Lynn Wood - Norman Brides 03 (19 page)

Michel grimaced against the pain and struggled to sit up in bed, but allowed himself to succumb to Amele’s gentle pressure to keep him in his prone position.  “What happened?” he demanded in a raspy voice, even as a fresh stab of pain ripped through him.

“Baron James was in league with Raulf. He was no doubt quite pleased when you conveniently removed the baron from his path to the throne.  Suddenly you were the only one standing in his way to becoming king.  I imagine he found the temptation too great to resist when he realized you stood by his side, surrounded by his men and separated from your own.  He seemingly decided to take advantage of the opportunity afforded him and acted on it, thinking in the confusion he could blame the enemy and claim he had been unable to save you.”

Michel nodded, remembering the older man among the nobles gathered in the hall the day he called them together to decide the question of the kingship.  He was stunned by his own naivety for accepting without question that the remaining nobles were loyal to him simply because they knelt at his feet and offered him their pledges of loyalty.  “Where is he?”

“He is dead.” Amele announced the traitor’s fate with obvious satisfaction.  At Michel’s enquiring brow, the older man added, “No, my king, not by my hand, though I would have gladly rendered you and Calei this service.  No, his own commander was the first to put his sword through him the moment he turned on you.  Each of his men took a turn running their blades through him. The baron made a grave miscalculation when he assumed his men would follow him in his treachery. They are loyal to you now and were appalled at their baron’s act of treason.”              Michel nodded, gritting his teeth against his pain, but quickly shook his head in response to Amele’s offer of the cup he held which Michel assumed contained an opiate to help alleviate it.  “And the baron’s family? I seem to recall a young son.”

“Yes, the baron’s older sons were killed some time ago in defensive raids on the mountain passes, and one in an accident while inspecting the mines.  The baron’s youngest son, Colin, waits outside these chambers.  He was posted on the walls during the fight, and by all accounts fought bravely in Calei’s defense.  He is as appalled as his father’s men were by his father’s act of treason and fell behind the procession carrying you back to the castle, stunned tears on his cheeks when it was revealed to him his father was the one responsible for your injury.  I believe his prayers for your recovery are exceeded in sincerity only by those of your young ward,” Amele tacked on, his head gesturing to the corner of the room.

Michel turned his head in the direction Amele indicated and saw Elena sitting there regarding him anxiously with tear-filled eyes.  “Elena,” he called out softly and with a soft anguished cry, she jumped up from where she sat huddled in the corner and rushed to his side, throwing herself on her knees and burying her face against his bandaged chest.  Michel suppressed the cry of protest that wanted to escape his lips at the evidence of her enthusiasm, and then as her hot burning tears dampened his skin, he reached up a gentle hand and threaded his fingers through her hair and trailed his hand down her back in a soothing gesture.               

“You are safe now, Elena.  There is no need for this display,” he reassured her awkwardly.  Despite having two sisters Michel never knew how to respond to a woman’s excessive displays of emotion.

As if sensing his discomfort with her tears, Elena made an effort to collect her composure.  She lifted her head from his chest and stared down solemnly into his eyes, as if to assure herself he was truly out of danger and was not going to die on her in the next moment and leave her alone again in the world.               

Despite his struggle with his pain Michel found himself very much aware of her softness cuddled close against his naked flesh and the way her innocent doe’s eyes clung anxiously to his.  Incredibly and damned inconveniently, he thought given the circumstances, he felt his manhood stirring.  He clamped down on his rising lust with an effort and suppressed the urge to both push away the source of his temptation and gather her close and give into it at the same time. 

He was prevented from the latter by Amele’s lingering presence in the room, though he’d very courteously distanced himself from the bed and stood with his back facing them, staring silently out the window into the night.  He was prevented from acting on his former inclination by Elena’s fearful expression and the knowledge that she was too innocent to reason out why he felt the need to put some distance between them. She would see such a move as a personal rejection of her, no matter the necessity warranting it for him to gain a safe distance from her alluring softness so he would be afforded the opportunity to draw in a breath without being filled with and surrounded by her heady feminine scent, a light, alluring fragrance that even now had his thoughts turning fuzzy in his head. 

The soft and tender glide of her fingers across his bare chest was not helping him to regain control.  In other circumstances he might have found his current predicament wildly amusing, but in his current pained condition he could only treat them as one more trying test of his discipline and his ability to control his manly passions.

He’d waged such battles before, he reminded himself.  A man who would rule an ancient kingdom could not himself be ruled by his own lusts.  So from a very young age, he’d set out to conquer his own.  Lust not only for a woman’s soft flesh, but for power, for wealth, for comfort, for luxury, for freedom from burdensome labor and the test of an enemy’s blade that could lead to the end of his mortal life.  For the most part, he’d been successful in overcoming the trials he set for himself.  He was actually quite astonished the most severe test of his will should come in the form of an innocent young maid who regarded him with a look in her soft brown eyes that made him feel as if he could one day become the man she already presumed he was. 

The pace of his breathing increased with his struggles not to taste the softness of her lips, to refresh his memory of the pleasure he took in her warm response to his every overture of manly passion.  Sweat beaded on his forehead and his glance dropped to her lips, then lower to where her soft breasts lay crushed against his chest.  In her prone position the top of her gown lay loosely across the fullness it was designed to conceal, giving him a tempting glimpse of her womanly curves.  He felt more than heard her quick indrawn breath at his close perusal and with an effort he lifted his glance from the promise of the pleasure awaiting him to return to her face. 

His eyes roamed over her delicate features, taking in her lovely countenance.  Everything about her was soft and yielding against his hardness.  Her tender flesh was made to entice a man to surrender to its beckoning allure.  He’d been resisting it since he first pulled her out of that absurd sack.  His life had been in turmoil when they met and was no less endangered now.

It would be grossly unfair of him to take advantage of her innocent faith in him, to let her become more deeply involved with a man who was incapable of promising her the secure future she so desperately sought and needed from the man she pledged her heart to, but in moments like these it was easy to forget his scrupulous sense of honor.  It was easy to forget she was younger even than his younger sister, Rhiann, and to simply give in to the temptation to take what she was so obviously willing to offer him.

So it was with a sense of inevitability he increased the pressure on the hand holding her head cupped in his to bring her closer to him. She didn’t resist his inducement, but let herself be drawn closer to him, her intent gaze, tears stilling swimming in their mysterious depths, clinging to his as their lips met and for one brief moment, Michel gave into the urge to take, to challenge her innocence and to reveal to her, perhaps unfairly, the depths of his longing for her.  His hand at the back of her head prevented her escape even if she had been so inclined, but as if she too had grown weary of the skittish dance they had been engaged in since the fateful morning of their first meeting, she made no attempt to elude his grasp. 

If he was intent on giving her a glimpse of the fullness of his passion for her, she appeared equally determined to take advantage of the very limited opportunities they had to be alone together. As though recognizing such opportunities would become even more precious when he rose from his bed to resume his duties as king, she apparently wanted him to know, wanted him to fully, mind-numbingly be aware of what she not only could, but what she was more than willing to offer him in return.  Her lips parted eagerly beneath his and invited him inside her warmth to grant him respite and soothing shelter from the enemies that beset him from all sides. 

Here was a woman he could trust with his honor and his life and who, despite her youth and her sheltered upbringing, and even despite her terror of the unknown and of the likely evils awaiting her beyond the safety of her uncle’s kingdom had planned to risk all to escape another man’s unwanted embrace. Yet to him, she was willing to surrender all, to share all of her warmth and love and shyness and gentle kindness.  For a man who’d spent his life assuming such gifts would be beyond his reach, the genuineness and simplicity of her offering was a heady temptation Michel was finding more and more difficult to resist.

Though she might lack the sophistication of his previous lovers and the knowledge of how to serve a man’s passions, her eager innocent response to his demands aroused him as no other had.  Closing his eyes in an effort to gain control of himself, he drew his lips from hers to slide them over her face, amazed anew at the softness of her skin, and whispered in her ear, “Elena, love, we cannot.  You must return to your rooms while I still possess enough discipline to allow you to leave my side, and I must see to setting my kingdom to rights.”

He felt the resigned sigh that passed through her, and opened his eyes to see the smile claim her lips before she allowed her lips to glide along his face to caress the sensitive skin along his ears when she whispered in reply, “I am not certain I still possess the discipline to allow you to banish me from your side.”

With a grin at her quick wit, he lifted his head to meet her challenging glance, but kept his voice soft when he responded. “I’m not banishing you from the keep, only from my chambers so I might concentrate on my responsibilities.”

She pouted, making her dissatisfaction with his very reasonable dictate well-known to him.  His grin widened and despite the lingering pain in his back, his amusement at her very feminine tactic brightened his mood.  Just to see her reaction, he lifted his hand to pat her head as he would a child’s and admonished in a voice of that of an adult with a recalcitrant tot, “Be a good girl now, and do as you’re told.”

Though she was aware of his ploy, she couldn’t quite suppress her outrage at his dismissal.   He saw the temptation to take her revenge flit across her lovely features, then at the reminder of his weakened condition, he watched her abandon her evil thoughts.  In the next moment she seemed to remember the brevity of their time together and her expression shadowed and she regarded him with pleading, anxious eyes.

“Will I see you again?”

Even though her pitiful question was a foolish one given they would be sharing the same roof, he understood her fear, because it so closely mirrored his own.  When would he have the opportunity to hold her like this again?  And even now, they weren’t truly alone. 

It was Amele’s silent presence across the room that had allowed him to retain control over his raging lusts with her softness curled so closely across his chest.  And it was his presence now that brought him back to a sense of his duties to Calei.  A king’s time was not his own and he could no longer spend his life as he had in the past, focused only on his own will and his own pursuits. 

So he didn’t try to dismiss Elena’s question as he once might have, with a joking rejoinder about the two of them being unable to avoid each other’s company now that they would be sharing a home.  There was no denying their previous unstructured relationship was a thing of the past and could not be resurrected even with a vow of marriage exchanged between them.  He no longer played the romantic part of the lost prince on a quest to claim his grandfather’s throne.  Now he sat upon that throne and the romance of it, while perhaps not completely lost to them, was about to be buried beneath the weight of the difficulties confronting him as the new king of Calei.  “Yes, you will see me again, Elena, but there is much for me to see to and I cannot yet grasp my way through to the end of it.”

She nodded her reluctant acceptance of what must be, and Michel was impressed by her quick understanding of the difficulties he did not enumerate for her. She neither demanded promises he was in no position to offer, nor did she appear to have any expectation that he would put the needs of his kingdom and its people aside to focus on his own desires.  As she was one of those desires, and for the foreseeable future her destiny was bound to his, she would not have been without the right to protest his dictate or to seek his reassurances of the place she would occupy in his life, if not in the immediate future at least at some definitive point in the not too distant one. 

Instead she neither protested his command nor demanded his promise, only slid away from him to rather awkwardly regain her feet and stare down at him with a sad, but resigned expression, a slight crease between her eyes, marring her flawless features.  He immediately felt the loss of her warmth against him and it required a very real effort on his part not to tug on the small hand that still rested in his and bring her back to lean close against his chest.