shadow and lace (27 page)

She drew away. Heat flooded her cheeks, and she hated herself for it. "You mock my inexperience, sir. I am not versed in the arts of love as you are."

The goblet rolled to the floor with a heavy clunk. Gareth caught her wrists in his hands. " Tis you who mock me. I know nothing of love. Nor do I care to learn."

Buried in Gareth's eyes, Rowena found a fear even deeper than her own. She felt the warning prick of his words like a dagger at her throat. But she would gladly impale herself on such a weapon to storm the wall he'd built so well around himself. Her hands laced around his own, disarming him with their surrender. She leaned forward and drew her small tongue gently along the seam of his lips, feeling them part beneath the coaxing motion. His smoky lashes veiled his eyes as he returned her kiss, his mouth spreading beneath hers, his tongue sweeping out to possess hers. His broad thumb probed the center of her palm, sending a rush of blood to her belly. She moaned softly against his lips.

He threw back his head with a laughing shudder. His knuckles rubbed the curve of her spine. "Do you seek to shame me with your surrender?"

"I swore not to beg or mewl, did I not?"

"And you are a lady of honor." Gareth's words held a strange note, as if it were himself he mocked. He gently pried her face out of his beard and cupped it between his hands. He looked down into her eyes. "If I gave you leave to beg, what would you beg for?"

"That if revenge on my papa was all you sought from me this night, you would throw me to Percival or one of the others." Her gaze did not waver.

Bewilderment touched his eyes. "Sweet Christ, I think you mean it. Do you hate me so well?"

Rowena lowered her gaze. "I could bear their cruelty better than your own."

He drew her against his chest and rested his chin on top of her head. "Fickle child. Whose touch would you prefer to mine? Mayhaps that green-eyed fellow you kissed with an enthusiasm denied me in the simplest greeting? Or your dearly betrothed?" His hand rode the curve of her rib cage around to gently cup her breast. His thumb circled, caressing its ripening peak beneath the coarse linen. "Is it Irwin's fumbling hands you would have touch you this way?"

Rowena's mouth opened in a soundless gasp as heat spread from Gareth's fingertips to her flesh. She nuzzled against him, pushing his tunic down with her nose until she could bury her face in the crisp fur of his chest.

"Irwin offers me an honorable union blessed by God." Even to her own ears, her pious words rang with lack of conviction.

Gareth tilted her face, studying her features in the gentle glow of the firelight. He punctuated each word with the brush of his lips down the purest curve of her cheekbone. "What do I offer you? A slow ride to hell?"

His lips came to rest against the thundering pulse in her throat. Bewitched by the lingering heat of his mouth, Rowena's head fell back in languorous surrender as if her neck had grown too lazy to support the weight of her hair. Spurred on by the ceding of her ivory throat to his dominion, Gareth dared to slip his hand into the neck of her kirtle. Her breast fit neatly into the cup of his hand. With a tenderness he had forgotten he possessed, his fingertips stroked and teased the hardened bud pressed to his callused palm until a shudder wracked her slender frame.

Rowena's head was thrown back, her sandy lashes pressed to flushed cheeks. With her legs parted slightly so her skirt fell into the valley between, she looked ripe for his taking. Gareth was not prepared for the trembling that seized his hands. His other hand cupped her cheek, coaxing her to open her eyes. They gleamed like stars in a sky that had known night for too long.

"I've been so cold and hungry without you, Gareth." Her fingers traced his lips as if memorizing their contours.

His lips parted as he bestowed a tender kiss upon each fingertip. The hand that had cupped her breast slid downward to tease the smooth, flat plane of her belly. Her blue gaze held him fast.

It seemed his whole life had brought him to this moment. He held the power in his hands to release her from a bargain made in wounded pride. But the time when Gareth could have stopped his hand's descent had passed. It slipped between her skin and the rough folds of her undergarment, finally coming to rest in the exquisite softness of the curls between her legs. Gareth lowered his head, partly to earn him time to steady his breathing, partly to hide the flush that bathed his cheeks like the flush of a youth in the first throes of manhood.

He pressed his lips to the delicate bell of her ear. "I am going to fill you, milady. I am going to fill you so you will never have to go hungry again." His husky words died on a groan as one of his fingers dipped into her, touching a warm, moist promise of ecstasy he had hardly allowed himself to dream of.

She slung an arm around his neck in a strangely fierce embrace as he slipped an arm under her knees and shoulders and carried her to the bed.

He laid her on the goose-down coverlet. Her nervous fingers plucked at the ermine trim. As the dancing flames threw Gareth's broad shoulders into silhouette, Rowena shivered, more from fear than cold.

Gareth knelt on the bed and gathered her in his arms like a child. "You'll not go cold again. If we are going to burn, then we shall burn together."

His fingers curled around the nape of her neck like a band of velvet. His mouth found the silky softness of her lips and parted them for a leisurely pleasuring. Rowena returned his kiss with a newfound ardor. She eagerly pressed her young body to his muscled frame until the suggestive rhythm of his tongue stroking the deepest corners of her mouth became impossible to ignore.

He broke away with a groan, tugging her kirtle off her shoulders as he went. Her hands caught in his shaggy hair as he lowered his head to her breast, gently teasing its coral peak with lingering strokes of his lips and tongue until an exquisite knot of longing tightened low in her belly. She stared with wonder at the coarse threads of silver woven through his dark hair. The feather tick rustled as he pushed her to her back. She lifted her hips obediently as he slid the kirtle down and followed it with the linen drawers.

A rosy blush crept over her breasts and throat as she lay exposed to the hungry heat of his gaze. But her eyes remained open and trusting, and it was she who caught his hand and brought it to her lips. Her teeth gently nipped his thumb.

"Come, milord," she said with a tremulous smile. "You promised me a respite for my hunger."

He drew his tunic over his head and bared his teeth in a wicked grin. "I misled you. Tis I who would feast on you."

Rowena was reminded once again of the wolf as he lowered his head to her throat. A playful caress from the roughened softness of his tongue was followed by the scrape of his teeth against her flesh. His mouth glided lower, following the valleys and hills of her smooth flesh with teasing determination. Rowena choked back a giggle.

Gareth lifted his head with a throaty growl. "You make sport of me, lady. I daresay a good tongue lashing would curb your impudence."

He proceeded to prove his point, devouring her with his mouth and hands until she tangled her fingers in his hair and begged for a mercy she did not want. His dark curls slipped like the silkiest pelt between her fingers. Pleasure spread through her body like an exotic net, trapping her in the web of her own need. His broad hands cupped her buttocks, then slid lower, coaxing her thighs apart with elaborate tenderness. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the coverlet with a breathless moan as his fingers and lips made melody on her until every muscle of her body arched into song.

She fell back to the bed, breathing as if she had been running for a very long time, her eyes huge and misty with wonder. Gareth met her gaze across the length of her body. She knew instinctively that the time for play had passed. His eyes were narrowed in dark slits of desire. A thrill of fear and anticipation shot down Rowena's spine.

Gareth's hands trembled as he climbed to his knees and began to unwork the points of his hose. Rowena pressed her fists to her eyes.

She kept her eyes clenched shut, even when he tugged one of her hands into his.

"Rowena?" he said softly.

"Hmmm?"

He drew her hand to him. Her fingers uncurled and she found herself touching something that had the resilience of steel sheathed in velvet. Her hand explored its length in curious wonder. A hoarse sound escaped Gareth's throat.

Rowena jerked her hand back. "I cannot," she moaned, "… you would surely slay me, milord…"

Gareth collapsed against her neck with a shaky laugh. "You flatter me, my dear." He raised himself on his elbows and stared deep into her eyes. " 'Tis passingly normal. I swear to you, I have not slain anyone with it yet."

The briefest of shadows passed over his features. Rowena could not bear to see it. She cupped his face in her hands and drew his lips to hers. His tongue gently penetrated her mouth, soothing and slaking as if to prepare her trembling body for a deeper invasion. She relinquished the fear that held her muscles rigid. Her knees fell apart and she felt Gareth's groan of pleasure like a purr against her palm.

At first the hardness of him was like an unrelenting blade driven with merciless slowness into her tenderest flesh. She muffled a whimper of pain against his lips. Gareth's heavy frame shuddered, and she realized his patience was costing him. He was a man accustomed to charging violently into every challenge life offered him. And now he was holding his own desperate need at bay to ease her pain.

Rowena tore herself away from his kiss and pressed her lips to his ear. "Fill me," she whispered. "Now."

She did not have to ask twice. Gareth drove the length of his hardness into her, tearing away the last fragile protest of her innocent body. He was still for a long moment, basking in the miracle of her warmth. Her breath came in short pants. He studied her face, waiting for the abatement of tension that would tell him she was ready to receive him fully.

She blinked quizzically up at him. "Is it over?" Her crestfallen expression melted his heart.

"Nay, my sweet. 'Tis only beginning."

With those words, he began to move deep within her. Her eyes fluttered closed. Her head turned from side to side. Her moist, swollen lips caught threads of gold on them. Gareth smoothed them away, deepening and lengthening his strokes until Rowena learned there was a deeper more insatiable hunger than that for food. Her hands caught his shoulders, feeling the smooth play of the muscles sheathed beneath rigid scars, urging him on as he rode her to the edge of hell and back until she swore she could see the exploding stars of heaven itself.

A gust of wind sent the tapestry billowing behind Gareth like a cloak of darkness. A chunk of wood on the fire breathed its dying gasp in a brilliant sputter of light; the mirror above the bed gave up its secrets. Rowena watched mesmerized as Gareth's back went rigid. He arched his neck, his muscles cords of tension. A guttural cry escaped his throat before he collapsed against her, his weight no more a burden than her own.

She stared up into the mirror at the pale blond stranger trapped beneath the sated body of the man she loved. She watched the woman's ringers tenderly comb through the man's sweat-tangled hair. Rowena closed her eyes, a faint half-smile still on her lips.

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Gareth clattered down the steps two at a time, his thoughts centered on the sleeping angel he had left curled in the bed. He did not realize he was singing until he rounded the last step and his rich baritone burst into the dead silence like an unwanted gift.

Three glum faces surveyed him. For an instant, Gareth saw himself as they did—hair tousled, tunic rumpled, hose furred with dust where they had been tossed heedlessly on the floor. Irwin shoved away his trencher as if he had suddenly lost his appetite. Thrown over his shoulders was the fur mantle Gareth had discarded the night before. Big Freddie turned a sullen jaw to the fire while Little Freddie glared at Gareth, gouging a pit in the oak table with the blunt end of a knife.

Gareth's song subsided to a hum which ended on a faint questioning note as he surveyed the cozy hall.

"Confess, lads. Have you vanquished the knights of Midgard? Are they bound and gagged in the stables?" Gareth deliberately made his voice cheerful and booming.

Big Freddie snorted. "Knights indeed."

"The knights have fled." Little Freddie's words were laced with contempt. "Irwin blundered into telling them what Rowena was to you. They scurried like rats to their holes, fearful you might awaken in a cranky temper."

Gareth whistled as he hooked an iron pot over the fire. He stuck a finger in its contents and brought it to his lips. "Not much danger of that, now was there?"

"None at all. Treachery brings out the best in some men."

Gareth's fist descended on Little Freddie. The boy ducked, but Gareth only rumpled his hair. "Curb that tongue of yours and we'll make a knight of you yet, my lad."

Little Freddie's fair skin blushed a becoming pink. His hand reversed its grip on the knife, and Gareth knew he was one smirk away from getting it in his gullet. The knight's smile did not waver, and the boy was forced to satisfy himself with stabbing an errant roach that went scuttling across the table.