shadow and lace (38 page)

Alise tugged at Blaine's sleeve. "Hang her, Blaine. Do let's hang her."

Gareth's nostrils flared as he shot Alise a look of pure contempt. She slipped behind Blaine, who stepped back from the swaying rope as if it might bite him.

Gareth pushed past them, and Rowena felt Blaine's sympathetic hand brush her shoulder as they passed. At the top of the narrow staircase, Gareth came to a halt with a bemused curse. Rowena stumbled into his back.

He drew her in front of him. "I've never had to face so many obstacles to get a woman to my bedchamber. Have you the pope crouching under my bed?"

Marlys squatted at the end of the corridor like a nesting gargoyle. Between lank strands of hair, her face was stark white.

Her voice had lost its confident cadence. "I must speak to you, Gareth."

His fingers lightly traced Rowena's collarbone. "Later."

"Now."

Rowena's eyes blazed a brilliant blue, narrowing in both a warning and a plea. She laughed lightly. "If you've come to plead for me, save your breath. Blaine did a much prettier job and his pleas fell on ears of stone. I fear it will take more than pleasantries to soothe your brother's wounded vanity."

"Like a human sacrifice?" Marlys bit off.

"A charming one, at that," Gareth said pleasantly.

With a choked cry, Marlys leaped to her feet and fled past them down the stairs.

Gareth soon had them secured behind a chamber door with the bolt dropped home.

Rowena stood lost at the door while Gareth went to the window. The moon cast his silhouette in wax.

"The remonstrances of your friends are touching, are they not?"

"But ineffectual," she murmured.

Her heart plummeted as she saw the linen sheets humped and tangled on the bed. She would rather he kill her outright than lay her beneath him on a feather mattress that only last night may have held the mold of Alise's body beneath his. She spun around, a cry catching in her throat, and pressed her forehead to the door.

Gareth's head flew up as the piteous sound arrowed straight to his heart. He crossed to her. His rough hands cradled her shoulders as his husky voice rocked her with shivers.

"Your shyness would be more convincing if my body were not incensed with memories of your wanton surrender to me. I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. I cannot think without your image rising unbidden before me. Your poison is sweet, but fatal. I can find no antidote except to partake of it again and again until I've purged it from my soul or died trying."

Rowena leaned her head back. Tears slipped down her cheeks, wetting his beard. "What do you want from me, Gareth? Shall I scream so the others can hear me? Shall I drop to my knees and plead for your mercy?"

"Your knees would be as fine a place as any to begin."

He pulled her around and pinned her against the door. His lips harshly took hers. His tongue stoked the embers of desire deep within her to hungry flames with a violence that warned her his own need was tinged with madness. His knee flexed between her legs, opening her to the brutal caress of fingers sheathed in leather. His palm rubbed the tatters of her dress against her, using leather against velvet as a fiery conductor of his will until her struggles deepened to tortured writhing. He scooped her up, one arm cradling her hips, his other palm still cupping the hot, damp fabric between her legs.

He lay her back on the bed, pulling her hips to its edge. Her legs dangled on each side of his thighs. He pulled his tunic over his head, revealing a dark mat of crisp hair.

"You are as spineless as your father," he snarled. "You'd give yourself to a man who hates you before you would fight for yourself."

His words were like ice water tossed on the flames of her love. She lay stunned before their virulence and injustice. Gareth reached for the points of his hose. If his hands had not been poised there, he would have received the full force of her convulsive kick to his groin. As it was, his hand shot down in a reflex born of knighthood, catching her slender foot in his grasp.

He gave a low, taunting laugh. "There now, girl. I knew you had your mother in you somewhere. 'Twas only a matter of baiting her to life."

Rowena sat up, jerking her foot out of his hand. "The two of you deserved each other."

She scooted back on the bed, and Gareth crawled after her. "You've inherited her deceit, treachery, and fickle heart. Perhaps 'tis time I taught you some of her other tricks."

"As she taught you?" Rowena shot back.

She rolled over, planning to launch herself off the bed and flee this vicious demon she had thought to be her lover. Gareth's arm snaked around her waist. He slid her facedown beneath his weight. She sucked in a sharp breath to scream, but before she could cry out, his hand clapped over her mouth. She tasted leather against her teeth.

"If you scream, you shall summon Blaine and his minions," he hissed in her ear. "And if you think his chivalry possesses no price, you are mistaken. Do you want to be the whore of one man, or two?"

Rowena slumped against the feather mattress, defeat etched in the slender curve of her spine. When Gareth turned her over, her eyes were as dark with bitterness as his own.

His knuckles brushed her cheek in a caress that was achingly tender. His lips grazed her temple, tasting tiny hairs like spun sugar against his tongue.

"How will I ever forgive you for this?" she asked.

His lips nestled into the hollow of her throat. "If I am a murderer, why should I care?"

Rowena ached to speak, but held her tongue, painfully aware of the price she must pay for her silence.

As he undid the hooks at her bodice, Rowena lay malleable beneath his hands, holding back a shudder even when he exposed her nakedness to his burning gaze.

She flinched at the unfamiliar feel of leather against her nipples. The sensitive nubs tightened and contracted with a will of their own. Gareth lowered his heated lips to first one and then the other, taking them into his mouth and gently suckling until her hands caught in his hair. He lifted his shaggy head and met the ferocity of her gaze over twin peaks silvered with moonlight and frosted with the wetness of his tongue.

He pulled off his gauntlets.

She caught her breath as his blunt fingers slid between her legs, weaving an erotic spell with a delicacy that should have been impossible. Gareth watched her face, captivated by the fleeting glimpses of a pleasure she could no longer hide. Her body tensed and shuddered as he dipped one finger into her with paralyzing gentleness, soothing the swelling membranes he found there with her own silken nectar. His finger ravished her with agonizing slowness, preparing her for the deeper filling soon to come. Her lashes fluttered against her flushed cheeks. Her head rolled from side to side, the coral softness of her lips forming soundless words against the pillow of her hair. Gareth's fingers worked their magic in maddening rhythm until a shudder harder and deeper than all the others rocked Rowena and held her fast.

Her throat arched and she fell back against the mattress, biting back a cry. Gareth felt the muscles of his abdomen tighten convulsively. Rowena opened eyes dark and misty with passion and bitterness as he withdrew his fingers from her and gently teased their dew over her taut nipples. He slipped his finger into her one last time. The pungent scent of leather assailed her nostrils as he gently drew it across her lips, pearling their softness with a glistening honey more potent than nectar. His mouth closed on hers, the taste and scent of her surrender fusing them together in a bond stronger than blood.

His knee nudged her thighs apart. He barely had his hose untied and down over his hips when Rowena felt the tip of a blade more lethal than any sword press against her softness, following the throbbing course his fingers had charted. She buried her face against his throat as he teased her, rubbing against her but holding back. Her teeth nipped his collarbone. Her moan reverberated against his ear. His fingers laced around hers, pinning her palms in a prison of deceptive softness underlaid with a hardness as fine as steel. She clutched his hands as a matching hardness knifed deep within her.

Gareth took her, making her his own with tantalizing strokes, each longer and deeper than the last until Rowena shuddered, filled so deeply that she no longer knew where her body ended and his began. His breathing quickened as he rocked between her hips until the tenuous thread of his own control snapped and a guttural groan escaped his throat. Rowena arched against him as he poured his seed into her, impaling her against the bed with the force of his need.

The moon sank like a pale pearl into a black sea, casting its exhausted beams over a floor strewn with gauntlets, hose, and velvet.

Gareth drew Rowena up in the center of the bed to face him. His fingers pushed through her tangled hair, his nails coming to rest against her scalp like tender blades. "I once swore an oath to you—on my knees." His hand tangled in her hair. She slid irrevocably down the merciless contours of his body until her cheek lay against the satiny heat of his thigh. Her hair sheltered her burning cheeks from him. He reached down and gently tilted her chin until she was forced to meet his gaze. "Now, sweet lady, you may swear your oath to me."

Rowena's eyes widened, but the honeyed languor of their lovemaking still held her in its thrall. She was beguiled by the strength of his will. His hands and body guided her through this tender initiation until the sweet acquiescence of her lips and mouth wrung a groan of mortal pleasure from deep in his throat. He threw back his head, teeth clenched in a primitive portrait of ecstasy. Exultation rolled through Rowena's veins like thunder as Gareth cried out a need for her that required no words.

The moon fled before the clouds that gathered on the far horizon. Rowena lay with her face buried in the crook of Gareth's arm. His hand absently traced half-words and pictures on the flat planes of her sweat-sheened stomach.

"You will find me no husband, will you?" she murmured against his skin.

Gareth's fingertips paused in their gentle motion. He shook his head.

"And you will not let me go come summer, will you?"

She lifted her gaze. Gareth's arm tightened around her neck. "I will never let you go."

Despair darkened her own eyes at the tenor of those words. Once she had prayed to hear them, but not spoken like that, not thrown out like a black-edged threat laced with more hatred than love. She blinked back tears as he rolled her to her stomach and mated her with a savage intensity that left her incoherent and mercifully incapable of further thought.

Rowena stared blindly at the gray dawn creeping through the narrow window. The distant, lonely crow of a cock warbled to a pensive halt. She gazed at the man beside her as if he were a stranger. A lock of tousled hair fell over his brow. Sleep had soothed the lines etched around his mouth, but as she watched, a shadow of a grimace tightened his lips as if even the peace of sleep eluded him. Rowena did not care to witness his pain. She had enough of her own to deal with. She nudged away the knee thrown over her thigh and scooted out from under his weight.

She slipped Gareth's tunic over her head. The heavy camlet felt rough against her nakedness. The garment covered her to the knees. She paused at the door before returning to the bed to draw a linen sheet over Gareth's sprawling form. He rolled to his side, pulling her pillow under his chin with a slurred murmur.

Sleeping bodies littered the great hall like the victims of some merciless plague of pleasure. Rowena stepped over the stained skirts of a spread-eagled maid whose cheek was pillowed on the rump of a pock-marked page.

As she passed through the bailey, Rowena filled her lungs with damp morning air untainted by the stench of sour wine and unwashed flesh. At the top of the drawbridge, she stopped. Her bare toes curled against the splintered wood as she gazed wistfully at the stables. She had come to seek the solace of her brothers' company only to discover that far more than the rich dirt of the list separated them.

A chasm had opened between them, a chasm deepened during the long night when Gareth had used her love as a weapon to tame her, used his dark skills to wring cries from her she did not even recognize as her own. The courage that had driven her to defy him deserted her at the thought of facing Little Freddie half-dressed with swollen lips and tangled hair. She knew the evidence of Gareth's possession was as fresh as the lingering tenderness between her legs.

She hugged herself, wishing she had thought to bring a shawl into a morning that still held a breath of winter. Clouds smothered the horizon, and the scent of rain drifted to her nostrils.

Bracing herself against the castle stones, she crept out along the narrow ledge overhanging the moat and sat down, dangling her feet over the dark mirror of water. Mist drifted across the lake in veils of white, obscuring the bridge. If she started walking now, how long would it take her to get to Revelwood? she wondered. And how long would it take Gareth to come after her and drag her back?

I will never let you go.

His icy words echoed in her head. Gareth de Crecy was a powerful man. He could lock her away, keep her prisoner at Caerleon forever if he so desired. She imagined herself sitting in a lonely tower, watching from the window as he brought a wife to Caerleon, growing withered and gray while he fathered sons and slowly forgot the blinding passion that had once bound them.