Lord of a Thousand Nights (30 page)

Aye, she had taught him much, but while he waited for Reyna tonight, those lessons and his years perfecting them had been forgotten. He had become a callow youth again, consumed by desperate needs and raw hurts, and
all of them had become centered on Reyna. The notion that he shared any part of her with another man had maddened him. He had entered her chamber full of furious, mindless emotions, and her own anger and passion had pushed him over the edge.

Then, seeing what was in him, she had simply opened herself to absorb it.

He stroked the cloth over her body, watching the skin below his hand, burning the memories into his head. Unnameable things still churned inside him, quelled but not killed by their passion, unsettling him with their power. The idea of leaving her saddened him in a surprising way, shading his heart with the foreboding and pain a child might feel when separated from his mother. Perhaps it would have been better to have avoided her tonight and never demanded that she cross those boundaries. The cost might be very high, especially if she ever withdrew again.

He turned his head and their gazes met. Her face looked very young and sweet, but her eyes carried a woman's knowing.

“Is your father who sought to make you a priest still alive?” She asked the question as if she had never spoken it before, but her gaze contained a challenge.

Aye, it would have its cost. This was Reyna. She would never be so stupid as to have the giving go only one way.

“He is not alive.”

He braced himself for the next question, and the next, and began to taste the loss of her after they had all been asked and answered. And so he almost groaned with relief when she chose to follow a connected path instead of the main one.

“Did he die when you were still a youth?”

“He died when I was nineteen, just after I was dubbed, right before I went to court. He had arranged to send me to a kinsman there.” It was the truth, although incomplete.

“Your kinsman served the king?”

“He was a minor functionary. He took me into his household.” None of it lies, not really.

“You lived with him the whole time there?”

Aye, one question would lead to another, and he saw where these were going. She merely followed her thoughts while she constructed forms of substance inside the deep but indefinable knowledge that they had of each other.

He couldn't deny her without losing what he had just fought to regain, but he sickened a little at the judgment awaiting. “The plague came not long after I arrived. My kinsman was away, and died of it. The household moved to one of his wife's manors in Sussex until the death passed.”

He paused, wondering if he could leave it there. Probably not. Alone with Christiana in Carlisle, she might learn about this lesser sin. “I stayed with his wife for two years, living off tournament winnings mostly.”

“And then you left for France?”

“I lived alone for a year after that before seeking my fortune in France.”

She immediately found the gaps. “Why? Did you fall out with your kinswoman?” When he didn't answer, her eyebrows rose and he watched the pieces fall into place. “The woman you told me about that day— the trade with Morvan—it was your kinsman's wife?”

“Aye.” He was relieved that she didn't look more shocked.

“She must have been much older than either you or Morvan.”

“She was my kinsman's second wife, and much younger than he. Still, almost old enough to be my mother.”

“Did you love her?”

She wanted him to say that he had been mad with love. Elizabeth had not been blood kin, but she had been related through marriage. While such liaisons were not unheard of, they were not acceptable. Claiming he had been besotted would make this more palatable, but he found that he could not lie to her.

“I loved her much as I could, which wasn't much. Less than I should. More than she wanted.”

“Why did it end?”

Because I ceased being faithful, which was all that she ever demanded of her lovers. Because I knew she loved someone else and I resented it, even though I would never have known what to do with that love if it came to me. Because we had healed each other's worst pain, and it was time to live the lives left to us.

“Elizabeth had much of the mother about her, and it was tempting to stay forever at the comfort of her breast. But as with a mother, there also came a time to leave.”

“I think that I can understand that. It was something like that with Robert and me.”

Of all the reactions he had expected, the last had been this calm understanding. She surprised him yet more when she added, “I am glad she was there if you needed her friendship.”

She reached up for the edge of the bed coverings and pushed them down and then drew them back over their bodies. “What with the hunt and all, you must be very tired. You have a long ride facing you. Sleep, Ian. I will wake you at dawn.”

“You should be tired too.”

“I find that I am not. In a few hours I must rouse the servants to prepare for our departure. I do not think I will sleep.”

“Nor will I, then. I learned long ago how to take my rest in a saddle. I do not plan to waste these hours with dreams when the best dream lies beside me.” He pushed the bedclothes back down, exposing her body, and rose up on his arm to look at her. “Besides, who knows when I will have the chance to give you another lesson?”

He kissed her, memorizing the softness of her lips and the sharp edge of her teeth and the velvet depths of her mouth. Gathering her hands, he pressed them above her head so she was stretched out completely vulnerable to him. He did not want her embracing him or doing anything to speed his own response. He would make her mad and desperate and begging, and maybe the sound of her cries would sustain him for the next days and weeks.

He caressed her slowly, watching his tan hand move around the swells of her small feminine form, doing nothing to arouse her beyond a languid pleasure. Her breasts filled and nipples hardened anyway. He smiled at her quick response, but he would not be distracted.

“You are so lovely, Reyna. There is always this faint blush on your skin, and it is soft and moist, as if it is covered with invisible dew.” Her breath caught when he lowered his head and first kissed and then licked the valley between her beckoning breasts.

She arched invitingly, but he rose away so he could caress and memorize the shapely lines of her legs. Her creamy thighs quivered and tensed when he moved higher to the scent and moisture already waiting at their top. He touched gently, testing to see if she was too
bruised for more, glad for the evidence she was not when her body trembled elegantly in response.

She frowned when he drew his hand away.

“Not yet, Reyna. This is punishment for calling me a whoreson and bastard again. I warned you not to do that.” Actually, that passionate invective had been music to his ears. He ran his finger over her lower lip, drawing the moisture from her quick breaths, studying the filmy desire in her eyes. He felt an inexplicable flattery that this woman wanted him at all, let alone so badly and so quickly.

He drew a line down her chin to her chest and then circled, circled, circled up the rise of one pretty breast. She squirmed and groaned, and he flattened his palm to gently graze her tight nipple. “Is this what you want, Reyna?”

She tried to wrench her hands free of his hold.

“Is it?”

“Aye, damn you.”

“Another curse? This could take until dawn.” He teased her with his fingertips, lightly rubbing the pink tip, and she jerked at her arms again.

“Let me go, you whoreson, and we'll see who cries enough first.”

“Keep that up and we may not depart until noon.” He lowered his lips to her other tip. “You are so soft, like velvet. The first time I kissed you, I almost forgot all sense of duty.” He licked and sucked slowly, lost in the delicious taste and feel of her, wonderfully alert to the abandoned cries and moves that his tongue and hand drew out of her.

Her hips rocked slowly while he made love to her breasts, and he let their rhythm of desire tantalize his own tight hunger. He savored each impassioned reaction, storing away its memory like a precious possession.

He released her hands and eased her over on her stomach. Hovering above her he slowly kissed down her spine, then turned to watch her body while he caressed the back of her legs and thighs. She half buried her face in her arms to smother her surprised gasps. When his gaze and hand moved higher, the soft hills of her buttocks tightened to his touch and her back arched in reaction. She looked incredibly erotic like this, and he bent to kiss the small of her back while his fingers followed the shadowed cleft.

Her muffled cry almost undid him. The storm, quelled but not sated, erupted again. She parted her legs for more, and her hips rose when his finger found the tight passage and stroked its hot depths. She lifted her head and looked back at him with wary eyes. “Are you going to—”

He pictured her hips rising to him and a piercing heat shook him. But he doubted he could maintain much control if he took her that way, and anything less than gentleness would be unforgivable this time.

He turned her on her back. “Another time, Reyna, and you will like it, I promise you. But tonight I want your face against mine and your arms around me.”

She made to embrace him, but he slipped from her arms and trailed hot kisses down her silken length. One other memory and possession he would not deny himself. He lifted her legs over his shoulders and kissed her inner thighs. A new fever entered her eyes. Her body seemed to know what he was going to do, even if her mind did not.

He caressed her intimately, finding the spots that drove her mad, and she moved in responses out of her control. He turned his kisses higher, seeking her passion's center. She cried his name and he glanced up at her wild, shocked expression.

“I am going to do it, Reyna. If you do not like it, I will stop.”

She stiffened like a board when his mouth replaced his fingers, but the pleasure immediately demolished her resistance. “Aye,” she whispered, and then the affirmation became a cry repeated over and over, and the sound of her breathless chant and the throes of her passion pushed him into a glowing oblivion.

When he rose up over her, she grabbed at him, pulling him to her, lifting her legs in an embrace, trying to bind their desperation together. “What do you want, Reyna?” He barely possessed sense anymore, but he wanted to hear her say it. Needed to hear her say it.

Her fingers clawed at his shoulders. She looked up and blinked away the obscuring passion.

“What do you want?” he repeated.

A fierce light flashed in her eyes. “You. All of you. Deep inside me and all through me.”

Searing hunger streaked through him with a dangerous force. If he followed his blood, it would be like before. Rolling over in their embrace, he brought her above him. “Then take what you want. As much or as little as you need.”

She moved to absorb him deeply, bending to caress and kiss his chest, drawing his spirit to her as surely as he had forced hers to him. She made love beautifully and hungrily, and his chaotic emotions swirled beneath her urgent aggression. Her cries started again, and she began to demand more. He grasped her hips and responded with his own thrusts, impatient now for the completion that he had delayed, trying to contain the complex needs so they wouldn't overwhelm him this time.

She groaned at his movement and buried her face in his neck. “Harder,” she whispered shakily. “Deep inside me and all through me.”

“I will hurt you. You are sore.”

“Nay, my love. If we must separate I want to feel you for days. Weeks. Forever.”

Her muffled voice contained a tremor. Caressing her face, he felt a tear. An astonishing tenderness washed him, full of awe that she cared enough to feel such sorrow about their parting and his danger.

Suddenly he wanted nothing from her at all, but only to give whatever she sought. Submerged with her in a soulful harmony laden with pleasure and joy and sorrow, he embraced her closer. Pressing her to his bursting heart, he whispered lies of reassurance while he drove into her.

Chapter TWENTY

I
an looked down on the precise drawing that David had made in the dirt floor of the tent. It showed a detailed image of Harclow as seen from the eye of a flying bird. There was the square keep with its four corner towers, and the inner wall surrounding it. Some distance away ran the thick line of the outer wall. Along two sides floated the lake, and David had even indicated the placement of the siege camps on the surrounding terrain. Ian had never seen anything quite like it, with all objects seen from the top and everything in scale. Most maps were not drawn this way.

“Have I forgotten anything?” David asked Morvan, who also studied the image.

Morvan shook his head. “It is astonishingly accurate.”

“Good. Now I only ask that you hear me out. This rain looks likely to last many days, so there is time to do it now, if you agree.”

Ian walked over to the tent's opening and gazed into the steady drizzle that had halted assaults for two days.
Behind him, David began explaining the elaborate plan that they had concocted.