A Knight to Remember (6 page)

“Your pride is not seemly in a woman.”

Her hands clenched into fists, and the scent of spring clover assailed her. Opening her hands, she wiped the smears of red from her palms. In a low tone, she said, “My pride is all I have, and it has sustained me for a very long time now.”

“You’re too independent.”

“Whose fault is that?” Her movements jerky, she stretched a thin cloth over the table and dumped the blossoms onto it.

“Mine, perhaps.”

She almost didn’t hear him, and she didn’t understand what he meant anyway.

He said, “When this war is over, I will have several estates to go with my title. I could foster your sons then.”

She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t stand it. Hadn’t he heard one single word that she’d said? Was her determination so easily brushed aside? His offer demonstrated the truth of her thoughts—that men created war for the love of fighting and struggled against the civilizing influences of wife and home. When faced with the thought of two boys—boys he had never met—becoming men of peace, Hugh endeavored to save them as surely as the saints endeavored to win a sinner’s soul. She managed a polite tone, but the undercurrent, if he cared to hear, swept through dark
and dangerous. “My sons have had too much disruption in their lives already. I am their mother. They will stay with me.”

Gathering the corners of the cloth, she lifted the trefoil. He tried to speak, but she walked past without giving a sign she’d heard and carried the flowers outside. In an area safe from the wind, she knelt and spread them to dry. In the winter they would provide infusions against fits of coughing.

In the winter, Hugh would be gone.

For the first time in her life, she longed for winter. Kneeling down among the herbs, she pulled the few weeds that threatened the comfrey. Last winter had been her first at the abbey. It had been very long, very dull, very cold. She’d longed for the spring as never before, but spring, with its easier travel and its rich landscape, had carried war on its temperate winds. Battle had come too close. The wounded had depleted her stores. A few of the rougher soldiers had threatened to sack the village, and in fact a gold chalice had disappeared from the church.

It took a desperate man to steal from God, and the experience alarmed the nuns. Edlyn thought it frightened the monks, too, untrained as most were in the art of war. Lady Corliss had suggested Edlyn curtail her ventures into the forest until the countryside had settled once more. Edlyn had explained that the season for trefoil was brief, and the leaves from the coltsfoot had to be collected now before they lost their vigor.

What Lady Corliss didn’t understand was that Edlyn needed to escape into those woods. There, no one watched her, no one mocked her for what she had been and what she had become. She could discard her shoes, hike up her skirt, and with a free conscience
hunt for medicinal herbs, all the while breathing the air of freedom.

Of course, one time she had had the uneasy sense of being watched. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she heard the crack of a branch beneath a man’s shoe. When she’d run into Wharton, bloody from skinning the rabbit, she’d been daunted until she recognized him. Then she’d been embarrassed, and he had enjoyed that.

Still, he had denied following her, and she was left with the fear of having been someone’s prey. After that, she had kept a stout oak walking stick close by her side.

She stood. Why was she worried about an imaginary presence? She had two big worries of her own.

She started toward the door when a drop of water struck her cheek. Looking up, she sighed in disgust and relief. Disgust that she had to bring the trefoil in again. Relief that the rain would set the new plants she’d placed in the garden.

She gathered the blossoms and walked back toward the door. As long as Hugh de Florisoun lived in her dispensary, she would have no peace.

He scarcely waited until she crossed the threshold before he said, “I mean for you to come, too.”

“What are you talking about?” She feared she knew, and she dumped the cloth of blossoms onto the table before she gave in to temptation and threw them at him.

“I’ll foster your sons, and you will live with us.”

She had trouble catching her breath. “
Live
with you?”

“I will be good to you, Edlyn.”

“Good to me.” She tapped her foot, irritated and insulted.

“I’ll need a woman to tend the house, and you know how to do that, and right well, too.” He dredged up a charming smile—clearly he was used to getting his way. “You’d like that better than this task of digging plants out of the dirt and having to boil decoctions for strangers.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he knew what she liked and what she didn’t.

“I would?”

“Of course you would,” he said confidently. “Edlyn”—he held out his hand, palm up—“you and I would be an invincible couple.”

“A couple of what?”

His hand dropped and his brows lowered. “A
married
couple.”

Panic hit her, twisting her stomach, making her want to retch. “Married?”

A tinge of irritation colored his tone. “What did you think I meant?”

“Not married, that’s certain.” Never married. Never again.

His voice rose. “You thought I would propose you stay with me as my mistress while your sons looked on? You thought I would take advantage of your lower status to dishonor you with a suggestion of impropriety?”

She subdued the panic and let irritation sweep her along. “In the past, I have not been impressed with any man’s integrity in the face of a woman’s misfortune.”

In a surge of fury, he rose to his feet. “I am Hugh de Florisoun. I am the living embodiment of chivalry!”

“Sure you are.” It gave her great satisfaction to layer her words with derision. At the same time, she hustled toward him and wrapped her arm around his. “Now lie down before you start bleeding.”

“You doubt me?”

His knees began to shake, and she answered
hastily, “I don’t doubt your honor, Hugh. Now let me help you to lie down.”

“I offered you marriage in all seriousness and in solemn belief in the justice of my suit”—he sank to the floor, dragging her with him—“and you mock me?”

She eased him around until his rump touched the mat. “’Twas my mistake. I
have
seen men who live by the code of chivalry.” She guided him back toward that hated pillow. “But not for a long, long time.”

She had her arms around his shoulders, one hand supporting his head, just as if he were a baby—or a lover. She should have grasped the simple truth—that he hadn’t lived so long or prospered so well by not seizing opportunity when it manifested itself.

In a tone heavy with sensuality, he whispered her name. “Edlyn.”

When she looked down and caught the expression on his face, she knew she was in trouble. She had presented herself on a platter.

Should she drop him and run? Or should she tend to his well-being? She’d worked too long and hard to drop him, but that confident expression he wore irked her. She got him within a finger’s width of the pillow and let go. Her action was not enough to hurt but enough to give warning she wouldn’t be easy.

She tried to jump back. He already had his arms around her, and he used that off-balance position to tip her forward and onto him. She collapsed on his chest and he groaned.

“Serves you right,” she said, struggling to elbow her way up. “I don’t want this.”

“Be ruthless.” He just kept blocking her, expending as little of his precious energy as possible while she exhausted herself. “Hit my wound.”

She couldn’t do it. She wanted to so badly, but she
just couldn’t take him back to the edge of death. Instead she balled her fist and tried to hit his face. He caught her by the fingers and gripped. She struggled, and when she flagged, he grasped the back of her head and held her still for his kiss.

He tried to use his tongue, and that infuriated her all over again. Who did he think he was? Her long-lost love?

Well, he should have stayed lost.

And who did he think she was? A lady of easy virtue?

Her tight-lipped resistance must have given him the message, for he let her pull back her head. She tried to scramble away again, but he handled her with great care, rolled onto his good side, and tucked her half under him.

He was so calm, so deliberate! How could a man who’d been so near death just a few days ago restrain her, a healthy woman? A little alarm worked into her voice as she struggled. “This…is…not…right.”

“I’m just going to kiss you, and that is right between couples who have pledged to wed.”

“I’ve made no such pledge.”

“You’ll see the good sense of it soon.”

He said it as if it were the truth. As if her objections meant nothing. As if she were nothing but a silly lady who needed a man to tell her how to live her life! Worse, he probably believed it, the dunce.

With one thigh anchoring her down, he controlled her. He got rid of her wimple first. The covering slipped easily off her head, and his fingers caught in the fine, straight strands that had escaped her braid. Holding the braid aloft, he stared at it.

“Stop that!” She grasped his wrist.

He looked at her, pressed between the floor and his
body. “I remember seeing this, all unbound, in the light of a fire, and seeing you, too, wearing nothing.”

“I wore something! I wore a—” She stopped talking.

Too late. Satisfaction curved his mouth, and she snapped, “What else do you remember?”

He didn’t answer. He just leaned forward and brushed her lips with his. She kept her eyes open, and when he lifted his head, she said, “First you try to sweep me away. Then you try gentleness. What’s your next tactic?”

She must have betrayed an emotion better concealed, for he replied, “Gentleness will do what I wish.”

She tried to stiffen even further, but she knew he was probably right. The loneliness of the abbey echoed in her soul. Oh, there were always people around, but in a place where flesh equaled sin, the residents spurned touch. Her sons hugged her, of course, but she couldn’t help but remember Jagger Castle. She missed the impulsive embraces of the girls she fostered, the respectful kisses of greeting she gave her guests. Most of all, she missed the body embraces she shared with her man, and this unwilling response to Hugh had to be nothing more than a sequestered soul reaching out to the nearest human for contact.

Either that or she was as wicked as Lady Blanche intimated.

Hugh’s forearm lay beneath her head, and he watched her with a fascination she knew to be unwarranted. His regard made her want to squirm, but she held herself still and said tartly, “What are you looking at, knave?”

“At the lady who would be my wife, and—dare I say it?—the woman who saved my life.”

An unwilling warmth softened her. “’Twas the grace of God.”

“Aye, and He used you as His instrument.” He stroked her hair. “Should I not be privileged to rescue God’s instrument from the despair of poverty into which she has fallen?”

Her goodwill evaporated. “I’m doing well on my own!”

“Ah, aye.” He glanced around at her beloved dispensary. “Very well indeed.”

She knew what he saw. The low ceiling, the dirt floor, her carefully tended herb boxes: what was this place when compared to a castle with glass in the windows, a wooden floor strewn with rushes, and tapestries on the walls? Yet because of her previous generosity, she’d had an abbey to come to instead of needing to resort to the streets to support her children. It had been as the priests said—the Lord rewarded good deeds. What Hugh saw when he looked on her was a woman who had fallen on bad times. She thought of herself as a woman who had done well with little.

She voiced a woman’s universal complaint. “What asses men are!”

He didn’t answer that. He only brought her head to his and kissed her again. Little kisses, nibbles that gave her a taste of him. She didn’t want to know about him and kept her teeth clenched, but his tongue darted through her closed lips and she had a sample of him anyway.

The billows of his breathing lulled her as his chest rose and fell against hers. She
was
hungry for human contact, it seemed, for she found herself inhaling with him, exhaling with him.

“Open,” he whispered. His beard had grown to a soft pelt that caressed her chin, and the sweet scent of him titillated her desires.

Plastered so closely against him, she felt his heart pulsate against her breastbone, and the beat overwhelmed her own natural rhythm to sweep the blood through her veins.

“Edlyn, give to me.” His hand rubbed her neck, then her scalp, in slow, hypnotic circles.

Her eyes had closed, but she saw with his vision. Her ears had failed her, but she heard her own denial. She felt his triumph as he surged into her mouth, then his frustration as she let him do what he would and made no attempt to reciprocate.

He gathered her closer when there was no closer, tangling his legs with hers, pressing his knee between and high until the pressure brought familiar sensations, then new urgings. She fought to deny them, but he moved insistently, insidiously.

“Feel me,” he crooned. “’Tis Hugh who holds you, who pleasures you. ’Tis your old friend, your new lover, your future husband.”

“Nay.”

“So faint a sound!”

He mocked her, but benignly. His hand—how many did he have?—wandered over her throat, her shoulder, along the length of her torso to her hip and rested heavily there. So aware of him, she could even imagine the pain of his wound. She fought the merging of two selves into one. He was an enchanter to so absorb her into his bones and his bloodstream.

“I feel your passion,” he murmured. “So long denied, so hungry and demanding.” His knee moved. “When you respond—”

Preservation made her answer, “Not going to.”

He stopped moving, stopped breathing, and remained so motionless her eyes opened and fixed on him.

She had seen him unconscious. She had seen him in pain. She had seen him recovering. She had seen him curious. She had never seen him determined, but she saw him that way now.