I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (34 page)

“Can we live here or have you someplace else that you must go to trade?”

His tongue traced a languid circle. “We can live wherever you wish.”

She moved into his caress. “I am sorry you lost Tristan.”

“You needn’t be. I recovered him. He is here.”

“Oh, I am so glad.” She stroked her fingers through his hair. “Is that why you left Exeter so swiftly? To retrieve him?”

“No.” He raised his head and looked down into her eyes. “I believed you were to wed another. I left because to be near you and prevent myself from loving you was a challenge I could no longer meet.” He pulled her up and onto his lap, settling her knees to either side of his hips. His hands spread on her back. “Also to escape the temptation of doing this at first opportunity.” He kissed her neck and she leaned into it, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. Nothing was between them now, not miles, not years, not a single garment.

“What exactly is it you are doing?” she said.

“Making you mine again.”

She kissed his jaw that was rough with whisker growth. She wanted to feel the scratchiness on her skin again. On every inch of her skin. “How many times will you do so tonight?”

“Until I am convinced it’s true.”

“It?”

“This. You in my arms. In my bed.” He brought their lips together. “Your love.”

“I am torn between convincing you immediately that it is indeed true and allowing you to come to it in your own time.” She worked her way to his ear, tasting the depression below with her tongue. His scent made her hungry for him, his skin smooth and hot against her lips. “The latter has certain obvious advantages.”

“If you choose the former,” he said huskily as she licked again, his hands clenching around her behind, urging her tighter to him, “I vow to not alter my current course of action.”

She drew aside his hair to kiss his neck. “Then I will set about convincing you in all ways. My heart is yours, Taliesin Wolfe,” she whispered in his ear, as though she hadn’t already told him a dozen times as they’d made love. “I have loved you forever and—” She stilled and brushed satiny black locks away from his skin. Her lungs could not capture air. “What—?”

She clambered off his lap and behind him. With her fingers she framed the dark mark at the base of his neck, a letter burned into his skin like a scar: a T with a diagonal line from the top right to the center. The symbol on the ring.

Her body trembled. “What does this mean?”

He turned his cheek toward her. “Your father did not tell you?”

“My
father
?” She traced the T on his skin with her fingertip. “No.”

“Long ago my uncle told me that I came to his family already marked with it. He said he did not know what it meant. But another did.” He removed her hands from him, kissed them, and went to the desk. He drew the ring from a drawer.

“Lussha knew what my uncle did not. When Edward left me with the Gypsies and the vicar, he told her my father’s identity so that if he and my father should perish in war, someone would know. She never told another soul. Twelve years later, Arabella appeared in her tent with this ring.”

“But . . . What Lussha said that day . . . The fortune about a prince . . .”

“Some Rom have the Sight. Schooled to mistrust magic by the Reverend Caulfield, I never believed it. Until you gave me this ring.”

“Edward . . . ? My
father
brought you to St. Petroc? To Papa?”

“To hide me from my father’s enemies. After Edward’s mind deserted him, no one knew the truth but Lussha.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before? After I gave it to you?”

He sat on the bed beside her, turned her palm over and enclosed the ring in her fist.

“Because it meant nothing to me. If I wasn’t to have you, I did not care what a ring or my blood or anything else said about me. In my entire life I have only ever wanted you. No prophecy or far-distant crown would ever change that.”

She put herself in his arms. He held her tightly.

But her eyes flew wide and she broke from his embrace. “Your father was Alejo? Alejo Torres?”

He nodded, lines cutting the bridge of his nose. “How do you know this?”

“Before I fell ill, my father told me of him. And of my mother.”

“Your mother, Grace?”

Wonderment constricted her chest. “After they believed Edward dead, Grace and Alejo . . . They . . .”

Taliesin’s handsome features creased into uncertainty. “They what?”

“They loved,” she said simply. A smile broke over her lips. “Taliesin, Ravenna is your sister.”

Ebony eyes shone and a slow, crooked smile slipped across his mouth. “Of course she is,” he said quietly. Then he took Eleanor into his arms.

She nestled into his shoulder and uncurled her fingers. “After Alejo died of the fever, she must have sent us to Papa rather than Lady Boswell because she wanted you to have this.” Ruby and gold winked in the candlelight. His family’s symbol was dark and bold through the crimson gem. “You must take up your inheritance. You must go fight for it.”

“Must I?”

“Yes.”

“Eleanor, after eleven years apart, we are now together again. Yet you wish me to immediately travel hundreds of miles away?”

“With me. I have always wanted to travel.”

“With you,” he said. “Into a war?”

“Whatever we find in your father’s lands, I will go with you, Taliesin. I won’t be without you again, even if it means facing danger.”

He kissed her brow softly. “And the magistrate who has prohibited you from dragging me into your lust for adventure ever again . . . ?”

“He’ll never know. Not until you are presented at court as a visiting prince, at least. But then I suspect I might be forgiven. I’ve heard it’s terribly difficult for women to resist a prince. I wouldn’t know about that, of course. I have only ever loved a rogue.”

“Have you,
pirani
?” He bent to the curve of her neck, making pleasure on her skin with the lightest brush of his lips.

Reluctantly she pulled away from him. But she must know, finally.

“Ever since I remember, you have called me that name. I always suspected it meant something horrid.”

“You might have asked me at any time,” he said quite seriously.

“I hadn’t the courage.” She stroked a fingertip down his neck, then spread her hand on his chest. The beats of his heart caressed her soul. “Now I do. What does it mean?”

He drew her forward and placed a soft, perfect kiss upon her lips. “Beloved.”

Epilogue

Love, Triumphant

“I
invited Taliesin to the wedding with the sole intent of throwing you two together.” Draped in a pink silk mantua accented with white lace, Arabella reclined on a divan, suckling her infant at her breast. This portrait of maternal leisure smiled like a cat that has feasted on Dover sole.

“And Papa wanted his wedding at Combe because he knew Tali wouldn’t come to St. Petroc,” Ravenna added, lounging beside an enormous white mass of fur. “It turns out that he hadn’t visited St. Petroc in so many years, Papa felt certain nothing could entice him to go there, not even an invitation from me or Arabella.” She stroked the fur and a tail thumped on the sumptuous carpet that lined the floor of the duchess’s dressing room. “I told Papa and Bella I thought that was the silliest part of it. I said you were far too intelligent to believe that Papa would require everybody in St. Petroc to travel to Shropshire just for a party. But apparently you aren’t too intelligent after all. Who would have thought it?”

Wearing a gown of white silk threaded with gold embroidery that made it shimmer, a string of milky pearls around her neck, and a delicate circlet of pearls in her hair, Eleanor sat quiet correctly in the straight-backed chair at the dressing table. Hands in her lap, she looked for all the world like a demure, virginal bride mere hours from her own wedding. That she had spent the night skin-to-skin with a black-eyed prince was their secret alone.

“You might have simply told me what you thought,” she said to her sisters.

“We tried,” Arabella said.

“For years.” Ravenna rolled her eyes.

“You always walked out of the room whenever we said his name.”

“Even Agnes connived with us,” Ravenna said. “Since we knew Tali wouldn’t go to St. Petroc, she devised the plan of throwing you at her son in order to make you desperate to flee the vicarage.”

Eleanor gaped. “Frederick connived too?”

“He’s wonderfully charming.” Ravenna grinned.

“And conveniently eager for a lark on occasion.” Arabella’s eyes glittered.

“Bella devised his costume, but he did the rest himself. He said that no matter what he did, you hid your repulsion so valiantly that he began to despair of success. He told us he’d never had such fun.”

Arabella lifted a staying hand. “He only agreed to it because he understood how desperate we were and how much we love you. He did not wish you to be hurt by it.”

Caught between dismay and laughter, Eleanor groaned. “I don’t know whether to thank him or never speak to him again.”

“You cannot imagine how thrilled I was when you fell in with my plan so effortlessly,” Arabella said. “I’d thought I would have to spend months convincing you to set off looking for our parents.”

“
Your
plan? Searching for our parents?”

“As soon as Ravenna married, I decided that you and Taliesin were destined for a quest.”

“Travel can be remarkably eye-opening,” Ravenna agreed.

Arabella bit her lip. “I never hired an investigator.”

Eleanor’s eyes widened. “My manipulative sisters. Did Taliesin know that?”

“No! Good gracious, with his pride?”

“He would never even speak your name,” Ravenna said. “That’s how we knew.”

Arabella drew her sleeping infant from her breast. “Will he be piqued with me when you tell him?”

The warmth that had remained with Eleanor since dawn when she had slipped from his arms lapped at her now. “I don’t think he will be piqued with anything for quite some time, actually.”

“My brother is a very good man,” Ravenna said with a sparkling smile. “And he awaits you at the church.” She jumped up, took the babe from Arabella, and set him easily on her shoulder. “Bella, you must straighten your gown and we will go now, so that Tali and Eleanor can finally do what they should have done years ago.”

Arms linked, the three sisters walked together down the stairs of Combe Park and onto the drive. Among the family and smattering of other guests standing by the carriages that would take them to the chapel a small distance from the house, only Taliesin was absent.
Awaiting her at the church
. It seemed at once unreal and the only reality Eleanor had ever imagined.

She allowed her father to hand her into a carriage with her aunt. In the three weeks since her return from Kitharan, Edward had grown ruddier and his eyes had lost much of their agitation.

“You seem well, Father.”

“With daughters now that I thought I had lost,” he said, “how could I not be well?”

“Eleanor,” Mary said with bright eyes. “It is done. Aunt Cynthia and her children are gone from Edward’s house.”

“They will not be invited to return,” he said.

Eleanor grasped their hands. “I am very glad for you both.”

“And I for you. That my daughter would wed my dearest friend’s son is a blessing for which I could not have hoped.”

They came to the chapel. Arabella, Ravenna and their father only remained in the narthex with her as the others took their seats. Then the violinist began to play, her sisters went forward, and she stood still and ready. So ready she could sing. Dance. Make love to a rogue all night, every night.

Impatient to commence this bliss, she peeked around the edge of the door. Arabella and Ravenna hovered mid-aisle, fiery head bent to black locks. Standing on the stair to the altar, simply robed and with a book between his palms, Papa waited.

Taliesin was not present.

Eleanor’s heartbeats slammed against her ribs. She did not believe what her eyes told her. Not again.
Never
again.

“Daughter?” Edward said, extending his arm.

Her head shook as though attached to a weathervane, the wind howling between her ears. “He is not there.”

“Taliesin? Not there?” He went forward into the nave.

She pressed her back to the wall and tried to breathe. To think.

Betsy appeared and hurried to her. With a grin and a curtsy, she placed a folded paper on Eleanor’s palm, and went into the church. Eleanor opened the paper. His scrawl:

Come outside

She pushed wide the door. Before the church, resplendent in a black coat and snowy neck cloth with silver glittering in his ears, he sat upon his great ebony horse that was decorated for the occasion with silver and gold chest piece and breeching like the steed of a medieval knight.

Taliesin smiled and her heart lurched again to life. He urged the stallion forward.

“My bride,” he only said.

“That I am,” she said.

He bent and lifted her up onto the saddle before him. Wrapping her in his arms, he kissed her deeply, soundly, until her hands clutched his shoulders and the pearl circlet in her hair was askew.

“Where are we going?” she asked with what little remained of her breath. “Do you not intend to marry me today?”

“I do. As soon as it can be done.”

“Then why are we mounted?”

“I want you in my arms when you promise yourself to me. I could devise no other acceptable means of assuring that.”

She laughed. “Acceptable? Riding a horse into a church?”

“Feasible, rather.”

“Feasible?”

“I am a horseman,
pirani
.” He cocked a brow. “Medieval knights did it all the time.”

She stroked her palm over his cheek and kissed his lips. “I have promised myself to you with every breath I have drawn for years. I do so again now, with all my heart.”

He looked at the church door, then into her eyes. With a smile of utter confidence he said, “Prove it.”