Keeper of the Dream (23 page)

She wished he would speak first, but when he didn’t she said, “There is a bath prepared for you, my lord. And food.”

He looked around the room. “I think I could easily come to like having a wife,” he said, and a smile blazed across his face, bright and dazzling like hot sunshine.

Arianna’s heartbeat skittered. Surely it was against the laws of God for a man to look like that when he smiled. It wasn’t until she opened her mouth to speak that she realized that smile had stolen her breath. “But I doubt I shall come to like having a husband,” she finally managed.

His gaze fastened onto her mouth, and she felt it as if he had touched her there with his fingertips. Or his lips.

“Help me to undress, wife,” he said, his voice rough.

She obeyed, coming up to help him off with his
broigne,
as she had done so often for her brothers after a raid or a day’s hunting. But his hands closed over her arms and he pulled her up against him. He dipped his head and for a poised moment they stood almost nose to nose. She had
time to think that his eyes really did darken to warm soot just before he kissed her.

He kissed her hard, bruising her lips. Her hands slid around his waist and she arched against his chest, flattening her breasts against the horn plates in his
broigne.
His hand slid down her back, cupping her bottom, bringing her up against the hard ridge of his sex. When at last he raised his head, her lips throbbed and she touched them with her tongue, tasting ale, and him.

He seized her wrist and thrust her hand up beneath his chainse. “And what about that, Arianna? Will you come to like that?”

His member was alive beneath her palm—stiff, thick, hot. Her breathing was so loud, her heart hammering so wildly, she thought he wouldn’t have been able to hear her answer even if she could have found the words. She waited until he let her go before she backed away from him. Her hand felt on fire.

He shrugged out of his
broigne
and she took it from him. Its weight dragged against her arms as she hung it on a wall perch. When she turned around he was pulling his quilted chainse over his head. He winced as the abrupt movement tugged at the cut she’d made on his arm. He had bandaged it with a rag and the cloth was stained brown with dried blood. She wondered how he would punish her for cutting him. And for the sackcloth and ashes.

He stretched, flexing a back strapped with muscle. He walked over to the table and poured more ale into the leather jack. As he brought the jack to his mouth, the veins and tendons in his forearm pushed out against the skin. She thought of how one blow from that arm with all his strength could kill her. She knew him better now but not well enough, and she was still afraid of him.

“Will you beat me, husband?”

He turned to face her, his brows raised slightly in a look of surprise. Foam laced his upper lip and he licked it off.

“I don’t normally beat my women just to get in the practice. Have you done something today that deserves punishment?”
She clasped her hands behind her back and held herself tall. “So you would beat me if you determined I deserved it,” she said.

He set the jack back on the table, though his gaze remained fixed on her face. His lips parted slightly on an expulsion of breath. “What have you done?”

“You misunderstand. It’s simply that I am not used to your Norman ways and I only wished to know where … where I stand with you.” If I
need to be afraid of you,
was what she meant, though her pride would not let her ask that. “In Wales, the law states a husband may beat his wife for three reasons only—if she lies with another, if she gambles away his goods, or if she insults his manhood. If he strikes her for any other reason, she may disavow the marriage. Unless he pays her a
sarhaed,
of course. Her honor-price.” The need to cry was now so strong, her throat was tight with it. “I cannot allow you to beat me for any other reason.”

“You cannot
allow?
You seem to have forgotten that you are a subject of England now, and in England a man can do what he wills with his wife.”

“He can beat her just to get in the practice,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness she felt from tinging her voice. As a Cymraes she’d had rights and respect; married to him she had nothing at all.

He came up to her, and she had to stiffen every muscle to keep from backing away. Though she thought by the slow, lazy way he moved that he wasn’t angry and wouldn’t hit her. This time.

She had her hair woven into a single fat braid that fell over her shoulder. His fingers started at her neck and followed the length of it where it curled around her breast. “Have you been stricken with a gambling fever?” he asked.

Startled, she realized he was unbraiding her hair. “Nay, but—”

His voice was flat and hard, but the fingers combing through her hair were gentle. “If I catch you with another man, Arianna, I won’t beat you, I shall kill you. And as for my manhood … it is pointless to cast slurs upon an object which is unassailable.” Something flashed in his eyes. Arianna thought it could have almost been laughter. “So do you understand now where you stand with me?”

Arianna tried to think, though her head suddenly felt slow and thick, like resin on a cold day. All she could concentrate on was the way his fingers felt in her hair. “I am to be your obedient and submissive chattel.”

His hand fell to his side. “Then at last we are in agreement about something.”

He turned away from her abruptly. He threw himself into a chair with a grunt and began to work loose the heel of one boot with the toe of the other.

Arianna watched him, dazed for a moment. Then she knelt in the rushes before him, her bottom settling down onto her heels. She pulled off his boots, and then his slippers. His chausses hugged the muscles of his calves and thighs, and she remembered how he had looked in the joust, with those legs wrapped around the thick body of his war-horse, how he had controlled the charging, thundering beast with those muscles alone.

He leaned forward, threading his fingers in her hair. He tugged her head up until her eyes met his. “I will be very slow and easy with you tonight, and if you don’t fight me it won’t hurt so much.”

“It will hurt.”

“A little, perhaps. At first. You are very small and tight.”

“And your male appendage is so very big and thick.”

His lips danced on the verge of a smile, and she caught her breath. “Was that a slur you just cast upon my appendage, or a compliment?”

Absurdly pleased that he was teasing her, Arianna lowered her lids. Then she smiled as a memory suddenly came to her. It had been the summer she was twelve. She could almost feel again the hot sun beating down on her head and the warm sand oozing up between her toes, smell the salt and wet seaweed, and hear the sucking, popping sound of the waves.

She spoke her memory aloud, without thinking. “You men are all so vain about your appendages. I snuck up on four of my brothers once, one summer day on the beach near Father’s
llys
on the Isle of Môn. They were standing in a half-circle right at the water’s edge, and at first I couldn’t imagine what they were doing because their braies were sagging down around their knees. They were seeing who could pee the farthest into the ocean, and comparing the sizes of their privy members.”

Raine laughed and she laughed with him and the sounds they made—hers airy and sweet, his deep and rich—blended together and filled the room.

He stopped first, and when she heard him stop she caught the last of her laughter in her throat. She looked down. Her hands were clenched in her lap and she flattened them, smoothing them over the pale blue silk.

After their laughter, the room seemed too quiet. His hand had been idly toying with her hair, but now his fingers stroked her neck, stroked, stroked, and a warm, heavy feeling spread over her.

She pulled away from him, stumbling to her feet. She went to the laver and filled an enameled basin with water. She brought it to him, along with a towel she tucked under her arm.

“What are you doing?” he asked as she set the basin down beside him.

She bent over him and her loosened hair fell forward, slapping against his bare shoulder. He turned his face into it, his eyes squeezing shut. But she didn’t notice, for she was busy plucking at the edge of the bandage on his arm,
trying to see if the cut had mortified. “This filthy rag is stuck to your wound. It’ll have to be soaked a bit before it can come off.”

“Just rip it off.”

“But that would hurt—”

“It couldn’t possibly hurt any worse than it already is with you poking at it.”

She ripped off the bandage. He didn’t utter a sound. But his whole body went rigid and the creases at the corners of his mouth turned hard and white.

Fresh blood welled out of the cut. She wet the towel, folding it into a thick pad, and daubed at the wound. “My lord, I hope you will accept my apology for knifing you. I had my reasons, as you know, but I am sorry for it now.”

He shrugged. “It’s only a scratch.”

“You should have put sicklewort on it to stop the bleeding last night. Now you’ll likely as not be left with a scar.” Some of the water had splashed onto his chest and it ran in slow rivulets, down over the ridges of muscle, matting the dark hair into swirls around his nipples, sliding into the crease of his stomach.

She jerked her eyes off him and looked at the gilded floral wall above his head. Inside, she felt all tight and hot as if her flesh were swelling and pressing against her skin. “I am waiting now for your apology, my lord husband.”

“My what?” He was watching her strangely, with glazed, unfocused eyes, as if he’d just been punched in the head. He had certainly done a number of things to her in the short time they’d known each other that warranted his contrition. Perhaps he was running the long list through in his mind. “Your apology for blackening my eye.”

He blinked, grunted. “The hell I will. You deserved it, and besides, it was an accident.”

“I apologized to you. First for calling you a bastard, though you are one—through an accident of birth, I mean,” she added quickly. “And now I’ve apologized for
stabbing you while you were performing a perversion upon me—”

“I was
trying
to make love to you.”

“So the least you can do is apologize for hitting me, accident or no. It’s only fair.”

“What in God’s wounds is fair about me having to apologize for something you brought on yourself?”

Arianna straightened with a snap. “You, sir, are woefully ill-mannered. Even for a Norman.”

She snatched up the basin and soiled rag, but he hooked her wrist as she sailed by. “Are you going to yap at me about this all night?”

“I am not yapping. Puppies yap.”

His jaw tightened until a muscle in his cheek began to tick. “Very well. I apologize for accidentally hitting you in the eye while I was trying to prevent you from slashing me to death with a ten-inch quillon dagger.”

“I don’t accept your apology.”

“You don’t accept—”

“Nay. An apology given so begrudgingly is worthless.”

“Blood of Christ!” Raine came up off the stool like a bee-stung bull, knocking the basin she held in her hand and splashing water all down the front of Arianna’s bliaut.

The water was cold and wet and she sucked in a sharp breath, looking down. The thin silk had molded to her body and her nipples had drawn up hard and tight so that they looked like two round nuts, and she remembered what he had done last night, how he’d sucked one into his mouth, sucked on it like a babe.

She raised her eyes to his face. Her heart was hammering so hard that it reverberated like a tabor throughout every bone in her body, and somehow she’d lost the ability to breathe. Her eyes focused on his mouth. She wanted him to … wanted him to …

His lips parted open, she wet hers. Her head fell back, his dipped down.

Oh God, she wanted him to …

His breath stroked her lips and she sighed.

Wanted him to …

His lips brushed hers, and then he was kissing her.

His mouth slanted back and forth across hers, pressing hard, forcing her lips open. His tongue probed once, twice, then filled her. She stiffened a moment, unsure, and then she began to respond with timid tongue-flickings of her own.

He ended the kiss slowly, touching his lips to hers again and again, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to stop. He groaned into her mouth. “Sweet Jesus, your lips are soft.”

His mouth trailed down her jaw, followed the curve of her throat. Her head fell back and her fingers dug into his arms. She felt heavy, aching, her insides all soft and runny like melted butter.

His hands spanned her head and he brought her face down until she was forced to look into his eyes.

“Arianna?”

She hesitated, suddenly afraid again. But she had a lifetime of nights to spend with this man, to spend in his bed, and she could not be afraid of him forever.

She drew away from him. Slowly, her eyes on his face, her fingers trembling, she raised her hand and pulled open the laces of her bliaut.

He smiled, and suddenly she knew there was nothing to fear.