Keeper of the Dream (20 page)

He thrust into her, trapping her scream with his mouth.

He finished it quickly. While he still could.

The slash on his arm was long but not very deep.

There was a stack of linen cloths by the laver. Raine wadded one up and pressed it to the cut to stop the bleeding. He looked over at the bed. She lay on her back, her
arms rigid at her sides, her face turned away from him. She wasn’t making a sound, and he didn’t think she was crying.

Enough blood stained the sheets to prove he had ravished ten virgins, and it was all his. Or mostly his.

God … he could still taste her scream on his mouth.

He wet another cloth in the water basin and brought it back to the bed. He eased down beside her. There was blood on her thighs, her blood, along with his seed. Wet red smears were all over her breasts, belly, and arms. His blood.

Leaning over her, he started to wipe off her stomach. She jerked upright, snatching at the cloth. “Don’t touch me anymore.” The face she turned to him was blanched of all color, but for the eye he’d accidentally struck. It was purple and nearly swollen shut, and would be black and blue by morning.

She began rubbing almost frantically between her thighs with trembling hands. “That was the most vile, disgusting thing that has ever been done to me.”

He swung off the bed. “You’d better resign yourself to getting used to it,” he said, in the flat, cold voice he used to mask all emotion. “Because it will happen again. Most likely as soon as tomorrow morning.”

He jerked the pillows off the bed, where she’d hidden the first knife, and found two more. He went over the room, searching for weapons. They made a growing pile on the floor: three swords, a half dozen daggers and knives, a battle-ax, even a mace—a particularly gruesome-looking, heavy wooden truncheon covered with iron spikes. He was both amused and astonished at the size of the arsenal his wife had hidden in their bedchamber.

When he was sure he’d gathered everything that appeared even remotely lethal, he went over to the window and lifted the bar off the shutters.

“What are you doing? You’re letting in the evil night air, you dolt.”

She had spoken with such indignation that Raine stopped to stare at her in utter bewilderment. She sat cross-legged on the bed, naked, with blood still smeared on her thighs, her hair in bird’s-nest tangles around her face, yet as calm and composed as a queen holding court. She baffled him, this wife of his, for he’d never known another woman like her. She had more courage than most men, and she spoke of duty and honor as if she truly believed they were more than just words.

Courage, honor, duty—he had believed in all those things once. When he was young.

“I have this peculiar fondness for my life,” he finally said, surprised at the tightness in his throat. “And I intend to hang on to it at least through the night.” He pitched the mace out the window. A startled bellow echoed up from below. Belatedly he called out a warning, before tossing out the battle-ax.

“I won’t try to kill you in your sleep.”

He lifted his brows, gesturing at the weapons scattered among the rushes. “Then what were you planning to do with these—beseige the Tower of London?”

She waved a hand through the air, the way a lady would dismiss a servant. “I never meant to kill you. For, whether I like it or no, you are my husband before God. But I had to make you stop … stop …” Her voice cracked as a breath hitched in her throat.

“Doing that vile, disgusting thing?” He came back to the bed and stood over her. “We’ve been through this before. The Holy Church calls it the marriage
duty,
Arianna. You are supposed to submit to it.”

“I know.” She looked him full in the face, her eyes wide and clear, the color of sea foam. “But the marriage duty is one thing, and your unnatural French perversions are another. I had my honor to defend.”

He sucked in a surprised breath, then pushed it out in a
noiseless sigh. “Mother of God …” He sat down next to her, ignoring the way she flinched from him. “Arianna, it often hurts at first and it’s no dishonor nor is it unnatural for a wife to open her body to her husband so that he might plant his seed within her.”

“I know that. But what you did was a perversion.”

He studied her averted face, trying to understand her. He thought back to what he had been doing to her before she stabbed him and he emitted a crack of laughter. “God’s love … Don’t Welshmen kiss and suck their women’s—between their women’s legs?”

Her head swung around. “Nay, of course not!”

“I pity the women of your country then, aye, and the men, too, for they don’t know the pleasure they are missing.”

Doubt flickered in her eyes, but then she shook her head. “I don’t think they would like it. ’Tis unnatural.”

He cradled her chin in his hand, lifting her face. He stroked the strong line of her jaw with his thumb. “There is nothing unnatural in what I will do to you, Arianna. When I touch you like this …”He brushed the backs of his knuckles across her breasts, oh so very lightly. Her nipples rose and tightened and she caught a groan deep in her throat. “And when I kiss your sweet mouth …” He slid his hand around the back of her neck, hooking her head toward his. His tongue stroked her lips, coaxing them to part.

She pulled away from him, twisting her head aside. “You have done it once this night, husband. I don’t see the need to do it again.”

For a moment he was damn well tempted to do it to her again just to prove that he could, that it was his right. Instead, he threw himself down on the bed, cradling his head in his clasped palms. His arm throbbed and a thundering pain had developed behind his eyes. He was tired, so very, very tired.

He eyed her now with weary indifference. She sat up
still, looking down on him. Her face held more confusion than fear. He supposed it was an improvement, but at the moment he no longer cared. “Go to sleep,” he said.

The musky smell of sex hung heavy in the air, and the cloying odor of crushed violets. They lay side by side, not touching, and though the bed was wide, it was not so wide that he couldn’t feel her warmth. After a while he felt the down-filled mattress move. He turned his head and saw her shoulders shake, though she had her face pressed hard into the pillow to stifle any sound. He brought his hand up, but in the end he pulled it back without touching her.

She cried for a long time. When at last she slept, he lay awake still, his eyes staring sightless at the canopy overhead.

The feeble morning sunlight wakened her, for she was used to sleeping with the bed curtains drawn and the window shutters bolted. But when she tried to open her eyes she found one lid wouldn’t work properly. The eye throbbed. She touched it with tentative fingers; it was puffy and very sore.

Slowly, she pushed herself upright. Her knee brushed against hard and hairy flesh. Snatching the sheet up under her chin, she looked to see if she had awakened him.

He lay sprawled on his stomach across the bed, his face turned away from her. He had kicked the sheet off during the night and it was twisted around his legs. He has the body of a warrior, she thought. Brown and battered and brawny from years of fighting in wars and tournaments. His flesh bore the scars of those years. There was a gruesome, puckered one on his shoulder, and an angry red welt wrapped around his waist. Unconsciously, she reached out to touch it—

He was on her before she could draw breath to scream.

He pinned her to the bed, his chest flattening her breasts. His pale gaze swept over her. Then his eyes darkened,
and his mouth softened. He lowered his head until she could feel the heat of his breath on her lips. “What were you doing?”

“Nothing.” She stared up into his face. His cheeks were darkened by a stubble of beard. She hadn’t noticed it before, but there were tiny specks of black in his gray eyes. They merged with the deep, dark centers, and it was what gave his eyes that sooty color when he laughed or when he was about to …

To kiss her. His mouth lowered another inch. He was about to kiss her. “I was looking at your scars,” she said quickly.

“Do they disgust you?”

“Nay,” she said, surprised that he would think so. “They are the proud trophies of a warrior’s life.”

He smiled … and her breath caught. She had never seen him smile, really smile, before. The lines that bracketed his mouth deepened into crescents and his eyes took on a sleepy, lazy cast. It was a boyish smile, and oddly tender.

“They are trophies, it’s true,” he said. “But I’m not proud of them, because every one resulted from a mistake I made. Something stupid that almost cost me my life.” He ran his finger along her cheekbone, just below her bruised eye, and the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding eased out of her on a soft sigh. “Shall I admire your trophy? You look like a spotted cow.”

Arianna lowered her lids, biting her lip to hold back a laugh, for she suspected that he had just accused her of having done something stupid. She noticed the sheet had fallen and she yanked it back up.

He slipped his hand behind her neck, his thumb tilting her chin until their gazes met. Her lips parted open as his mouth came slowly toward hers.

The door opened with a bang and Taliesin entered, bearing a tray piled high with honeyed manchet loaves and jacks of ale in one hand and carrying a copper bucket
of steaming water in the other. “Your brother the earl and his lady wife are leaving immediately this morning, my lord,” he called out cheerfully. “And they ask that you ride with them as far as Offa’s Dyke—”

Taliesin froze and his face blanched as his wide gaze first took in the dark brown splotches of dried blood smeared on the sheets, and then Arianna’s startled and bruised face. He took a stumbling step forward, dropping the bucket. “Oh, milady! Goddess save you …”

The tray started to slide from his hands, but Raine was on his feet to catch it. Taliesin turned horrified eyes onto his master. “My lord, what have you? … Oh, but this is terrible. Truly you have done worse than bungle it this time….”

Raine’s mouth kinked into a half-smile. “The blood is mine, not hers. You warned me, after all, that I might need my armor to bed her.”

“Huh?” Taliesin’s gaze went from Arianna’s black eye to Raine, narrowing at the gash on his liege lord’s arm. “You hit her and so she stabbed you.”

Arianna almost laughed. “Nay, boy, ’twasn’t like that at all,” she said. “I stabbed him and so he hit me … sort of.”

Taliesin’s lips tightened into a thin line. “This isn’t at all the way these things are done. You, my lady, are not supposed to try to kill your husband. And you, my lord, are not—”

Raine whipped around, pointing a stiff finger in his squire’s face. “Taliesin, if you don’t start minding your own affairs, I will give you a black eye to match hers.”

Arianna did start to laugh then, but the laughter died in her throat as her attention was caught by the sight of her husband standing naked in bright sunlight at the foot of the bed. She studied him with an unconscious curiosity.

The English called it a
prick
and the Welsh a
bonllost.
It thrust up from the dense black hair between his thighs,
thick and raw-red and heavily veined, and even as she looked it seemed to swell some more.

“Do you like what you see, little wife?”

Arianna’s gaze flew up to his face; she didn’t look away from him though she could feel a heat begin to spread up her neck. For a long, dragging minute, they stared at one another, while she tried to pretend that she wasn’t afraid of him.
My duty,
she thought, I
must do my duty.
But the fear grew worse as she remembered the pain when he had taken her last night and later, his saying in that cold, flat voice,
You’d better resign yourself to getting used to it. Because it will happen again. Most likely as soon as tomorrow morning …

She had almost forgotten, because of a smile, just what she was to him, what he saw when he looked at her—Rhuddlan, and a noble brood mare for his heirs.

She heard the sound of splashing water as Taliesin retrieved what was left in the pail, and Raine turned aside, going to the laver. The squire stomped around the room, pretending to be busy and casting dark looks in his master’s direction.

Arianna’s muscles slackened with relief that Raine was not going to exercise his husbandly rights on her, but soon she became increasingly uncomfortable when she realized she was going to have to wait in bed until he left or get up and dress in front of him. After he washed, he crossed back into her line of sight, naked still, and her discomfort increased when she realized he was headed for the garderobe. He kept his back to her, but he left the door open and she could hear plainly what he was doing. She felt a sudden urge to use the privy closet herself. But she could not even begin to imagine doing such a thing with him in the same chamber, even with the door closed.

Finished with relieving himself, Raine headed back toward the washstand. Arianna whipped her head around, focusing her fascinated gaze on the wall.

“Is my horse saddled yet?” Raine asked around the hazel twig he was using to clean his teeth.

“No, my lord,” Taliesin replied. “Milady, you ought to bathe that eye in rosewater. I could fetch you up—”

“Never mind her. She’ll live. Go see to my horse.”

The door slammed behind the squire and the room fell expectantly silent.

“Come here.”

Arianna looked at her husband. He had put on his braies, but that was all. He stood with his feet spread wide, pelvis tipped slightly forward, his hands on his hips. The pose was intimidating and Arianna didn’t like it.

“Come here,” he said again.

She pulled the sheet up tighter beneath her chin. “You haven’t finished dressing.”

He sucked in a deep breath, expanding his chest. “You have a lot of things to learn, Arianna. And the first lesson is obedience. Come here.”

“Go to hell, Norman.”

He took a step toward her, and she was out of the bed, taking the sheet with her. She discovered two things immediately—the first was that she couldn’t run and clutch the sheet to her chest at the same time. The second was that she’d jumped off the wrong side of the bed. All that faced her was a blank wall.