My True Love (25 page)

She’d lit not one candle but a branch of them which stood outlined in the flickering light. Shadows graced her face and accentuated the reddish hue of her hair. Her hand stretched out and greeted him, lured him closer. Just that, an outstretched hand. Nothing else. Not a sign, then. It was a night of farewells and poignant partings, not omens.

Once before they’d stood together like this. A night of loving to last a lifetime. Memories to be pulled from their resting place when the world turned black with powder or death rode too close in battle. But that night would also be recalled in more peaceful times. Perhaps for the rest of his life. A night of passion he’d not dreamed of before, of both conquest and longing. Of desire sated and rewarded.

Tonight he came to her. The moment repeated again. The need for forgetfulness and a wish to add to that store of memories.

Even as he stood in silence, he vowed that he would love her once not in parting but in joy. This he silently promised her, even as he accepted that it might not be possible. He made another promise, one he could ensure was kept. If she allowed him to stay. Tonight would not be swathed in sorrow. Not in the shadows of grief.

He would enchant her, as she had him.

“Forgive me,” he said, his voice kept low. Out of respect for her? Or because he did not want to have the world hear him beg?

There were secrets to her mind and person, mysteries in her eyes. In the slight smile she wore when looking at him sometimes. In the passion she so artlessly gave and shared. She opened her arms. Welcome and forgiveness in a gesture.

A sign, then, of how close to madness he must surely be, that he pressed her face gently to his chest and sighed into her hair.

“I need you,” he heard himself say in horrified fascination. “I need you.” Again, as if the initial capitulation had not been enough. Again and again and again, this surrender. Practice, then, for what he must do in the morning.

Help me. Ease me. Make me forget for a while.

She’d guessed so easily what he’d planned to do before the thought had become solidified in his mind. It seemed as if she intuited the exact moment of his surrender now. Or did she see the knowledge in his eyes?

She wound her arms around his waist. She held him tight to her as if the words he did not speak would sever them otherwise.

He’d held her so when nature itself had split the air around them. Held her when the thunder roared and lightning flashed. The passion that sparked between them was as strong. But she’d not been afraid then. Even in her innocence, she’d matched his need and gifted him with a wonder he’d never before felt.

When she pulled away, he was humbled and awed. On her face were tears. They glazed her cheeks and reddened her lips. He’d sought a sign, an omen, a signal. As he stared down into her face, he found that he didn’t need one after all.

She did not cry easily or often. How did he know such a thing? The same way he knew that her tears were for him and the morning to come, and a hundred such when time separated them and wars and politics and religious unrest. All stupid reasons. All silly notions measured against this woman.

Anne. How simple her named sounded. How plain for such a glorious creature. Anne. He wanted to call her something different, something unique and rare and unusual, that was never uttered by any other voice. A name that would indicate to her how he felt, how he wanted to thank her and praise her and show her, in some tiny fashion, that he would hold the memory of her smile in that sweet spot in his heart where all such memories rested.

He had thought himself adrift in near madness to think of her so often, to dream of her so deeply. But in her look was the same possession of thought. To be so open in her vulnerability was an act of the greatest courage.

The candlelight was too bright, the moment too ripe with feeling.

Some women were lovely even in their tears. Anne was not, a discovery that sent a surge of tenderness shooting through him. Her nose was pink, the whites of her eyes nearly red.

He’d shared passion with her, and it had been wondrous, something that made tawdry and minor other joinings in his lifetime. But now she offered him something more. Not mere passion, not solely exquisite physical pleasure, but part of herself.

Do not
. He wanted to tell her to shield her eyes or cover her heart, but not to show him her soul so easily. He might bruise her accidentally or wound her with his actions. But she stood silent, as she had a habit of doing, and dared him to look inside her. To take or to reject what she so effortlessly offered him. The gift of herself.

She offered and he would take. He knew that even as he reached out and bared her shoulder. Her dressing gown was borrowed or made for her. Cast off from one of the servants or crafted from the bolts of cloth kept in the sewing room. He didn’t know, nor did he care. His only interest was in stripping it from her.

He felt hollow. A man without a soul or heart or even thoughts at this moment. They trembled in the air between them, all the separate pieces of himself, to be gathered up by either of them.

My soul. I shall need it if I pass through to heaven. And am challenged at the gate for all my misdeeds. Shall I number you among them, Anne?

It did not surprise him when she answered, her soft voice proof that he was indeed adrift in confusion. Enough to speak the words he had not wished to say aloud.

“No, Stephen, my dearest. Do not regret me.”

“A command again. You have a habit of doing so.” His smile curved even as he kissed her bare shoulder.

She tilted her neck, an invitation to feast on her throat. He could not deny himself. He kissed her there, where the pulse of her was hot and rapid. Life beneath his lips. A life all the more precious for being hers.

“My thoughts,” he said, content to continue this madness with her. “You are in them always, as if you have invaded my mind. You are not content to simply be in my dreams.”

“You have been in my sight all my life,” she said, the words crumbling beneath her sudden, surprising sobs. She began to cry so hard that he gathered her up into his arms and held her tight.

“All my life,” she said, as if it were a confession.

Her tears were those of grief, mourning held too long within. He did not ask for what she cried. Whatever answer, it would too closely parallel his own thoughts.

Instead, he could only hold her while the storm raged within her, survive these minutes with a silent endurance. If he ever thought himself numbed by war or uncaring, that would be when he summoned this memory to mind. Or if his freedom were curtailed and his life forfeit, he would think of this time. Each of Anne’s tears seemed tinged with acid, and each of them bored through his chest to find his heart. The recollection of these moments would prove that he was not jaded after all. Rather that he was proficient at feeling too much.

The flickering of his anger was unexpected. But it grew in that moment to be a wall through which he viewed the world and anything that would come between him and her.

The hollowness of him expanded until he felt only a shell. But it curved and wound itself over her. A hermit crab, perhaps, summoning a home.

He had not lost his senses in wine, but his thoughts were no less drunk. Or fevered.

Valere iubere
. Beautiful words. Words that fell in a soft, rolling lilt from his tongue.
Valere iubere
. To bid farewell. A strong parting, one of optimism, victory, great health. Not a surrender to circum stance or to men who fought for causes he could not espouse.

He should not be here. Remonstrated with himself even as he bent his head to kiss her.
Make me remember
. She had said that to him once, and he’d not been able to forget. Not one moment of the night they’d shared. They’d laughed and lingered and explored each other. Yet when he touched her naked skin now, it was as if it were the first time. Her fingers tangled with his. Her eyes wide, her lashes spiked with tears, she encouraged him and welcomed him without a word spoken.

Her flesh was warm as he cradled his palms around the curve of her full breasts. Warmed them as she closed her eyes with the feel of his knuckles brushing her skin.

They’d teased each other with words before. Soft words that had draped themselves between desire and propriety. Their speech had tripped along a cliff of need, been tender and evocative.

Not this time. This time he welcomed lust. It would burn away the sorrow they each felt and would not acknowledge. He wanted to bind her to him with passion. To make her weak and wasted from it, from him. To take her tears and taste them and transform them into weeping of another kind.

He needed to spill himself within her. Not honor, then. Not even duty. Only need. Naked and intractable and necessary.

He would make her whimper in the faint light and be as ensorcelled as he felt.

“I want to taste you,” he said, not bending to whisper the words in her ear, not lowering his voice. He stared into her eyes and watched her cheeks deepen in color.

He parted the garment slowly an inch at a time. Then bent his head and nuzzled her engorged nipple. Sucked it into the heat of his mouth. He heard her gasp, felt her hands flutter on his shoulders.

He sucked harder, a gentle insistence, passion’s game. Then used the edge of his teeth to scrape the length of the nipple.

Her breathing grew louder or his hearing more acute. He wanted her to scream in his arms, to grow wet with his play. To beg him to enter her, to sob his name.

The other breast was teased with his lips while he fondled the one he’d deserted with tender fingers. Her nipples were sensitive, easily aroused. He’d learned that during the one night they’d shared.

She closed her eyes. He touched her closed lids with one gentle finger, remonstrance in a touch.

“No,” he said, gently. “I want to see your eyes, Anne.”

She had a habit of blinking slowly when she was moved. A curiously evocative gesture. One that hardened him still further.

In the candlelight her eyes appeared almost black. The centers had expanded, the look in them was beyond passion. Something more dangerous, perhaps, as if a part of her recognized his game for the tenuous control it represented and goaded him to continue.

For a second, a moment, his hand hovered at the apex of her thighs. Then he gently touched her.

She blinked again, that slow, arousing blink even as she tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth. He wanted to tell her that it was his game of seduction, that she could not sway him from this goal, but words were too difficult at the moment.

His fingers found her wet and hot. Nature prepared her for him even as he ached to be inside of her. His thumb brushed over gently swelling flesh. When she gasped, he repeated the gesture.

“Is it nice, Anne?”

She looked shocked at the question. He repeated it, accompanied it with a tender smile and a soft, teasing touch.

She nodded.

“Is it nice?”

She understood finally. “Yes,” she breathed, the sound no more than a sigh.

“Do you want more?”

He inserted his longest finger gently, sweetly, slowly inside her. Her plump breasts had been sucked into arousal, their nipples deeply red and gleaming with his kisses. Her dressing gown hung from her shoulders, framed them, and made the sight even more arousing.

Anne with her eyes black with passion and her cheeks pink and hot.

He kissed her temple, breathed the words against her ear.

“Is it nice, Anne? You must say if you want more.”

He felt her shiver.

“Stephen.”

She should not have said his name. Not in that husky voice. It made him want to thrust against her, spill inside her now instead of teasing her to fulfillment.

Who was being bound in lust?

She was hot and wet and slick and so tight that she gripped his finger as he entered. His thumb stroked her flesh where it swelled.

“Say it,” he demanded.

“Nice,” she said, her head falling back, her eyes closing. An artless siren. A sound escaped her. A moan of delight or need? Either heated his blood.

“Do you want me inside you, Anne?”

He’d shocked her again. Her eyes flew open, met his. But instead of looking away or lowering her eyes, she smiled. A long, slow smile that fanned the flame inside him.

“With all my heart,” she murmured.

“Then you must do as I say,” he said. His look was heated, her smile one of complicity.

“Ride you, Stephen?” she asked softly.

She learned quickly. But then, she was a woman of candor and daring.

He took her hand and led her to her bed. She lay on it before him, acquiescent, but not sweetly so. There was a look in her eyes that made him wonder if she would match his audacity.

“Will you do anything I ask?”

“Anything.” It was a murmur, sweetly fashioned by curving lips.

“You must ready me for you.”

She smiled, as if she knew what a fallacy that remark was. He’d been hard since he’d begun to think of her.

But she raised up on her knees and unlaced his shirt, aided him in removing it.

Her tongue reached out and touched his nipple. “
Papilla
,” she said softly.

She unlaced his breeches, thrust both hands within, and widened them until he heard the stitches pop.

Both her hands gripped him. One slid to the base, held him there, as the other gripped him as if he were a stalk of wheat and slowly slid to the head.

“
Penis
,” she whispered.

She bent down and placed a kiss on the head. Anointed him with the daring touch of her tongue. “
Basiatio
,” she murmured against his flesh.

He was on fire.

“I was wrong to teach you Latin,” he said, as she pulled him to her.

He half tumbled onto the bed beside her. Their mutual smiles made their kiss one of delight, the sheer exuberance of their lust for each other changed their laughter and transformed it into whispering words and smiles dusted against skin.

“Spread your legs for me,” he said, and she did. Without hesitation or question.