At The King's Command (27 page)

“You taught me to hope again,” he said, scooping her up and laying her on the puffy velvet counterpane.

Living among gypsies had taught Juliana that lovemaking was a frantic, furtive affair enacted in the dark to the discordant rhythm of uneven breathing, the occasional muffled shout and the creak of wagon springs.

Being with Stephen in the massive bed corrected that notion. Though a fire blazed in his eyes, he took his time with her, lowering himself beside her and kissing her lips, her throat, her breasts, then pulling back to watch her like an artist surveying his handiwork.

He said little and his infrequent whispered phrases were disjointed, but his meaning was clear. From the depths of her being he summoned passion and tenderness and the jewel-bright conviction that she belonged here, in his arms. She felt as if she had reached the end of a long journey.

And then he left her with her body bathed in firelight and moonglow. She gave a little cry of dismay and came up on her knees, reaching into the shadows.

He laughed quietly, cupping her chin in his hand. “Patience, love.” Bracing one hand on the bedpost, he removed his boots, his hose and trunks. He stood there for a moment in only his large, blousy shirt. His gaze touched her like a caress.

He needed her. She saw it in his eyes as clearly as if he had admitted it aloud. His unguarded expression made her tremble.

“You are afraid,” he whispered.

“No, I…” She looked away. “Yes.”

He captured her chin again and made her look at him. “’Twill hurt.”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No!” She clenched her hands into his shirt. “It is as if, all my life, I have been searching, seeking. Without quite knowing what I sought.” Her hands drifted down to the hem of his shirt. “And it is not just the heat of your body next to mine that I need, but something more. Something deeper. Something I begin to believe I can find with you, and you only.”

He made a strange, low sound in his throat. She studied his face, and what she saw surprised her. “You are afraid, too.”

He gave her an endearingly crooked grin. “It’s not every day that I bring a wife to bed.”

“I am a woman, no different in essence from any other. And you’ve had so many—”

“Hush.” He kissed her briefly, firmly. “First of all, you are very different indeed. I daresay you are the most singular baroness in all of England. And second of all, I think you should know that there has been no one since Meg.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Please don’t lie to me. Not tonight. You are notorious, Stephen. Your love affairs with lightskirts are common gossip.”

“Pure invention, love. It was a way to chase off unwanted betrothals.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.” He winnowed his fingers into her hair. “There is no greater intimacy than this, Juliana. Some take it lightly. I do not. I never have.”

“I love you,” she whispered.

His mouth hardened, just for a heartbeat. Just long enough to shadow her heart with doubt and make her blurt, “Stephen, did you love your first wife? Did you love Meg?”

He hesitated, his fingers ceasing their exploration. “Must we speak of her now?”

“Tis a thing I have long wondered—ever since I first saw the shrine you built to her memory.”

He rolled his eyes. As if the ceiling were a higher authority, he asked it. “Why do women always want to know these things?” Then he looked down. “Sweetheart, you do use words as a bucket of ice water.”

She stifled a giggle and brushed her hand over his. “By knowing what you cherished, I learn to know you.”

Stephen heaved a great sigh and sat on the edge of the bed, clutching his head in his hands. “She was chosen for me in the same manner my first horse was selected. We wed as children, and at first it seemed we were only playing at being married. How could I have loved her if I did not even think she was real?”

Juliana clutched the bedclothes to her chest and sat forward. She had no answer, so she simply listened, trying to picture a much younger Stephen, a Stephen untouched by sorrow.

“Of course, the world changed, and I changed. My father died and the estate fell to me. Meg was delivered of a son—Dickon.”

“And did that change her?” Juliana whispered.

“Oddly, it did not. She was as childlike as ever, playing with Dickon like a little girl with a poppet. I suppose, when I saw them together, I felt gratitude and something warm in my heart that might be called love, but that feeling was slain quickly enough.”

“By Dickon’s illness?”

“Aye, that, and—” he lifted his head, and his hands curled into fists on his knees “—my inability to forgive her.”

Juliana closed her eyes and remembered the heavy stone Stephen had hurled. She saw it all again, the stone smashing through the exquisite colored window, the gift to Meg from King Henry.

Suddenly Stephen turned to her, grasped her by the shoulders. “I am an unforgiving man, Juliana, but I am no liar. What you took for my devotion to Meg was guilt. Before I could forgive her, before I could make myself understand why she became the king’s lover, she died. She died cursing me, and cursing the children we had made. It has not made for blissful memories.”

“But there is hope in you now. I see it shining in your eyes when you watch Oliver. I know it is why you brought me here tonight.” She kissed him again, long and lingeringly.

He looked slightly dazed when she lifted her mouth from his. “I think,” he said, “I have recovered from the ice water.” He stood and reached down, pulling the shirt over his head and letting it drift to the floor.

“Oh, my.” It was all she could manage. She cupped her palms on his shoulders, glorying in the feel of his warm
skin, then slid her hands inward, mapping the contours of his chest. He made a hissing sound as if she had burned him.

She took her hands away quickly. He grabbed her wrists. “Jesu, don’t stop,” he said.

With a cry of delight, she flung her arms around his neck, and he came to her, tumbling with her until they were spread crosswise on the huge bed, the velvet counterpane nuzzling their flesh.

How delicious he tasted—of plum wine and male sweetness and hot desire. She explored his body with increasing boldness, daring at last to touch him intimately. The heat and hardness beneath the warm silk of his skin startled her, and she forgot to be afraid.

She moved her hips, tilting them upward, and his hand and fingers led her closer and closer to the dark release, the addictive pleasure.

“Minx,” he whispered in her ear. His breath was ragged, uneven; he sounded as if he was about to explode. “I’m trying to go slowly, but I’m not made of stone.”

He pressed her back against the bolsters and bent to kiss her breasts. His hand slid down between her thighs, brushing them apart, seeking and probing with a refined tenderness that took her breath away.

“Ah, Stephen,” she said, “what are you doing to me?”

Stephen smiled at the naïveté of her question. God, she was sweet, so pliant and warm, so lacking in feigned modesty. “Loving you,” he said in a soothing tone. “Just be at ease.”

There were a thousand reasons he should not be with her, touching her. But for the life of him, he could not think of a single one. And then he acknowledged, with a
rare lightening of his heart, that it was useless to think at all. He skimmed his hand along her inner thigh. Warm alabaster it was, deliciously smooth. His fingers brushed lower, and her eyes flew open. He saw in their depths the bewildered anticipation of a woman on the verge of a shining discovery.

“Yes, love,” he said, nipping at her ear. “Let me touch you here…and here…and then here, as well.” With each word he caressed her more deeply, and she gasped until at last she shuddered, and a hot flush swept over her body. The look in her eyes turned from anticipation to the smoky satisfaction of fulfillment. A thin cry escaped her, and she threw back her head. Never had he seen ecstasy engulf a woman so completely.

As he bent to kiss her lips, he knew a moment of regret. A tiny ache flared in his chest. This would be the end of her innocence.

The thought passed in a blur; he was fast losing his will to postpone his own pleasure. She clasped him against her, so close he could feel her racing heart, and her legs slipped around him.

“Don’t move,” he begged her.

She moved. Bless the girl, she lifted her hips and finished the job, and the sound that escaped her was more a shout of gladness than a cry of pain. Swept past self-control, Stephen buried himself to the hilt in her.

“No,” he ground out in a last futile protest, but his long-denied desires, kindled by the months of unbearable tension, overcame him. “Ah, Juliana.” He spoke in the voice of a stranger, the voice of a man who was learning to feel again, and learning that feeling did not always have to hurt.

Long moments later, he lifted his awestruck face from the thick silken tangles of her hair. “Jesu,” he said.

She blinked. “What is wrong?”

He tried to shape the feeling into words. “I saw heaven. I swear to God, I did. That’s never happened to me before. Jesu.” He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. “I had no idea.”

“This is good, yes?”

He laughed, and his body reminded him that they were still deeply and intimately joined. He could not remember such a feeling of joy. “No,” he said, “this is not good.”

She looked crestfallen.

“This is wondrous, magical.” And frightening as hell, said a little voice in the back of his mind. Now what are you going to do with her?

“I’m going to do it again.” The stranger he had become spoke without volition.

Her eyes opened wide. “Do what? Stephen, you are acting very oddly. Do what again?”

“This,” he said, lowering his mouth to the bud of her breast, lingering there, tasting her dulcet essence. “And this.” He slid lower still, savoring the raw sweet musk of their loving.

She began to pray in Russian.

“And this,” he continued, until she could not speak at all.

A
crisp breeze through the partially opened window teased Stephen to wakefulness. The wind carried the music of lark song and the scent of ripe apples, and for a moment he felt so content that he was certain he was still dreaming.

A sinuous movement in the crook of his arm assured him that he was not. And more than just his mind came awake when he felt her move against him, her body satin-soft and sleep warm.

Juliana
. His heart called her name.

He turned his head to brush his lips over the downy disarray of her curls and the delicate skin of her temple. His hand skimmed up her arm to her shoulder, and he remembered.

He had known his share of beautiful women. He had married one. He had courted many others.

But none of them, neither Meg nor the refined beauties of court, nor yet the women Cromwell paraded before the king, had Juliana’s gifts.

He could not name precisely the special quality she possessed. A glow. An exuberance. An aggressive and determined joy that gave her the courage to push past his
defenses, to confront him with unflinching courage, to look into his heart and to see something there worth fighting for.

When he regarded her, he saw more than a beautiful woman. He saw himself reflected in her eyes, with all his pain and fear and fierce pride and passion. And the love he was learning, day by day, to give freely.

Juliana.
Her name was a silent song on his lips. Her love was like a circle in the water, radiating ever outward, inevitably encompassing even the remotest of hearts.

And he’d thought he had the power to resist her.

As the brightening dawn made a play of rainbows over the bed, Stephen de Lacey dared to dream. He studied her face, a delicate oval within its frame of pure sable curls. He saw the sable gone white as winter ermine, the face delicately etched with the tracery of passing years, and he realized that he wanted to grow old with her by his side, in his arms.

He wanted to fall in love again.

The idea dragged a gasp of amazement from him. And a cold fear gripped his heart.

If he begged her to stay with him, she would bear his children.

Children like Dickon. Children like Oliver. Children destined to blaze like bright flames, to be snuffed out by the inevitable, accursed disease, leaving only the charred remains of their parents’ hearts.

Juliana had never endured that loss. She had never held a dying child in her arms, had never shaken her fist at God in helpless frustration, had never felt the huge, gaping ache of sorrow as that precious life suffocates in her arms.

No children, he decided resolutely. He should practice abstinence.

He nearly laughed aloud at his own foolishness. Abstinence indeed, after such a night.

His arms tightened around her. God. He had taken her again and again, with the single-mindedness of a madman. No wonder she was sleeping so soundly.

Just the memory of her eager passion, her smoldering hunger, her unbridled ecstasy, made him hard with wanting her. Very well, he told himself. Abstinence was not a possibility. Perhaps he would avail himself of those French sheaths. Aye, some likened their use to bathing with one’s boots on, but in the name of protecting Juliana’s precious heart from grief, the discomfort was a small price to pay.

“What is a small price to pay?” she asked, brushing the sleep from her eyes.

Stephen nearly leaped out of his skin. “What?”

“You said, ‘’Tis a small price to pay.’”

“I did not.”

“I heard you.” She braced up on her elbows and shook back her hair. The motion bared her breasts and made Stephen’s throat go dry while his mind emptied of thought.

Without looking, he groped for the jar of fresh water he kept on the bedside table. He took a long, cooling drink. “I must have been thinking aloud.”

She sat up and took the jug from him. He watched in rapt fascination as her throat undulated with swallowing. She set the jar aside. “Why do you look at me like that?”

He shifted so that he lay between her legs and kissed her moist mouth and then the tips of her breasts. His water-cooled tongue brought the peaks to hardness, and a cry leaped from her throat.

“
That
is why, Juliana,” he said.

“I do not understand.”

His lips moved from one breast to the other, teeth grazing and nipping while short gasps escaped her. “Can you guess yet?” he asked, his fingers dipping down and parting her thighs.

A soft moan was his only answer.

His mouth skimmed lower, down over her taut flat belly. “Just make a guess, my comfit. Why—” his searingly intimate kiss made her body arch like a drawn bow “—would I regard my naked wife in such a way?”

He expected no reply, nor did he get one, save that of her wonderfully expressive body and the wordless cries that escaped her as his hands and mouth brought her to ecstasy. And then he could not help himself; despite the vow he had made, he joined with her, reveling in the welcome of her body, in the gloriously evocative tightening of her female muscles.

Much later, when they lay sated and replete, listening to the lark song and letting the breeze caress their naked bodies, he felt dazed with love and wonder. Like a groggy sleeper coming awake, he blinked and smiled.

“Does that answer you, my lady?”

She blinked back at him, looking equally dazed. “It probably does, my lord. But I do not remember the question.”

The season was dying, but Juliana had never felt more alive. Her every sense hummed with awareness as she worked the cider press in the apple yard. She was aware of the ripe, heavy scent of apples, the chilly tang of winter on the breeze. From the porter’s gate in the distance, she heard a call and remembered that Stephen was expecting a shipment of goods from France. Oliver’s shrill voice called out, bringing a smile to her lips.

Every day was a new adventure for Oliver. She adored watching his first tentative overtures of friendship with the children of the village and manor, and taking him to see the weaving house in the old abbey of Malmesbury. She even relished the bittersweet agony of love when she held him through an attack of wheezing.

And every night—with a dreamy mist in her eyes, Juliana turned her thoughts to her husband as she emptied another bushel of apples into the cider press while Jillie worked the windlass. Every night was another sort of adventure altogether. Hours and hours of lovemaking with Stephen, as inventive in the bedchamber as he was at his drawing board. What joy they found in the intimacy, the sharing, the love that held nothing back, the lack of sleep, the aching…

“Ooh, look at her ladyship,” said a bright, teasing voice. “Off in dreamland again.”

Juliana blinked and grinned at Nance Harbutt. “I have been at work on the cider since dawn. I’m entitled to a rest.”

Jillie jabbed Nance in the ribs. “Bet she weren’t thinking of rest at all, were you, my lady? Come, tell us what put the roses in your cheeks.”

“Never,” Juliana declared. “You are a maiden, Jillie Egan.”

“Not by choice.” She brushed her yellow hair out of her eyes and cast a wistful glance down toward the river. There, Rodion was working with the gypsy horses. He had stripped off his shirt, and sunlight bathed him in gold.

Nance sucked her tongue in disgust. “Pining after that Egyptian fellow,” she scolded. “He’ll lead you to heartbreak, you mark my words.”

“What’s all this gossip?” Stephen boomed, walking up to them with Oliver riding high upon his shoulders.

Juliana felt a spasm of elation at the sight of her husband. In truth, he was the same man who had, long ago, caught her stealing his horse. Yet the subtle differences shone clear to her. No longer a brooding, secretive lord, he was frank and affectionate, with laughter in his eyes and a broad grin on his face.

Oliver waved a drinking cup in his fist. “Look what came from France! It’s got a picture of a naked woman in the bottom of it.”

“Give me that.” Juliana snatched it, looked inside, and laughed, then showed it to Nance and Jillie. The nude was Bathsheba, modestly clad in bunches of grapes and fig leaves, a crown of laurels on her head.

The women oohed and aahed until, with mock severity, Stephen said, “You’re supposed to be working.”

“We are not slaves, my lord,” Juliana said pertly.

“Are, too!” piped Oliver. “I heard Papa talking to Uncle Jonathan. Told him he made you a slave to fashion.”

Juliana cocked her head. “To fashion?”

Stephen’s ears went red.

“To passion,” Nance declared, shaking a finger in Stephen’s face. “You’ve the devil’s own tongue, my lord, to be talking that way in front of a tyke.”

“I’m not a tyke,” Oliver roared, sliding down his father as if Stephen were a tree trunk. “I’m a spy! Yes! A
spy
like Uncle Algernon!” With a savage war cry he summoned the widow Shane’s lad from his labors gleaning apples, and the two of them scampered out of the apple yard.

Juliana jumped up on a wobbly stool so that she could face her husband eye to eye, nose to nose. As if running
for shelter from a gathering storm, Jillie and Nance disappeared, closing the gate firmly behind them.

“A slave to passion, am I?” Juliana demanded, quivering with feminine outrage.

Feigning nonchalance, Stephen took an apple and bit into it, chewing slowly. “’Tis unfortunate the lad overheard, but I trow ’tis the awful truth.”

“It is insulting,” she declared. “And you are arrogant.”

He took another bite and carefully held the white flesh of the apple between his teeth. Leaning forward, he offered her a bite.

She hesitated. He curled his hand around the back of her head and drew her forward. With a wicked little laugh she took the bait and would have pulled back, but he was quicker. He crushed his mouth against hers and with a single deft motion gathered her hard against him.

She knew then that she had no defenses and wanted none. He could make her—raised amid age-old wealth and privilege—forget that she was a Romanov. In broad daylight, he carried her to a thatch-roofed shed made of fieldstone. There, amid clay bottles and wooden vats of cider, he stripped her bare and made love to her on her shawl spread out on the packed-earth floor. She did not make one word of protest when he grasped her hands and held them high over her head, when he entered her swiftly and, while moving within her, somehow managed to anoint her breasts and belly with frothing apple cider, then drank the nectar from her bare skin.

Lying replete in his arms, she admitted, “You are right. I am a slave to passion.”

He kissed her with his apple-flavored lips. “I would have you no other way.” Rolling to one side, he reached for the pouch hanging from his discarded baldric.

“Stephen?” she asked. “What is it?”

“A sheath. It’s from France. It was made to…prevent certain things.”

“To prevent us from making a baby,” she said. “How dare you?”

“Juliana.” He took her firmly by the shoulders. “Listen to me. I have sired two sons. One died in my arms. The other is sickly still. I mean to spare you—”

“Spare me!” With a violent jerk of her body, she wrenched away from him. “Who are you to make that decision?”

He flung up his chin and squared his shoulders. She had nearly forgotten how imposing he could be when possessed by a fine rage. His bare chest loomed like a wall before her. “I am a man whose beautiful son died in agony. A man whose other son might well meet the same fate. I can’t suffer that again, Juliana. I won’t. And I will not have you know such sorrow. If you refuse to use the sheath, then we will practice abstinence.”

“Ab—” The word was unfamiliar to her.

He pulled her close. His knuckle under her chin forced her to look into his stone blue eyes, into those icy wells of pain. “Think of it, Juliana. Never to feel my caresses.” His hand drifted down to touch her throat and breasts. “Nor my kisses.” He bent and brushed his mouth back and forth over hers. “To sleep alone in your room, night after night.”

For long moments she stood spellbound, on fire with a need he could arouse with no more than a low-lidded glanced across the great hall. When he added the touch of his lips and hands to that, it was putting a torch to fresh pitch.

She pushed at his chest. “Damn you, Stephen de Lacey. Damn you for a selfish rogue.”

“Denying myself the full pleasure of making love to
you is selfish?” With jerky, frustrated movements, he donned his clothes. “How so, Baroness?”

The cruel lash of his irony stung her. “You want me on your terms. You seek to alter fate. What about all the times we did not use the sheath, Stephen? Even now, I could be carrying your child.”

His face drained of color. He looked panicked, a cornered animal, scared and dangerous. “Get rid of it,” he said in a frantic whisper. “The midwife can help you, or perhaps the gypsies have a remedy for—”

“Remedy?” she shouted. “A child in the womb is not a sickness, but a blessing from heaven.”

“It is a curse, damn your eyes!”

She turned her head to the side as if he had slapped her. “I thought I had found happiness with you.” She jumped up, backing toward the door of the shed. “I thought I could abandon my quest to find the killers of my family. I was willing to give up my identity and my need for justice—everything I have lived for for the past five years. For you, Stephen. I would have given it all up for you.”