A Kiss in the Night (33 page)

Tension increased with each step she took slowly toward him. She stopped just in front of him. “Dressed in firelight, you are my desire in flesh," he whispered as his gaze moved over the thrilling beauty of her nudity. His warm palms reached behind her thighs and slowly traveled up, pleased with the shiver this caused. His firm lips caressed her flat stomach and she held her breath, her hands braced on the wide span of his shoulders, his flesh warm and vibrant beneath her fingertips.

Hot shivers raced and echoed in a rush of heat between her legs. "Paxton..." His hands slid over her sculpted back, sliding forward over her bare breasts to cup their softness. She rewarded him with small heated pants. His hands, behind her now, slipped over the dramatic curves of her slender figure, caressing the rise of her buttocks, massaging, kneading her flesh until her legs went weak and her weight needed the support of his shoulders.

His mouth found the hard tip of a breast.

"Paxton, Paxton." She said his name in a plea.

His hand threaded between her legs, testing the richness of her moistened sheath. Her breath came in small gasps and she flushed with a wave of hot suspense. A husky growl sounded briefly before he gathered her to him and turned, lowering her backside to the bed. A shudder of heat passed through him at the feel of her slim, naked body beneath.

"I want to hear your love cries," he whispered as his mouth lightly brushed her lips. "I want to feel your lips beneath mine, the swell of my sex in yours. Linness, I want you..."

And he kissed her. The kiss was a prelude, the beginning, an opening to the heaven that followed. The heaven was like nothing she ever imagined, for it was her surrender.

* * * *

Clair peered over Linness's shoulder to see the statuette of the Virgin Mary while Linness hurriedly dressed for the feast that marked the last night of the fair, "Tsk, tsk." Clair shook her head. "Isn't that just like the man? Saved himself a pretty coin buying ye that, no doubt. Pretending ye'd like it better than a new dress! Like we'd be fooled by that bit of theatrics!" She laughed at the thought "Either the old bones are getting addled or the man's more of a miser than I guessed."

Linness frowned angrily at her "Clair, sometimes you're really quite wicked."

"You mean honest."

"No, you're wrong. This means more to me than a thousand dresses. Truly."

Linness shook her head as she pulled the violet and rose brocaded gown over her head. Clair began buttoning up the back. A rose-colored chemise appeared around the edges of the darker violet bodice. Billowing sleeves gathered at her wrists. Her long hair was decorated with violet ribbons and piled into a soft crown atop her head. The color was not a good one on her; she looked best in darker colors and she was just about to ask Clair for an opinion when she noticed her stare. Her hand went nervously to the gold necklace that draped over her throat.

She met Clair's stare and saw the compassion and worry in her eyes.

Clair turned to the trunk to fetch the matching caul.

"Nay,” Linness said softly, "the ribbons are enough."

"As ye wish."

Much meaning clung to those simple words. She knew Clair was afraid for her, and yet there was nothing she could do. There had never been anything she could do.

She closed her eyes as images drawn from the previous night's passion danced dizzily in her mind: swirls of exploding colors of ecstasy. She drew a sharp breath. Her vision went suddenly white and against the white background she saw her. The lady in black.

Clair looked in bafflement at Linness. "Milady?!"

"Who are you?" Linness asked in a heated whisper.

There was no answer. Just a haunting doom emanating from the sad creature, and then she was gone.

She was stepping into her life now.

Nay,
Linness realized,
she had already arrived
.

"What is wrong?"

The vision was gone. Linness looked up at her friend and, with a hand to her forehead, said, "I keep seeing this strange woman.”

Clair swallowed nervously as she looked around the chamber, quiet, perfectly normal, not a thing out of place. "Where do you see this…horror?"

"Just in my dreams. Sometimes I think I see her every night in my dreams. A vision of a lady dressed in black. Somehow I know she is to be a part of my life, that she is sad for me." She shook her head. "But I do not know what it means."

"It means ye are not gettin' enough sleep, is what it means. Are ye quite well?"

"Aye. I am fine. Do not worry so." Dismissing the strange dream as she did every morning she woke remembering it, she headed for the door. "It will all work out in the end," she said. Yet her voice held uncertainty as she whispered, 'Somehow…"

Clair nodded skeptically, watching as Linness went through the doors in a swirl of violet and rose. If only it could work out, but it couldn't, she knew. If the bishop's malice weren't enough to threaten the lady, someday, somewhere, the lovers would be caught and made to pay the price for their love. Only Morgan's death could save them, and for all of Morgan's drunkenness, the man was as hale and hearty as many a man half his age.

Besides, even she could see that Morgan did not deserve an early death.

Try as she did, her imagination failed to generate a happy ending to this love story. There was something else as well. She used to see Linness as a charmed and enchanting heroine of a fantastic tale No more…

The older woman's mind traveled over the dozen courtly tales of romance she had heard over the years. Lady Beaumaris had been particularly sentimental, and she had paid many minstrels to sing these romances at Montegrel. Now she realized how few of these love stories had happy endings For fate never rewarded so rare a passion as that between Lord Paxton and Linness. Quite the contrary, like an overlooked law of nature, the magnitude of love between Paxton and Linness was like a too bright fire, burning hot and bright only to be quelled, extinguished, gone, leaving only ashes. And the memory of its once bright and shining light for the minstrels to sing to sentimental old women.

No matter how Clair looked at the future, it ended in darkness and tragedy. She felt a chilly draft sweeping in through the opened shutters and she shivered. In the middle of a warm summer night, she shivered for the want of a happy ending.

Everyone stood as the bishop said grace.

Linness hardly heard a word. She stood between Morgan and John and across from Paxton. His unwavering gaze rested on her, while she kept stealing glances at him. He was so bold now! He might have echoed the words of last night, ''Again, Linness, I will have you again." They sang so loud in the heat of his stare. Her color rose.

Then suddenly she felt something ominous between them. She struggled to make sense of the emotion emanating from Paxton. What was it?

It came to her in a confused rush. Pity! He felt sorry for her. She closed her eyes in a desperate attempt to shut out the world, long enough to understand this.

The image of the lady in black came to her mind.

Morgan shifted his feet uncomfortably as the bishop went on and on in an annoying exercise in verbosity. This prayer not only taxed his thirst and his hunger, both ferocious, but it began to tax his temper. Father Gayly always said a simple prayer at mealtime; that was enough—not this monotonous spew of Latin no one even knew anymore.

John hid a yawn in the sleeve of his green doublet.

Morgan's heated glance demanded he finish. The bishop paid him absolutely no mind, the Latin song rising, lowering, continuing; it might be a whole high mass. The man continued it just to irritate him, he was sure. Just as he had insisted on retaining Father Aslam after he had beat his son .

Morgan cast an angry look at the very priest standing at the lesser table below and he gritted his teeth against the incessant, grating noise spewing from the bishop. He thought again of the previous day's findings.

The man was insufferable! He and his less than merry band of priests had all but taken over his hall. John and Paxton said 'twas to convince him to spend the monies for their own residence, but curse it all, he did not have any monies for new buildings.

The bishop and his legion of priests, numbering ten now, gathered in the hall every hour of every day not used in church or prayers, and like a black blight, their robed presence stole all humor and merriment, and dropped a somber, dour mood over the whole. He had not enjoyed a feast since the man arrived. He could not play a game of chess with his son, let alone meet with the town's burgeoning guilds and merchants or his own vassals, without hearing the man's scathing and dire warnings of fire and everlasting hell or whatnot, or a directive about this or that. His endless directives. Monday it was on the indecent dress of the women of Gaillard. The man objected to the curved tips of their shoes, of all things. Claimed it was a display of vanity.

And there it was, the frightening contradiction. He could think of a woman's shoes as sinful, when he raised his hand to stop the beat of another's heart and think it as just. The man's malice was cloaked in his empty ideology.

He was a danger to his wife.

Linness had been so right! She had known he would ruin everything. He remembered her saying he would steal her happiness. Happiness was not all the man tried to steal. He was trying to steal her very life.

"I know you are scared, Morgan," Paxton had said yesterday when they had discovered Boswell's body. "I am as well. But we cannot just kill him. If something were to happen to you or me, if an ecclesiastic trial found us guilty of murdering a bishop, Gaillard would go to the church until Jean Luc comes of age. By then our boy's precious life would not be worth a brass ducat. We must find another way."

The bishop ended at last. A disgruntled Morgan sat across from the man at the head of the high table. He hardly noticed the special dishes the servants set to the feast: the goose soup, delicately stuffed eggs, roasted beef, pheasant and venison, the plate of ripe summer fruit ingeniously made to look like the biblical arc, the delicious scent of warm trencher bread. He poured another goblet of wine and drank it whole.

"So, Lord Paxton," the bishop began in a mild tone, "I understand you recently received a letter from our good king."

Linness tensed slightly as she felt Paxton's sudden consternation and watched his dark gaze turn to the bishop.

"Aye," Paxton said suspiciously. "I received a letter just yesterday."

"And pray tell," the bishop continued, "what news comes from the royal court?"

Paxton's suspicion became in the instant a certainty. The man had read his missive. He had not carefully inspected the seal. Michaels had brought the letter, informing him the messenger had been paid. He had not inquired further, assuming Morgan had done so.

He cast a glance to his brother, who shrugged, conveying he knew nothing about it. John looked just as bewildered. He looked back at the bishop. "I must rid myself of the apparently archaic understanding that a man's letters are private."

"I'm sure I don't know what you are referring to," the bishop said innocently. "But tell us, was it a private directive, then? Perhaps an order regarding your future? Now, what could that be?" He wondered out loud, "One of Francis's favorite lords, his most successful general. Is it a new campaign perhaps? Will you be leaving Gaillard soon?"

Linness watched with heightened interest as Paxton picked up the carving knife and, though the task belonged to the servants, he began slicing the venison. John and Morgan exchanged apprehensive glances. By this point everyone sat poised, listening and waiting to learn what order had arrived from the king.

Paxton's glare did not stop the audacious man. Nor did his intentionally deft strokes of the knife on the meat. There was no stopping him now.

He had always been too late. The thought allowed him to rein in his temper. He finished the carving, lifted two slices onto his plate, and sat back in his chair, appearing indifferent, almost bored now. Save for his eyes. Eyes that focused now on Linness.

The bishop thought to nudge Lord Paxton from this rare inarticulate stupor. "The Italian campaign is over with. France, the greatest Christian country on earth, is at peace. Surely all Francis wants now, like every king who ever lived to end a war, is to join the two countries: the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan with the greater kingdom of France. The marriages will be starting soon, no doubt—" He stopped in a pretense of sudden realization. "Why, of course! You are land-rich and conveniently unmarried. No heirs hath been issued by your loins, none that you have claimed in any case, and you would no doubt be one of his first candidates, am I right? Did he present you with a marriage contract?"

John felt the shock pass through Linness; he reached under the table and took her hand. She clasped it firmly, as she felt the blood drain from her body.

"My God, brother, is that true?" Morgan asked, with a burst of sudden laughter. "Has a marriage been arranged?"

With lowered eyes, Linness stared at the artful presentation of sliced pears, apples, and berries that Vivian had prepared for her. Her vision blurred and the woman in black appeared, like a mirage over the plate of fruit.