Lady Merry's Dashing Champion (27 page)

"You have the salt box," she reminded him, keeping all inflection from her voice.

He pushed it under the blanket without a word.

"My thanks, sir," she said in a high tone.

Before she could ask, he sent the bread loaf and the butter crock and the ever-present cheese after the salt. She dipped in a finger and tasted the thick Dutch butter, which was easy to love.

She thought not to thank him twice for his reluctant service, but decided she would prove to have better manners than a peer of the realm and a Garter knight. "Again, sir, my extreme and absolute humble thanks."

Meriel was certain that he, as she, could hear everything in the small space, every sigh, every movement, every step of the four she could take from cabin wall to outer bulkhead. She wanted to plead with him for understanding, but she would not, though she knew he was a man who had understanding in him. Had she not seen it? Felt it? She spent some time and effort shutting her mind to the memories of what she had felt with Earl Giles.

Several times she thought he took a deep breath to speak only to fling himself into his bunk, roll over and soon sit up again. Finally, there was only the sound of Channel waves breaking against the ship, of winches squeaking as they turned on deck and sailors' shouts to break the silence. She sat, her arms folded, her mouth stubbornly clamped. 'Od's bods, he must speak first.

When he did speak, his voice was so suddenly all around her that she jumped and gave a little cry of surprise. He repeated the first words of his question.

"Did you not say that you swam in the Stour as a child?"

"Yes."

"Was that true, or part of a spy's story to make me believe you were Felice?"

"True."

"Then you were Canterbury born?"

"I don't know. I was named for Thomas Becket since I was found as a newborn babe on the cathedral steps one morning. I was taken thence to a foundling hospital, and when five years of age to a charity house for orphans... where my good Sir Edward Cheatham found me."

"Sir Edward? I know him and never heard him speak of you."

"Did you talk of your servants to him?" She didn't expect an answer to her counterquestion and didn't get one.

"And what is your age now?"

"Twenty and two ... and not like to live to another nativity day by the way of things. What means these questions? Do you know aught of my parentage?" There was no answer, and she was not surprised. Yet she took a deep breath and spoke one word so sweet on her tongue it sounded of honey: "Giles?"

But Giles did not respond and her temper flared. "My lord, does talk only go one way in your noble world? In mine, that is considered poor etiquette. You know that French word for right manners, do you not, Lord Warbor-ough?"

Silence. She could not goad him into breaking this crushing silence, forcing him to acknowledge her. She needed to hear his voice say her name, to have him hold her, place his lips on hers.... And elsewhere ,.. especially elsewhere ... a very sore need.

Meriel took a deep breath, and said one word. "Please." Then another from deep in her throat. "Giles—"

She heard a groan from behind the blanket, which was ripped away from its pegs at that instant to reveal Giles standing, his head bent to accommodate the low ceiling.

"I command you to stop this torment!"

His tightened muscles and half-growled words frightened her. And excited her. "What, my lord? What have I done? Is passing the salt box so onerous a duty.. . ."

He knelt before her, then pulled her roughly from the bunk to the deck and into his arms as she clutched the salt box against her breasts.

Meriel felt his arms tighten, while Giles devoured her buttery mouth as if he were starving for her kiss before another moment passed.
Yes!
She wanted to scream it. If they were to die in this place, she needed him to love her once more. She had to show him that she wanted him as a man and not as part of a spy mission. He had to learn.... To know ... To believe. She heard him gasp. Giles released her so instantly that she fell back, the salt box spilling its contents everywhere on the deck.

"Oh!" She knelt, urgently tried to scrape the grains together in her hands and replace them in the open box. Where was the lid? Dizzied with confusion and heated surprise, not to mention a wildly pounding heart, she couldn't think or see clearly.

Giles bent to help. "Do not upset yourself so. This is my fault."

"No. My lord, I was too demanding. I should have waited until you were finished with your meal."

He forced a bitter laugh, since he had allowed himself to go against all best judgment, only to be completely misunderstood. Then the laugh changed to real mirth. "You delicious ninny! You think this is about salt?"

Giles's gaze smoldered with such a light that it was like to set the wooden ship afire. Even in this small, windowless space, Meriel saw the desire she'd longed to see in his eyes. She smiled in her turn, licking the kiss still on her lips. "I would hope something much ... much sweeter, my lord."

“This should not happen," Giles said, but he did not move away, could not move away from her. It was a puny power that told him to use his head and not his body to think with. And with a moment of clarity and honesty, he had to admit that his head did not rule him, either. It was his heart speaking and his memory of soft inner thighs like damp silk against his cheek.

"I know," Meriel agreed, with what he saw as a tentative smile, although she was beginning to untie her gown. "Do you want to stop me, or must I attempt to reject you? And how forcible would you have me be?"

Although he knew that she was making a pale jest to hide the truth of her own need, he didn't answer in kind. "You could favor us both and say no," he said, attempting seriousness, though he pulled his shirt over his head. When she didn't answer, didn't look as if she meant to ever speak again, her lips pursed a little stubbornly, but all the more kissable for that, he brought his hands curving up her sides and curled them about her breasts. He kissed one quivering handful and then the other, hearing her teeth chatter as if from cold, though he felt heat sweep through her body. She gasped, as if taking a first birthing breath.

All the hours of being close to her he had been in hot torment, hating her deception, trying to believe their loving had not been all playacting, longing for her, twisting this way, then that in his mind, until he thought he must be crazed. He had tried to ignore his insistent need, but he might as well ignore the air he breathed as his unexplainable desire for this spying woman who wore the face of betrayal. He had closed his eyes tight so that the sight of her body would not tempt him, but the memory of her behind his eyes was an even greater temptation.

Meriel, delirious to feel his hands on her when she had thought never to know them again, lost all caution and opened her gown to him.

"You are indeed a wanton." He breathed the words against her breasts.

"Hey, well, my lord earl, I can have a brain or a woman's part, but not both working together!"

His face fell forward between her breasts and he shook. She was amazed. This was laughter she felt, helpless laughter. With this man, she need not hide her secret thoughts, her second mind, as she had always done with every other soul on earth. She could be herself, all of herself, with Giles.

Giles lifted his face to hers, kissing her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, a smile upon his face. "You are ... you are—"

"Waiting, my lord," Meriel said, and began to stroke what parts of him she could reach.

Giles lost any will to fight his need for her, promising himself to examine it later, doubting that promise as he made it.

He kissed her throat from one side to the other as she arched her neck for him. They were hard, hot kisses because he had been a man who controlled men in battle and he could not control himself with one woman. He'd tried to convince her of his hatred. Did she believe he truly felt hate and was using her for his own needs'? No, she was too strong for that or else she would not have dared so much. He must have known this from the first moment he saw her.

Yet how could he trust her again and not fear for his reason? How could he want this woman more than he had ever wanted Felice, even in the beginning? He forced himself to stop all thought, and it was as difficult as reining in a galloping stallion with the bit in his teeth.

"Answer one question, mistress," he said, not able to say the name Merry aloud. Not yet. He had no practice in dissembling, so he asked his question without making it pretty: "When we were together at Harringdon, were you loving me as yourself, or as Chiffinch's spy?"

"Sweeting," she said, enclosing him in her soft arms and using a dear name that she had never thought would be in her mouth. She felt his back muscles tense. "That was me, only me, and now that same woman is before you, undeserving but wild with want for you."

Because love had been denied for the many times Giles had wished it, whether confronting her in Whitehall, in his library at Harringdon, in the hold of an enemy ship bound hand and foot... he was fully ready. He had held tight to his need for as long as any man could.

He stood and reached down for her where she sat amidst the scattered salt grains, and they tumbled into her narrow bunk. "Please, Giles," she begged without ceasing against his lips.

"Please? What do you wish for? Say the words to me." His fingers were dancing from her breasts down to stroke her gently rounded stomach and further to the soft muff of dark hair, on into the cleft at the entry to her woman's cave, his fingers coming upon a slippery fire at the entrance.

She answered, "I want your body joined to mine, our parts grown together, never to separate."

Giles crouched over her in the dim light of the one lantern swinging from midcabin, his hot blood surging through him. He bent to kiss her where his fingers had first explored, tasting her sea-salty essence, his rough tongue moving her tender nether lips as it willed. Finally, at almost the last moment under his command, he slid his body up and she reached for him and guided him to the place that demanded filling and would no longer wait.

Meriel's eyes were full of searing tears, but she saw his face in the dim, wavering glow of ship's lantern light, his shadow moving up and down on the wall in concert with the ship's plunge to meet an oncoming wave. She could not see herself, but seeing him in flesh and in shadow was like being loved twice as hard.

Meriel reared up from the wooden bunk, feeling her heart pounding against Giles's chest, until with a cry she was drained of all the desperate desire she had held deep inside her, and he collapsed against her, gulping open mouthed for air against the hollow of her neck.

He closed his eyes, holding tight to this moment before he had to let her go, perhaps to never know another woman like Meriel. His senses vibrated with a strange unspoken prayer:
Oh, God, I don't know how I will ever live without you.

Meriel spoke as she thought. "I love you, Giles. Whatever happens, I will always love you."

"Shhh. Don't speak," he said in a low voice, withdrawing from her reluctantly and readjusting his clothing.

"Giles, what have I done? Don't turn away—"

He put a finger to her lips and mouthed, "Quiet." Something in the way he said it and his movement toward the cabin door forced her compliance. As she quietly crawled forward, Giles had his ear to the door.

Many men's voices came from the cabin, and one woman's. Felice's high, brittle voice, speaking English and seemingly translated by de Witt for others.

"What are they saying?" Meriel whispered insistently.

"Council of war."

She moved closer to him. She had to look in his face, since his words had so little sound. His arm came around her and he held on.

"Michiel de Ruyter is there, and other admirals," Giles said, with Meriel following his barely audible words. "The damned French have joined them with twenty ships. That gives them near one hundred sail!" He bent even closer into the door, listening hard. "They are arguing, with de Witt against taking their fleet into the Thames."

"Why?" Meriel whispered, her heart gladdened at the thought the Dutch might fear to attack even with so mighty a fleet.

"An English squadron could come up behind them and they would be trapped between the warships at Chatham and the ones behind. A neat snare."

Meriel heard Felice say, "No, tell them the squadron is too far away, and I have two renegade English pilots ready to guide you to an attack on the fort at Sheerness."

Giles flexed his fists, and Meriel sensed the power of his hatred and dreaded to think it could ever have been turned on her. "They mean to attack Sheerness, and Felice has hired other traitors to pilot them in through the shoals in the estuary. After that, they can enter the Thames at will with only the chain to stop them."

She shook her head, biting the lips that had to tell him otherwise. "The chain is so heavy and so low in the water, a fair-sized ship that draws less than nine feet could sail over it."

Anguished, Giles closed his eyes tightly. "Aye, the Dutch have many with shallow draft."

At last, after some time of talk and even shouts in Hollander that Meriel could not understand, all was quiet in de Witt's cabin. Giles was deathly white, his eyes haunted with worry about England's weak defenses. Unthinking, Meriel put out a hand to hover over his. She did not touch him, not yet knowing her rights, but he did not pull away. "Giles, Felice has finished her foul work. There's no help for that. Now it remains for us to find a way to stop the Dutch." Her voice was hard and uncompromising.

He nodded. His wife, who had been given every privilege of an English gentlewoman, was a traitor. This commoner ... although a most uncommon commoner ... had the courage and determination of a queen. He looked long at her... the last long look he would allow himself for how many hours or days he did not know. She had the heart and stomach of Elizabeth Tudor, though not the nose, thanks be. He wanted to laugh aloud at that absurdity, but he dared not. The king's spy, after days as a captive, was yet a soft beauty, and Felice, with all her paint pots had turned ugly and hard as stone. This Meriel St. Thomas would never break, of that he was certain. Yet he must keep tight rein on such thoughts, in spite of the sweet time they had just spent. Indeed, he must forget everything, thinking only of the fight ahead. He shivered at that and wondered if he had caught an ague, or was he dreading a future without this woman? He was married for life, according to every law. Even if he could get an annulment from Felice, Meriel St. Thomas was a commoner he was forbidden to marry ... and the Earl of Warborough must have a legitimate heir.