The Maiden Bride (25 page)

"Aye—a bastard, but a son." He suddenly looked as though he'd betrayed a confidence. "Pardon me, my lady. I thought surely you knew of the boy."

A cold lump lodged in her stomach.

"Yes, of course."

Liam.

"Do
you mean to marry again one day?"

Nicholas.
So rampantly possessive, so startled to find her that day in his tower.

His
tower.

"Lady Eleanor?"

"Yes?" A muffled roaring filled her ears, her heart shoving up into her throat. Though Arundel was talking, she couldn't hear him. She looked up into the cliff tower, where her dark-hearted gargoyle had stood guard against her, had made his horrible plans.

Had stood fast in his falsehoods—this treacherous husband of hers.

* * *

"Oh, this is madness." Eleanor scrabbled over the cliffs at the base of the castle as soon as Arundel left, convincing herself that she'd find nothing in Nicholas's chapel or his work shed to prove that he and William Bayard were one and the same man.

It was preposterous to even think it. This was her damned imagination running wild on a horrible day of disaster and reprieve and disaster again.

So William had had a bastard son—what knight of the realm hadn't a dozen to show for his whoring?

Even Nicholas had a son born on the wrong side of the bed.

Liam. William.

No! Because that would mean the unthinkable: that William hadn't come for her and Nicholas never would.

She searched the chapel first, every niche and alcove, even its tiny undercroft. But there was nothing at all of her husband here; this was Nicholas's project. His joy, his penance, too. That gave her hope and the confidence to scour the shed for evidence, some clue that she hadn't made sense of before, something out of place.

All the while, she prayed that Nicholas wouldn't come looking for her—that he would never see her doubt him, or his honor or his motives.

She found nothing under the workbench, or on the table. Nicholas's tools hung neatly oiled and in their places on the wall; nothing odd or out of place.

She almost dismissed the chest. He kept his drawings there, with their angles and arcs all neatly lettered. She needed to touch them, to assure herself that Nicholas Langridge was just the fourth son of a minor baron.

The rolls of parchment lay on top of each other, as they always had. But something whispered to her to look underneath—and there, lying snugly at the bottom of the chest, were two large books, fashioned as all the other records had been in wood-bound leather with the Bayard crest.

"No, Nicholas." Her throat crowded with tears as she lifted one of the heavy books from its hiding place.

Her hands trembling, she opened to the first page:
Faulkhurst, the year of our Lord, 1348.

She leafed through the thick pages, her fingers quaking, not certain what she was looking for until she found it: two years ago last March. Rudolphus's aged handwriting gave way gradually, and then totally, to a firmer, broader hand: one that was dear and familiar, because she'd spent hours bent over his broad shoulder, watching him carefully scribe his planting forecasts and the harvest yields.

"'Boon day bread, 100 loaves, from my bakehouse.
Mea culpa.'
William Nicholas Bayard."

Nicholas.

Her wicked-hearted, pillaging husband. Oh, God.

Chapter 22

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N
icholas had watched Eleanor and Arundel from the cool shadows of the cliff tower, chafing at Percy and his ineffectual courting dance, at Eleanor and her sudden agitation as she paced and gazed up at the castle, at him—although she couldn't possibly know that he stood watching her, his heart rammed up into his throat, aching for her.

Be gone, Arundel. Leave me to my wife.
He would gather her up as soon as the two men were gone from Faulkhurst, and then he would tell her of his change of heart. That he understood her plight, that he was willing—despite his vows of chastity—to deflower her.

Willing.
Christ, she was his fevered yearning. He burned to taste her, to feel her quaking beneath him, to hear her cry out his name in ecstasy.

The right was his—the obligation, the honor. No man's, but his.

Marry me, Nicholas.

Oh, yes, my love.
She'd have her wedding night and all its joys. And he would share it with her to the fullest, would ride her rhythms and be her hunger. A holy joining that God would surely allow him, if only because the bliss of it would leave him aching and repentant forever afterward, through a long, bleak eternity.

Because he couldn't imagine living without her. She'd become part of his breathing, the smile he searched for each morning, his pulse and his hope.

It was a goodness that he would take with him to the grave: that he had been loved by Eleanor.

And that he loved her beyond his life.

Pacing, he watched the gate, her every gesture. Yet somehow, during a blink, his dazzling wife vanished into the afternoon shadows of the castle without a trace, as Arundel and his nephew trotted through the village.

Bloody hell. He felt like a randy bridegroom on the church steps, waiting through the tedious ceremony so that he could get up his wife's skirts.

A smile warmed him deep down inside his chest and sent him down the stairs to the armory, expecting to see her at any moment, expecting her to press him onto a bench and lavish him with tales of Percy and his roving hands.

But she wasn't there, and didn't come. An austere loneliness crept over him, and he tried to ignore the niggling fear in it.

She could have sped off anywhere, on any of a hundred projects. She needed a tether—one of silk, so like the one she'd tied around his heart.

But as supper came and went, as night fell and the great hall grew quiet, and Hannah hadn't seen her either, Nicholas truly began to worry. He'd checked her chamber twice before, and now slowly climbed the stairs with a growing dread that emptied him.

Bloody hell, if she wasn't here now, he'd wake everyone in the castle.

But then he smelled lavender and saffron drifting down the stairs.

Christ, she was here in their chamber, and safe! He reached the landing in great bounding steps.

"Eleanor!" he shouted as he tore through the doorway. And for all his helpless feeling that something had gone terribly wrong, he was astounded by the sight of her.

His stunning wife standing in the middle of the room in a pale gauzy night shift, the shutters open wide to the ocean, every candle lit, throwing dancing ghosts everywhere.

She was looking at him as though she'd never seen him before, her eyes as piercing as day's first light, wide with wonder.

She whispered in astonished awe, "He was here, Nicholas."

God, she was all of his dreams, all the yearnings of his heart. His wife.

And he wanted her in all the possible meanings of the word. He stood there, amazed, anchored by his unspent passion, by this purloined indulgence he'd granted himself in her name.

"Arundel?" he said, taking the breath that had stuck inside his chest. "Aye, a fine man, but he's taken enough of your time with his visit."

She seemed to have gained composure, while he was barely muddling through. "Not Sir Richard, Nicholas."

"Who then?"

She took a deliberate breath that hitched twice. "My husband."

Christ
. "Your—"
He hadn't air for anything more.

She touched her mouth with her fingers as though testing the words before she spoke them. "William Bayard."

Nicholas managed to shake his head, to unfasten his dagger belt with steady hands, though his nerves crackled. He would listen to every word before he replied, control the situation completely until it became his again.

"What do you mean, he was here?" he asked, hating himself for the fraud, for the anger in her eyes. "Recently?"

She frowned as though he'd purposely asked the wrong question. "How could he have been here recently, Nicholas? He's dead, isn't he?"

She spun away from him and took up a large wooden comb off the side table, then a fistful of her hair, and dug the teeth into the damp tangles.

Arundel must have said something to inflame her. But surely nothing of import. He hadn't communicated with the man for more than a year.

"Did Arundel tell you this, my lady? That Bayard had visited Faulkhurst? Most lords do attend to their distant estates on occasion."

She swung back on him, her stance wide and challenging, looking ready to charge him. "Yes, Nicholas, the earl told me. It seems that my husband arrived here shortly after we were married, and—damn his eyes—he remained here in our home during the whole of the pestilence."

Our home.
Ours.

"Interesting." What else could he say to all that fury, when his heart was slamming around inside his chest?

"Interesting? Oh, yes, Nicholas. Especially when you consider that I never heard from him, though he was little more than a week's journey from me. Not once in all those months."

The truth was his only defense, though it stank of feeble excuses. "Perhaps your husband thought you were dead."

She arched a brow, nearly spitting. "Why the devil would he think that, Nicholas? Did he just decide that I was? Was I more convenient that way?"

Truly, I didn't know, love.
Word had come that the de Laceys were gone, Glenstow in other hands.

"You
said yourself that communications broke down completely, that your father's estate had been hit very hard. The reports that your husband heard from his sources were mistaken."

"And not pursued or verified."

Guilty, madam.
He took her anger full force because he deserved it, and wanted nothing more than to assuage her anger.

"Your husband obviously didn't care to, my lady, or think to. But what could you expect from a blackguard like William Bayard?"

She plopped the comb onto the table and threw out her hip, a pose that outlined the smooth, round slope of her bottom. "That's another point, Nicholas. That 'blackguard' reputation of his. My scourge of a husband…"

She was biting the inside of her cheek, waiting for him to make some kind of reply to this new path and its blind, treacherous curves, but she'd completely befuddled him.

"A rotter to the bone, indeed," he tried.

"Not according to the earl."

What the devil did the man say about him to rouse her passions? He felt the sand being sucked out from under his feet, unbalancing him.

"Meaning what, my lady? Had Bayard a few undiscovered virtues in his character?"

Oooooo, Eleanor wanted to throttle the man. For the startled pain in his eyes, the guilty confusion, the stunning fact that he
was
her husband—that he was alive and hers.

She loved him for all those things. But she was still reeling with the pain of his betrayal.

And she refused to let the man hole himself up in a monastery for the rest of their lives.

A monk, be damned. He was her husband. He was and would be a father to all their children. The plowshare to her furrow, the vigilant steward of her heart. He just needed a bit of tender guidance.

And a long night of seduction.

Which wasn't the mood that she'd managed to create here. A court, more like, with the befuddled defendant unaware that he had already been convicted of high crimes and was in the midst of taking his punishment.

So, seduction first. Then she'd lecture him on the finer points of marriage, the trusting and the cleaving. And the forgiving.

She clasped her hands behind her neck and lifted the mass of curls, letting her breasts strain against her gown.

He followed the fall of her hair with his eyes, then sucked in a breath through his teeth, his gaze arrested on her breasts—which seemed to heat and expand with his regard, leaving her breathless and dizzy.

"Oh, never mind me, Nicholas."

"What's that?"
    

She dropped the rest of her hair abruptly and crossed her arms beneath her breasts, which lifted them nicely, making more of their roundness than they actually were. "This has nothing to do with you."

His eyes found hers briefly. "But it—"

"No, truly. The matter is between me and my husband, should we ever meet up." Double meanings all around. Let him squirm a little more. "But I was wondering if—"

"If what?"

She didn't have to pretend her shyness; her heart was fluttering madly. She'd never seduced a man before. "If you had reconsidered my request?"

"Your—"

"If you could set aside your vow of chastity long enough to relieve me of my virginity."

He scrubbed his hair off his forehead, turned away and then back again. "Jesus God, Eleanor, you are very free with yourself."

"I have to be expedient, Nicholas. I may be taking a husband soon." An excellent double meaning. She meant to have the man tonight. To take her wedding-night revels on her own terms, and at long last. Because she felt so married to him already.

Nicholas looked delightfully apoplectic.

"You're taking you a husband?" He caught her arms and peered down at her with those dark, possessive eyes. "Who? Percy?"

She caught her lip to keep from smiling. This was jealousy, plain and simple, a welcome sign that he himself might be willing to fight to keep her after all. A sign that he loved her as she did him.

"Well, he really wasn't such a bad fellow. You maligned him."

"Eleanor, he's an ass."

"That's neither here nor there. I only need to know if you will deflower me, Nicholas. Soon. Tonight, preferably, else I'll have to risk blisters on my toes and hie me off to Ravensglass to find me a willing stranger." She left him for the candle on the blanket chest and pinched out the flame.

"You'll do nothing of the sort."

"Then you'll do the deed, Nicholas? Tonight?"

"The deed? My God, Eleanor, this is your virtue that you're so quick to give away. I would think you'd hold it in better esteem."

"I hold myself in great esteem, Nicholas. That's why I offer it to you—in my husband's stead."

That stopped him, had him scratching pensively at his beard, silent and staring.

"Well, sir? What's your answer? Or do you want to see the goods first?" It took only a bold breath and she was naked, letting her gown drop to the floor.

"No." Nicholas knew that his answer had come eons too late to stop her. She was splendid and willful in her nakedness, his teasing wood nymph, her arms spread at her elbows with a soft, sideways pressure that lifted her small perfect breasts to him, and framed the gilded shadow at the lithe joining of her thighs.

Ah, my love, will you call my name when I kiss you there?

"No,
what,
Nicholas? That you don't want to see the goods first—in which case, you're too late, or no, you aren't interested."

He couldn't help his diabolical smile as he grabbed up her fallen night shift.

"No, madam, I don't need to see the goods to know that you are lovely beyond my imagining."

"Am I?"

"Oh, yes." He kept his eyes on hers as he found the neck hole, as he settled the gown over her head with a soft kiss against her temple to keep himself from sliding his hands down her soft flesh.