The Maiden Bride (7 page)

"I was sleeping." He released her hand abruptly, and she pulled away, her fingers blithely tingling, wanting more, telling other limbs and locations about his wonderful
touch. "At least, attempting to.
What do you want?"

Seeing the glint of lamplight on his moist mouth, she nearly forgot why she'd come: to tame the man.

Their rules of engagement.

"First of all, sir, I want to know what the devil this apparatus is." Her resolve renewed, she tugged lightly on the rope and set a cascade of bells ringing above their heads. "Bells?"

"A caparison bridle." He lowered the chair sharply, brushed bits of wood from his hauberk, then stood up in reluctant courtesy, as though every muscle in his body were already cramped from sleeping folded into the chair.

"A caparison bridle, tied to the end of a rope? Whatever for?" He seemed even taller, standing among the hatchwork of the thick wooden rafters that supported the portcullis and the roof—overpowering, with the restrained gentleness of an appeased bear.

"That I might know when someone is at your gate, my lady." He bowed slightly and her heart took a long, skimming leap toward the remarkable man.

"You did this for me? Fashioned a welcoming bell?"

One of his brows arched wryly, along with the corner of his smile. "An alarm, madam."

Ha! A compromise, my dear steward.
But she wouldn't say that aloud. Let him think that he'd bested her in his quiet sedition. The gate would be opened to anyone who wanted to enter the castle, one way or the other.

"Whatever your reasons, sir, it was clever and obliging, and I thank you for it." There—a compliment where it was due.

He shrugged off her gratitude, and her wariness of his motives rose precipitously. "Nothing more than my dutiful effort to guard and increase your property, madam. To defend your rights and franchises. To be prudent, faithful, and profitable."

"I am much obliged to you, sir." And hugely suspicious, that he'd so thoroughly conceived his steward's creed in such a short time.

The blackguard. Trying to carol dance around her, while he kept his own ways.

"I am, after all, your steward, my lady."

"Aye, sir, and
not
my husband—"

He went utterly still, and her innocent bit of humor thudded to the floor between them like a block of limestone pushed from the cliff tower.

"No, madam, I'm
not."
The flat echo of silence followed, like a door slammed on an argument.

So—her steward was entirely humorless on the subject of marriage, and not exactly given to flattery, blast the man.

"I didn't mean to offend, Nicholas." She smiled, meaning none of it if he was going to be
that
stoneheaded. "I merely wanted you to know how grateful I am that you're my steward."

"Are you?"

"Yes—"
dammit,
she wanted to add. "I'm glad that you persisted when I put you off so squarely. I didn't want to turn you out of my home, though we did step off on the wrong foot."

He leaned toward her. "Much more than a foot, my lady."

"Indeed." There went her thoughts again, completely distracted by his gaze. "You were my best and only choice all along—short of giving up altogether, which I will never do."

"You've made that patently clear." Pronounced like another judgment on her sanity and a sacrifice to his patience.

"Let me make this just as clear: though I'll consider your warnings and your advice and your guidance with great care before I make any decision, you must understand that my word will reign here in all matters. And you must abide by it."

"Fine." Too quickly said.

"So you agree to this very basic rule?"

"Yes." That was said a breath too late for her to believe him completely.

He looked suddenly weary and irritable, as though he had a long, regretful journey ahead of him, and Eleanor felt oddly responsible for disturbing his lonely peace. After all, Faulkhurst had been the man's home for some time. His solitary refuge from his own secret tragedies, it seemed.

"Where do you sleep, sir?"

He took a long measure of her and then tapped the back of the chair. "Here."

"You can't sleep in a tiny chair. I'll send Dickon with a pallet."

"No. Send me nothing."

"But you'll be aching by—"

"The chair will do." She couldn't possibly have softened his abruptness with any amount of argument or eider ticking. He seemed bent on his discomfort—a mendicant monk in the guise of a soldier.

Who are you, Nicholas Langridge? But it was far too late in the evening for that kind of question; tomorrow would be soon enough.

"Where have you been sleeping these
months since you arrived here? Surely in the keep somewhere. If you have a chamber there I can bring—"

"It doesn't matter, madam. I am fine here."

Fine? Sleeping among the chains and gears? An ordinary man would have quartered himself in royal splendor, given an entire castle full of appointments, would have gathered together the riches of the late lord's bounty and reveled in them. Or packed the lot off to the nearest town and sold it all. But her steward seemed as spare in his living as he was grand in his honor—a far better man than the one she had been so briefly wed to.

He'd been protective when he could have pillaged at will. A steward in fact, if not by title.

Oh, my—she'd been a complete dunderhead not to have realized from the start what he'd been doing here all alone at Faulkhurst. "You've been steward for months, haven't you, Nicholas?"

"What do you mean?" The question was asked quickly, ripe with suspicion of her motives.

"First in my husband's absence, and then in
my own." No wonder he'd taken possession with such
vengeance.

Nicholas's heart was thudding again against his chest, his pulse again under siege from her innocent arrows that forever hit him dead on target and pierced deeply.

"I lodged here only, madam. For a few months, because it has been convenient for me. Make nothing more of it than that."

She settled closer to him, a hand on her hip, puzzling over him, over some bit of unlikely logic. "Whether you meant it so or not, your skulking has kept Faulkhurst from being picked clean."

Ah. "By your enterprising outlaws?"

She laughed generously, as though he'd caught her in a misstep, and touched the hollow of her throat, exposed in that sloping, alabaster breach above her night shift. "Aye, sir. You saved me from those very outlaws, locked everyone out until I could come. Why?"

Blasted woman. He would never be ready for any of her stunning questions. He hadn't thought ahead that far into his story—the whys of his being here, of his staying. And he sure as hell couldn't judge—at the mercy of her gaze, of her fingers smoothing the edge of his cuff—what this falsehood or that would mean in the coming months. Would a simple detail eventually trip him up when he least expected it?

"Why? Nothing I had planned," was all he could manage. For that smallness of spirit he got another of her enigmatic smiles. And his privacy, his distance.

"Well, sir. How can I ever thank you for all you've done for me thus far?"

She put out her hand for him to shake, which scared him brainless—because he
couldn't stop
himself from taking it, any more than he could stop himself from raising its slim paleness to his mouth and pressing a kiss to the back of her fingers and between.

Yes, fresh dandelions and lavender and soap. A new fire in his cold hearth.

"Oh, my." She watched his dangerous, forbidden courtship with open fascinations with eyes that sparkled with curiosity and invited much more exploring than he dared imagine.

"Well. Thank you, Master Nicholas," she said, with a magnificently erotic hitch of her breath that flushed her cheeks and her throat, and made his skin ache, his chest burn.

He let go of her hand, regretting few things more in his life. "You will thank me most effectively, my lady, by keeping yourself safe at all times."

"From…
?"
Her mouth glistened, pouting as though he'd just kissed her and she was asking for more.

From me—from your husband's outrageous lust for you, for it is hot and close by.

He sighed. "Your bloody outlaws, my lady."

"And the bloody king."

Oh, she was very good, this wife of his. Forbearance became her, and generosity of heart. So very tolerant of an interloper's arrogance, as masterful in her mercies as she was in her unwitting malice.

"My husband may have been a neglectful monster, but we'll make amends for his wickedness, you and I. We'll finally put Faulkhurst aright."

"Fine. Good." Damned little else he could say, outside of "So glad the bastard's dead."

"We'll meet in the great hall in the early morning, if you will, sir. The seven of us. Do sleep well."

God help him, he craved the choking sting of the battlefield as he never had in all of his life—it was far safer there than here beside his wife. He'd been arrow-shot and sliced through to the bone a dozen times; he'd suffered broken limbs and festered wounds, had been stitched up with catgut and rusted needles in the thick of a brawling fray.

But he'd never felt so mortally wounded, so dazed and confused as he did now at the end of this interminable day.

"Good night to you, madam."

"And to you, Nicholas." Her voice was pillowy and warm, and he feared she would cup his jaw with her hand and leave a kiss on his cheek. She was that kind of woman, and he was just the kind of sinner to let her.

But he could never stop there—not at a kiss. He'd gather her into his embrace, and meet the dawn all tangled up in her skirts and in the lushness of her arms.

He stood unmoving as she turned away, feeling coarse-muscled and slow. Then she stopped, studied the floor beside his chair for a moment with that keenly tender brow of hers, then stooped and picked up a partially carved block of pine—the upper half of the standing bear he'd been working at with his knife.

"Is this your carving, Nicholas?" She turned it in the lamplight, raptly studying the details, unaware that his heart had stopped for more reasons than he cared to admit: fear and flattery and the desolate yearning for a better man's life.

"It is mine." He could hardly deny it. There were bits of shavings on the floor, and, he suddenly noticed, on the sleeve of his tunic. He brushed at them, stark evidence of his melancholy distraction. That tenuous connection with his son.

"Why, it's—" she laughed in pure delight, lighting the room with the lilt of it "—oh, Nicholas, it's absolutely wonderful." She sent a quick, assuring glance to him with those clear, painfully lovely eyes, then she went back to studying the bear from all its angles, caressing the small nose and the back of its head and neck as though it pleased her as nothing ever had.

"Whoever is it for?"

My son, Liam. Your son, wife,
if
I'd been a better man, a better father.

His mouth went as dry as the wood shavings, leaving him feeling exposed, lacking an explanation for the very simplest, the truest, the purest, part of his life. Though he burned to confess it, he could never tell her this particular truth either—because she might understand, might absolve him, and ask more of him than he could give her.

He'd crammed eight years of fatherhood into a single, astonishing summer of joy, when all around him had been collapsing. He'd found the boy abandoned to poverty and neglect and had courted his trust, carving dozens of animals for his son, his heart filling up, spilling over with every chip he'd cut away.

A clumsy, aching attempt at making amends. Toys and trifles to catch his son's fancy and rest his fears—not much to recommend him after years of absence and deliberate denial of the boy. But Liam had fallen for the carvings.

For the badgers and the bears and the kennel full of hunting hounds.

I like the pony best of all, Papa.

Nicholas could hardly breathe for the memory of all the grinning, the skipping and hooting that the boy had done so often in the simplicity of his joy. And now his wife seemed just as taken with the unfinished bear, beaming with admiration that he didn't deserve.

"The toy is for no one in particular, madam," he finally managed, though she must have heard the rasping of his voice. "A passing of time, is all."

Her eyes sparkled with a starry dampness. "I never would have guessed at your secret, Nicholas. Never in my life." Her smile for him was tender and compelling, the affection in her voice, devastating. "And that would have been a sorrowful loss indeed."

She nestled the bear into his hand, lifted high onto her toes, and pressed a warm, lingering kiss against his bristly cheek. With a small, startled sound, she lowered her lashes and whispered hoarsely, "Good night, steward."

Then she was gone down the stairs with her lamplight—leaving his heart thumping with equal parts of longing and terror and rampaging lust.