At Your Pleasure (16 page)

On a breath, she said, “Perhaps, rather than strangers, we may be proper enemies. Enemies may respect each other, I think.”

He shook his head. He looked haunted, and his short laugh was ghost-soft and strange. “You are a fool,” he said.

He rose and came toward her. She watched his approach in puzzlement, then gasped when he lifted her into his arms. The world tilted around her; his broad palm cradled her skull. “What—”

“Shh.” He carried her to the bed, his steps smooth, his grip firm beneath her knees and shoulders. The scent of lavender rose as he laid her atop the quilts. She looked up at him in wonderment. In his face, her addled imagination now glimpsed a tenderness she had not seen in . . . years.

He leaned down so close that she could see the striations in his irises, the green fading into a ring of gold around his pupils. His breath warmed her lips as he searched her face. She held still, uncertain what he looked for, riveted by the sensation of his body’s warmth. Everything in these past few hours seemed more and more like a dream. She could not attempt any longer to make sense of it.

“I would ask once more,” he said, his tone very gentle. She felt the light brush of his knuckles down her cheek as he lifted a strand of hair away from her mouth. “What did those men come for?”

She moistened her lips. His gaze dropped to watch them, and a queer, hot thrill blossomed through her. She felt almost drunk.

Dream or no, this was dangerous. She pressed her lips into a hard line and drew a long breath through her nose.

“I will not betray my brother,” she said. “You will have to force me by some other means.”

Now his eyes lifted again to hers. “Suggest me a way.”

“I cannot say one. I mean to repay my debts to him.”

He showed her a brief, black smile. “As do I.”

His voice held a promise of blood. She bit her lip to forestall the urge to protest of David’s kindness; to demand that he spare her brother’s life. She knew how it worked among men. David had shown no kindness to Adrian that day in the courtyard. He never would have supported a marriage between their families.

She must protect David, for Adrian never would.

He retreated a step but remained looking down at her a moment. Then he turned for the door.

She frowned and pushed herself up on one elbow. He intended to leave? Had he given up on his questions? But she had one of her own. “What did you mean? How am I a fool?”

His hand on the latch, he paused. She watched the line of his shoulders square.

But when he spoke, he said only, “Go to sleep, my lady. Dream sweetly.”

The door closed softly behind him.

9

T
he chapel was dark and narrow, hewn from stone in a time when a Plantagenet had held the throne. Adrian took a seat on the hard, chilled bench. Narrow windows of rippled glass permitted only a weak glow from the sun dawning without.

He wanted to smash something.

Something needed to shatter, bleed, and collapse.

He stared at the ornate gold crucifix that loomed over the mahogany altar, at the broken body that draped across it. Someone had put exquisite care into crafting the agony on this wooden face of Christ.

Perhaps Nora was right: God watched but did not concern Himself with this kingdom. In His son He had exhausted His interest in suffering. Now He waited indifferently until Judgment Day.

Or perhaps He did not even watch. This Jesus on the cross must be
blind
to have endured the worship of David Colville and his father.

Adrian exhaled. The events of her wedding day had been emblazoned into his brain with a searing force that no amount of time would blur. He could still recall with perfect detail the jewels around her fingers as she had lifted her wineglass. The smell of the feast, sharp alcoholic fumes mixed with the richness of roasted game. The lilting tune of the pipes playing in the gallery above. His own sensation of shock—like a full-bodied blow, an impact that somehow did not end—as he had backed out of the hall. The bite of the knife that had settled then against his throat.

He could hear the words David Colville had spoken as though the man now stood beside him.

Catholic dog, I would kill you and rejoice in it. But your life is not worth the meanest servant’s effort to clean these floors of your blood.

What he could not recall was his own response—as if the great blankness inside him, like an explosion of light, had blotted out his senses.

But he had said something to prompt David Colville’s parting remark.

I would see her dead before you soiled her again.

This was the brother she protected. This was the man whom she called her only help.

I knew naught of the agreement they had struck
.

The memory of her soft words hammered at him. He had thought himself numb? He was rage, nothing but it. Rage . . . and horror . . . and regret.

And shame.

He made fists. He relaxed them. He breathed in and out.

There must be a way to fathom this. It had happened long ago. It was
done
. It changed nothing of what had come afterward.

So she had not betrayed him. So she had been cruelly abused. His course would not have altered had he known it. He had tried with every faculty and the last ounce of his strength to return to her. Knowing the truth now did not cast that effort in a different light, only restored to him the certainty that his effort had been just.

It did, however, clarify his shame.

He had lain with her only once. A single time, so fumbling and brief, so incandescently sweet, that it had seemed almost innocent. Blameless; a sanctified thing.

Afterward, caution had reclaimed him. He had waged a mighty struggle to keep chaste, recognizing that the danger in lying together was all to her peril, not his. Cowardly indeed of him to put that risk upon her, though youthful ardor had painted it in a different light.

Understanding now how she had been ruined by it—fathoming fully why she accused him of destroying her life—showed him the truth of that day in the fields. An embrace of transcendent sweetness now twisted in his mind into a clumsy act of violence, which had torn a bloody gash across the fabric of her life and his own.

It sickened him in waves. If he had never touched her . . . if they had always remained chaste . . .

And now he had come to ravage her life again.

He looked down at his own hands, his palms upward atop his thighs, the posture of a penitent begging God’s
forgiveness. But this test was man-made and had no divine resolution. Angels would turn their faces away. Only darkness lay ahead.

He did not know if an afterlife awaited him, a judgment and a punishment. Perhaps there was no hell, or any heaven, either; perhaps his body would only molder, and turn into food for worms. Men made games of religion, did they not? They made God into a reason for warfare. Who was to say that He was anything more than an excuse, an invention, a convenient cause? Adrian had never felt Him save in His absence.

Nothingness, then: no punishment for sin but death; no reward for virtue but the grave. Yet, even if there was a master in heaven, it would make no difference to his course. He would accept damnation as his due in exchange for an earthly life in which he and his were no one’s slaves.

His own brother—
who had known; who had known she carried his child
—his brother was dead. Hexton was out of reach—
for now
.

But David Colville would come into his grasp, and then there would be justice.

There would be a smashing, and a shattering, and a collapse.

There would be blood.

He inhaled, tasting the musty air, the dust of centuries of penance, and spat it out.

He came to his feet. He felt nothing in this space, no divinity, no disapproval, no breath of damnation. But as a monument to hypocrisy it was unrivaled.

Here, before this blind face on the crucifix, he would slit David Colville’s throat.

He started for the exit. Halfway down the aisle he heard a thought not his own, a dim voice that spoke in his head:

And who will clean the blood from these floors?

The voice sounded like Nora’s.

Would he ask the mistress of this house to clean her brother’s blood?

He drove his hand up his face and cursed.

But if there was no god, there was nothing to curse for this bind. Without God, there was no fate, only chance. Only flesh, and pain, and occasionally, so briefly, moments of pleasure, unexpected, unbidden—

—as when he had taken her into his arms tonight, too exhausted to heed caution.

David Colville’s rotted, myopic ambitions might cost her life.

David is all I had,
she had said.
The only one who helped me
.

But it had not always been so.

It had not always been so, and it would be so no longer. Now, whether she willed it or no, she would have
him.

Her brother had forsaken her welfare when choosing his path. Adrian had seen this knowledge in her face. But she could not break from the course her brother had set for her—not even if the man died. Her principles and allegiances were not so flexible.

Indeed, her brother’s death might only strengthen her resolve.

Very well. If Colville died, it would not be by his hands. Instead, Adrian thought,
he
would choose a new course for her. And he would make her walk it, though it won him her rage.

He had no illusions of what her reaction would be. In her grief, she would loathe and revile him.

But she would be alive. And she would be
his
.

10

N
ora slept, and woke, and slept again. She slept for nearly a full day, dimly conscious, in the break between dreams, of Grizel’s cool hand on her forehead and the maid’s quiet fussing with the blankets that enclosed her.

When her eyes finally came open with the desire to stay so, another dawn glowed through the windows. She lay alone, enfolded by warmth and peace.

Only once before had she slept through a day of her life—after miscarrying the child. The missing hours had haunted her thereafter. That something so dreadful and altering might occur, and its consequences unfold, while she lay unawares . . . It had caused her to think for the first time on mortality. Surely this was what death would be like: nothingness, oblivion, as the world continued to turn, heedless of her absence.

She had felt corrupted by this new understanding, intolerably cognizant that one day she would cease. She had
turned to prayer for comfort, desiring to be persuaded that oblivion was only the step before grace, the last trial before everlasting resurrection.

But prayer had not helped her. That bleakness had endured for months, if not years.

Not so now. She rose from the bed with a lightness of body and spirit. She felt as though a storm had passed, leaving great peace in its wake.

He knew everything. The past was no longer her dark secret to carry.

Out the window the day was blooming, great swaths of scarlet and gold spreading across the sky. She wanted to be in the light, with the dew soaking her slippers, grass brushing at her skirts and bending greenly beneath her feet. The locked door across the room taunted her as the birds outside sang invitations.

She went to the door and put her ear against it, hoping to hear Grizel’s approaching footsteps. The answering silence puzzled her. She could not even hear the quiet conversation of her erstwhile guards.

When she pressed her ear harder against the door, it creaked and gave way.

Startled, she held her breath—certain that at any moment it would be slammed in her face and locked again.

But silence still reigned, and the door remained ajar. Tentatively she pushed it farther.

Her sitting room was empty. The far door—the door to the hall—stood open.

Was this some mistake? She dared not waste a minute. A fresh shift, her stays, petticoats, and a sack gown
she could lace herself: dressed thus in haste, she crept out from her chambers and down the stairs. Nobody appeared to stop her, but she held her breath as she went. She felt like a thief stealing through the house with mischief in her heart. She felt like somebody enchanted, a princess from an Arthurian legend, rejuvenated from a magical rest of centuries.