Blaze Wyndham (14 page)

The shredding of the silk, the touch of his warm lips upon her skin, had set her senses reeling wildly. Some instinctive carnal knowledge told her that this was desire.
Her husband desired her.
If only he would love her a little, she thought sadly. If it were not just his longing for an heir. His mouth closed over one of her nipples, and he drew sharply on the sentient little crest. It was that small act that caused Blaze to cry out again.

“
Edmund!
Ohh, my lord!” She struggled slightly beneath him, seeking to escape the rather frightening passion he had unleashed with his lips upon her responsive flesh.

He wanted her! Dear God, how he wanted her! He wanted to rip away the remainder of the silk that hid her from him. He wanted to cover her body with his and plunge the weapon of his manhood deep into her warmth. His temples throbbed with his longing, but the tone of her sweet voice penetrated his consciousness, even if the words did not. Christos! She was his wife, and his by right, but she was also yet a virgin. He could do nothing that would destroy that fragile and wonderful relationship that they had spent the last two months building.

Reluctantly he raised his head from her breasts to see her half-frightened and questioning look. “Oh, Blaze,” he said softly, “I beg your pardon if I have frightened you, but surely you must know that you tempt me beyond reason. I could no longer contain myself, or my desire for you.”

“I did not know until a minute ago that you did desire me, my lord,” she said somewhat breathlessly. “I do not find it unpleasing, Edmund. Indeed it is most pleasurable.”

“Can it be,” he said hopefully, “that you are ready to become my wife in the fullest sense?”

For the briefest moment he saw fear leap into her violet-blue eyes. “Not yet,” she whispered. “Please, not yet, my lord!”

Gently he kissed her trembling lips, and his hand smoothed softly over her breasts. “Not until you desire it, my sweet. Only then. I want you eager for your initiation into love, not frightened.”

Reaching up, she touched his face with her fingers, and caressed it. “I think, perhaps, that I am beginning to love you, my lord,” she said. For a brief second her eyes met his. Then, blushing, she shyly looked away.

In the days that followed, the deepening desire between them escalated. He now felt free to catch her in his loving embrace, giving his hands license to roam at their will, and indeed she encouraged him in his passion. For the first time they lay together, though fully clothed, upon her bed. His kisses and caresses were like heady wine to her. Catching her small hand in his, he led it below his doublet, and Blaze felt for the first time the hardness of a man. Tremulously she let her fingers close around him. Then when he felt her fear easing, he encouraged her to stroke him.

“It gives you pleasure?” she asked softly.

He nodded, his eyes smoky with longing.

The next morning he hunted in his forest with his nephew, and his mood was subdued.

“So, you have not yet breached the virgin walls,” mocked Tony. “If you do not do so soon, uncle, I fear for your sanity. You cannot produce an heir unless you do. How you have refrained from taking the toothsome little wench is truly beyond me.”

Edmund sent his nephew a black look. “Have all the village girls grown wise to you then, Tony, that you lack amusement and must concern yourself with my marital state?”

“Ahhh,” laughed Anthony Wyndham, “so you have
not
deflowered her! Your lance is ready, but her sheath is yet closed to you. Take her and be done with it, Edmund. She makes a fool of you! You are her husband, and her lord. It is what you want! Your wishes are what matter, not hers!”

“Nay, my nephew, it is you who are the fool! Cease your banter now, for I have no wish to discuss my private life with a stripling who knows naught!”

Anthony rolled his eyes mockingly, but quieted his tongue. He had never seen Edmund quite like this. Was it possible that his uncle was falling in love with his bride? The thought disturbed him, though he knew not why. When Edmund spurred his horse ahead, Anthony followed him into the deep forest. The morning was unusually warm for late November, and he could already feel a trickle of sweat slipping down from his neck. He loosened his shirt.

They hunted for most of the day, but though the dogs flushed several rabbits and game birds, they found no deer. They finally exited the forest in late afternoon at a fork in the road near a point equidistant from both RiversEdge and Anthony’s home of Riverside.

“You’re not asking me home to supper?” teased Tony.

“Nay, I’m not!” came the surly reply. A rumble of distant thunder seemed to punctuate the earl’s point as he turned his stallion and cantered off with his men and dogs behind him, leaving his surprised nephew alone in the middle of the road.

B
laze disliked thunderstorms. She strove to hide her nervousness, relieved to see her husband’s return. Edmund was not aware of her fears, for she took great pains to hide what she now considered a childish anxiety. It had been a dry autumn. The rain that had fallen had done so quietly. Today’s unnatural heat seemed to have unleashed an aberrant violence in the weather that followed.

The distant thunder grew in intensity as it drew nearer to RiversEdge. The sky beyond the hills bloomed and faded with bursts of an unearthly pearly light. Blaze was subdued throughout the evening meal. Edmund quietly thoughtful, unaware of her edginess. He was in no mood for an evening of kissing and cuddling that would lead him nowhere. Tony’s gibes had stung him harder than he was willing to admit. For the first time since his first wife had died he considered tumbling some serving wench, and looking about the room, his eye lit upon the buxom maidservant now adding logs to one of the fireplaces. His sherry-brown eyes narrowed speculatively. God, how Tony would mock him! He needed more time to think before he made a total fool of himself.

“Go to bed, my sweet,” he ordered the surprised Blaze.

She arose obediently, and curtsying to him, left the hall on trembling legs. Why had he chosen tonight of all nights to leave her completely alone? It was ridiculous that she have this fear, but she would master it this night if it killed her. Determined, she marched upstairs to her apartments.

“Prepare my tub,” she ordered Heartha and her staff.

“Shall I draw the draperies, my lady?” asked the tiring woman.

Blaze hesitated a moment, then said, “Nay, I would watch the progress of the storm.”

She bathed amid a fragrant cloud of sweet violets while outside the night grew pitch black but for the shattering lightning, which was always followed by crashes of thunder.

The young maidservants skittered nervously about the room preparing their mistress’s bed, setting out her pale pink silk nightrail with its matching beribboned nightcap, carefully banking the fire in the bedchamber fireplace so that a sudden gust of wind would not encourage it to unruliness. Heartha helped Blaze from her tub, quickly drying her off. The silky night garment was slipped over her head, and slithered noiselessly to her ankles. Lovingly the tiring woman brushed her lady’s long brown-gold hair as the tub was dragged from the bedchamber by the serving maids into the receiving chamber, where the footmen were waiting to take it away.

Heartha tied the nightcap’s ribbons beneath Blaze’s chin, and helped her into bed. “Would you like me or one of the other girls to stay with you on the trundle, my lady? The storm is something fierce, and it ain’t peaked yet, I’m thinking.”

“Nay,” said Blaze bravely with a nonchalance she was absolutely not feeling. “The storm bothers me not. Good night, Heartha.”

Heartha curtsied, and with a final pat to the down coverlet hurried from the room, saying, “Sleep well, my lady.”

Sleep?
She was never going to sleep with all that booming and flashing going on outside her windows. She snuggled deeper into the bed, wishing that she had allowed her servants to draw the draperies. Then she would have had only the thunder to contend with. The wind began to moan and keen around the house. A fierce little gust hissed down her chimney, teasing the fire, which leapt at it, sending eerie shadows to mottle the walls of the room. Blaze shivered, suddenly remembering Old Ada’s stories of the ghosts and ghoulies that rode upon the roiling back of storms such as this one.

“I will not be afraid,” she whispered aloud to herself, and the very sound of her own voice was somehow comforting.

The night seemed to grow blacker, and the storm now began to mount in its intensity until the very house itself seemed caught directly dead center in the midst of the maelstrom. Blaze’s good intentions dissolved amid a roar of thunder that actually shook the house to its foundations, which, coupled with a ferocious crack of lightning that struck one of the chimneys upon the roof directly above her, sent a rattle of bricks cascading down and over the slate roof above her windows.

Terrified, she began to scream. Peal after peal of pure, unadulterated terror. Despite the great noise of the storm, her frightened cries sounded throughout the upper floor of the house. Almost immediately the connecting door between her bedchamber and her husband’s burst open as the earl dashed into the room.

“
Blaze
! What is it, my sweet? What has alarmed you so? Is it a nightmare, my darling?” Edmund was at her bedside, gathering her into his arms. The sweet fragrance of her bath oil made his head reel with desire.

“Th-the s-storm! I h-hate th-thunderstorms!” she sobbed piteously into the fine linen of his nightshirt, for he had not taken the time to put on his dressing gown.

“Why did you not ask one of the maids to stay with you then?” he asked practically.

“It ... it’s ch-childish to f-fear th-thunderstorms!” she wept wildly, shivering as another boom sounded overhead. “I ... I did not want you to th-think that I was s-so fainthearted as t-to f-fear a little th-thunderstorm!”

Little thunderstorm?
He would have laughed, had her terror not been so real. It was a horrendous storm. One of the worst he had ever known. Her warm, wet tears had soaked his nightshirt through at the shoulder where her face was hidden. She was yet trembling. His hand reached out to stroke her honey-colored hair in a soothing gesture as the thunder crashed once more outside the windows.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” he asked her, thinking as he did that she was the sweetest armful of female that he had ever held.

“Aye, my lord.”

Gently he set her back against the feather pillows, catching her gaze with his. Her eyes were like rain-washed crystal violets, and her mouth was quivering with seductive innocence.

“I cannot guarantee my behavior, Blaze. Do you understand what I am saying? I must be completely candid with you about that, my sweet.” His look was a serious one.

She caught at her lower lip in consternation, her small even white teeth worrying the pink flesh. “You would make love to me?” she said low.

A small smile played at the corners of his mouth. “You would quickly forget the storm, I promise you,” was his answer. “If you prefer, however, I will leave you, my sweet,” he finished.

Again Blaze paused to consider her plight, but another fierce shattering of thunder that rattled the windows sent her hurtling back into her husband’s arms again. Desperately she clung to him, her soft breasts pressing against his chest. In that single moment Edmund Wyndham’s good intentions dissolved. He was a mortal man, not a high-minded knight from some ancient world of courtly love. Blaze was his wife, and he yearned desperately for her. Tony was right! She was his! By God, he would have her, and no more of this nonsense! With a groan of longing he pulled his nightshirt off, tangled his hands into her hair, tipped her head back, and finding her mouth, he kissed her.

His passion surprised her. They had kissed and cuddled these many weeks past, but he had never kissed her as he was kissing her now. It was a demanding kiss that seared her tender lips, forcing them open that his tongue might pillage within the fragrant cave of her mouth. Their tongues met for the first time, and she shuddered with the sensuousness of the new feeling. Warm velvet stroked warm velvet. Her entire body felt weak with the sensation, yet she strained to answer his hunger.

There were no more words left between them now. Edmund kissed her until she moaned pleadingly at him to cease, and so instead his hot mouth sought a path down her satiny throat. Strong fingers shredded the blossom-pink silk of her night garment, yanking the fabric away that he might gaze upon her innocence lit golden by the pale firelight. With another groan he buried his face deep in the valley between her virgin breasts, branding the flesh above her wildly beating heart with another kiss.

Fingers reached out to tease at the nipple of one breast. His touch was almost a relief, she thought, so charged with tension was her whole body. Yet she was not afraid. Nay! There was no fear of what was to come in her mind, for she loved him. In her budding passion she dared to admit it to herself. She had known it almost from the beginning.
She loved her husband!
What she knew now was that she wanted him to love her. Raising his head, he then lowered it over the little nipple he had been fingering. Shyly Blaze reached out to stroke his dark brown hair. His mouth tugged hungrily upon her flesh, and she whimpered softly. His teeth scored the nipple gently, sending a thrill of pure longing down to her very toes. Fiercely she kneaded the shapely back of his neck.