Dark Angels (80 page)

She stopped where she was.

Richard stepped into the bedchamber. “You’re so thin. They told me you were dying.” He wasn’t caressing. There was no smile on his face. He looked tired and strained, not the lover at all.

“Is that why you deigned to visit? Because you thought I was dying?”

Fletcher and Poll and Perryman were silent. Were they witnessing a lovers’ meeting or a final rupture?

“Damn it, I am absent without permission from General Turenne! Are you well or not?”

“Not! Your note made me so!”

Suddenly he smiled.

She refused to be dazzled. “It would serve you right if I were married three times over! I could be, you know. What if I am dying?”

“I’d ape John and taste every drop I might and sleep at your feet until the final closing of your eyes and then carry your memory in my heart until the day I died.” He had moved forward as he spoke, had a hand on her arm. “What’s this in your sleeve?”

“A letter. A short one.”

“Will you quarrel on my deathbed?”

“Yes!”

Richard stared down at her. Fletcher put his hand to his heart. The intensity betwen the two was palpable; he half expected lightning to strike and thunder to sound.

“The only person you will ever marry is me. I love you.” Richard stepped closer, reached his other hand to cup the back of her head.

Alice shivered. “Yes, I will quarrel on your deathbed to talk you from it because if you were to die first, I could not bear it.”

“Sweetheart.” Richard put his mouth on hers, and they held each other in an embrace so passionate, so white-hot with love, with longing, that later Fletcher would swear he smelled smoke and heard a distant rumble. Richard kissed Alice’s eyes, her nose, her lips, again and again, hard, not the way one ought to kiss an invalid. Alice kissed back with all the furious joy struggling in her.

“Yes, I wait,” she whispered to him. “Yes,” she said as she bit his full mouth. Yes, yes, yes. Home. I am home at last, she thought. He was her beloved.

“My heart left my body when I heard you were still ill.”

“I mend.”

“You’d best, because I must return at once to France to avoid disgrace. There’s to be a war, Alice—”

“What’s all this now?” Sir Thomas stood in the doorway, surveying the scene with eyes that were not warm. “Unhand my daughter at once, sir!”

Richard kept his eyes upon Alice, his smile as wide as the chamber around them, his eyes scalding in their promises.

“Our bed,” he said to her, “will be green.”

A
ND LATER, WHEN
he recited the verses of Solomon on their wedding night, she understood. When love and truth and duty united, possibility had no end. A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Behold, thou art fair, my beloved.

A
LSO BY
K
ARLEEN
K
OEN

Through a Glass Darkly

Now Face to Face

Copyright © 2006 by Karleen Koen

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koen, Karleen

Dark angels : a novel / Karleen Koen.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Charles II, King of England, 1630–1685—Fiction. 2. Catherine, of Braganza, Queen, consort of Charles II, King of England, 1638–1705—Fiction. 3. Courts and courtiers—Fiction. 4. Great Britain—History—Charles II, 1660–1685—Fiction. 5. Great Britain—Kings and rulers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.0334D37 2006

813'.54—dc22                       2005030734

eISBN-13: 978-0-307-35194-4

eISBN-10: 0-307-35194-7

v1.0