Fallen in Love (8 page)

B
lackie neighed softly as Roland slipped off her back. He led her to a budless apple tree at the southern limits of Rosaline’s father’s property and tied her bridle around the trunk.

How many times had Roland circled the trees in this orchard, carrying his love’s wide woven basket on his arm, trailing behind her, adoring her slow movements as she plucked red fruit from the branches?

Her father was an earl or a duke or a baron or some other variety of greedy land magnate. Roland had
stopped caring about such mortal titles after a thousand years of having to watch their kind play at war games. This mortal’s sole passion in life seemed to be exactly that: waging war and stealing the riches of nearby fiefdoms and making life a living hell for all his neighbors. The band of knights Daniel and Roland served with fell under his sway, so Roland and his fellows had spent many hours outside and within these castle walls.

He dug into Blackie’s saddlebags and found a dried apple, then fed it to the horse while he took the measure of the situation.

He remembered this Valentine’s Day Faire. He knew that it took place after his affair with Rosaline had ended. Their love would have been over for … five years by now.

He shouldn’t have stopped here. He should have known this would happen—that the memories would flood his mind and cripple him.

Not a day went by, these thousand years, that Roland did not regret the way he had ended things with Rosaline. He had designed his life around that regret: walls and walls and walls, each one with its own impenetrable façade. The regret formed a castle inside him many universes vaster than the one that stood before him now. Perhaps that was why this English castle’s size moved him so dramatically—it reminded Roland of the fortress within him.

He was far too late to redeem himself with her.

And yet …

He gave Blackie an encouraging scratch and made for the castle. There was a stone-flagged walkway lined with hibernating primrose bushes, which ended at a heavy metal gate. Roland avoided this and took a side path. He walked under the tree line of the bordering woods until he could slink along out of sight in the shadow of the castle’s western wall. It towered over him, rising fifty feet in the air before the first window offered a glimpse out.

Or in.

Rosaline used to wait for him there, her blond hair trailing over the window’s edge. It was the signal that she was alone—and awaiting Roland’s lips. The window was empty now, and to gaze upon it from the ground below gave Roland a rusty feeling of homesickness, as if he were very, very far from the place where he belonged.

No guards looked down from the battlements here, he knew. The wall was too high. He left the shadows and walked over to stand directly beneath the window.

He ran his hands along the wall, remembering the grooves his feet had found so many times before. He’d never dared then to unleash his wings in front of Rosaline. It was enough to ask a mortal like her to love him despite the color she perceived in his skin. Her father never saw Roland without his visor, and would not have permitted a Moor to fight for him.

Roland could have changed the way he looked; angels did it all the time. How often had Daniel changed his mortal guise for Luce? They’d all stopped counting.

But it wasn’t Roland’s style to follow trends. He was a classicist. His soul felt comfortable—as comfortable as was possible—in this particular skin. There were occasions, like today, when his looks caused some dull hassle, but it was never anything Roland couldn’t withstand. Rosaline said she loved him for who he was inside. And he loved her for that openness … but she didn’t
really
know. There were still some things about himself Roland knew he could never expose.

He would not expose himself now, not by shedding his armor or baring his wings. Habit would help him scale the wall the old-fashioned way.

The path within the walls came back to him, as if it were illuminated by the same golden sheen his exposed wings cast upon the world.

Roland began to climb.

At first, he was cautious in his ascent, but even in the creaky metal armor, he soon felt nimble again with light memories of love.

A few short minutes later, he reached the top of the outer wall and heaved his legs onto the narrow ledge of the parapet. Righting himself, he slunk along to the far turret and gazed up at its conical sienna spire. From there, it was a treacherous climb up to the ring of arched
windows circling the tower. But he knew that there was a narrow terrace outside one of the windows, and a fine lip of stone encircling the tower. He could stand upon it and peer inside.

Soon enough, he arrived at the ledge and clung firmly to the stonework alongside the window. That was when he noticed the open balcony door. A red silk curtain billowed in the wind. And there, beyond it, a brush of mortal movement. Roland held his breath.

Blond waves of hair, long and loose, hung down the back of a glorious green dress. Was it her? It had to be.

He longed to reach in and pull her from the window, to make the world the way it used to be. His fingers grew numb from his hard grip on the ledge, and in the pivotal moment when the golden-haired goddess spun around, Roland froze so quickly, so completely, he thought he would tumble like an icicle to the ground.

He pulled himself away and back onto the ledge, his chest flat against the wall, but he could not pull his eyes away from the girl.

It was not her
.

This was Celia, the lord’s younger daughter. She must have been sixteen now—Rosaline’s age when Roland had broken her heart. She resembled her sister: fair skin, blue eyes, rose-petal lips, and all that stunning flaxen hair. But the fire within her—that mighty conflagration that Roland had adored in Rosaline—was a dying ember in Celia.

Still, Roland was riveted, unable to make the slightest move. If Celia swept out through the window and onto the balcony, as she looked like she was about to do, Roland would be caught.

“Sister?”

That voice—like a stringed instrument, only richer. Rosaline!

For a fraction of a second, Roland saw a shadow in the doorway, and then: the clean, graceful profile of the only girl he’d ever loved. His heart stopped. He could not breathe. He wanted to cry out her name, to reach for her—

But his sweating palms betrayed him and his grip faltered. For several eternal seconds, Roland felt like he was hovering in the air—and then he plummeted six long stories to the muddy ground.

A memory:

The open doors of a dilapidated barn.

Roland recognized it as the rickety structure on the northeast corner of the castle grounds. The sun swept past the doorway at about six o’clock on summer evenings, so Roland guessed by the golden light on the hay that it was nearly seven. Nearly suppertime—or the ever-too-brief stretch when Roland could persuade Rosaline to steal a few moments alone with him.

Through the wide wooden doors he saw two
silhouettes huddled in a dark back corner. There, between the chicken feed and a rusty pile of sickles, Roland saw his earlier self.

He barely recognized the boy he’d been. They were one and the same, and yet something made this boy actually look young. Hopeful. Unspoiled. His woolen tunic hugged his body, and his eyes were as bright as a newborn filly’s.
She
did that to him—stripped away millennia spent toiling on Earth, his entire existence in Heaven, and the weighty Fall afterward.

He might have been experienced at war, at rebellion against the divine, but when it came to romance, Roland’s heart had been the heart of a child.

He sat on a three-legged wooden stool and gazed—so earnestly it embarrassed him to recall it—at the gorgeous blond-haired girl before him.

Rosaline reclined on her side in the hay, oblivious to the thistles that clung to her satin gown. Her hair had a luster that was lovelier even than he remembered, and her skin was as smooth and bright as fresh-skimmed cream. Her downward gaze meant that all Roland could see of her fair blue eyes was the soft curtain of lashes drifting over them. In those days, her full lips had two expressions: the pout they clung to now and the brief gift of a smile she sometimes bestowed on Roland. Both were desirable. Both did strange things to him.

She shifted in the hay, feigning boredom but feigning
it poorly. She was transfixed by his every movement, he could see that now.

“I do have one more trifle. Should my lady like to hear it?” his past self said.

Roland recalled the eager tilting of his past self’s chin and burned with shame. Now he remembered why she had taken so much convincing to agree to meet him in the barn.

All he did was assault her with bad poetry.

The boy on the stool did not wait—he clearly
could
not wait—for Rosaline’s ladylike groan. And when Roland launched into his gruesome verse, no one would ever have guessed that this failed sonneteer had once been the Angel of Music.

At the end, Roland looked up to see Rosaline’s face pinched into a frown. He remembered it now, struggled to endure it a second time, and felt the same heaviness in his stomach, like an anvil falling off a cliff.

She said: “Why do you infect me with such clumsy verse?”

This time, in his memory, Roland heard it in her voice: Of course! She was
teasing
him.

He should have known it when she reached for his hand and drew him down onto the hay with her. His heart had been hammering too loudly for him to hear her implication, which now, clearly, was
Shut up and kiss me
.

And how he had kissed her!

That first time their lips connected, something ignited within Roland, as if his soul had been electrified. His body had gone rigid with the effort of trying not to mess a single thing up. His lips were welded to hers, but limply. His hands were two claws glued to her shoulders. Rosaline writhed against his grip, but for the life of him he could not move.

At last she let out a sweet giggle and snaked free from his arms. She leaned backward in the hay, her pink lips pursed and off-limits once again. She eyed him the way a child eyes an out-of-favor toy. “That lacked grace.”

Roland lurched forward on his knees, his hands
planted in the rough hay. “Shall I try again? I am certain I can do better—”

“Well, I should hope so.” Her laugh was coy and elegant. She leaned away just long enough to tease him, then lay back in the hay and closed her eyes. “You may try again.”

Roland inhaled deeply, drinking in the sweetness of every part of her. But just as he was about to bestow another awkward kiss, Rosaline pressed a hand against his chest.

She must have felt his heart race, but she didn’t let on.

“This time,” she instructed, “not so stilted. More … 
fluidity
. Think of the flow of a poem. Well, perhaps not
your
poems. Perhaps your favorite poem by another. Throw yourself into my kiss.”

“Like this?” Roland all but fell on top of her, rolling to the side and finding himself facefirst in the hay. He turned toward her, flushed.

Side by side they lay, facing one another. She took his hands. Their hips were touching through their clothes. The tips of their feet kissed without embarrassment. Her face was inches away from his.

“You missed my mouth.” Her lips parted in an alluring smile. “Roland, love means not being afraid to let yourself go, trusting that I will desire everything you have to offer. Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand!” Roland breathed, shimmying closer for his next attempt. His lips and his hands and his heart were nearly bursting with expectation. Tentatively, he reached for her—

“Roland?”

What is it now?

“Hold me tight, sir, you won’t break me.”

As he kissed her, it seemed to Roland that not even the call of Lucifer himself could have forced him to let that fair maiden go.

He would follow her advice a thousand times with other ladies in the future, and sometimes he would feel something, but never for long, and never, never like this.