At Your Pleasure (30 page)

“And yet, I did alter. Did I not, in the end? Faith apart, you found me changed.”

She swallowed. Was this some veiled apology? He was no longer the laughing boy of yore. He had murder in him now, as he himself had said. He had done a terrible thing to her. His younger self would not have done it.

But she could not resent him simply for the sin of having changed. Forsooth, she herself was no longer that wild young girl she had once been, so unafraid and so bold.

She did not want to speak words that abjured him. But she could not hold silent, either. “Perforce we all alter,” she said haltingly. “Time . . . batters us. Perchance we must change or die.”

Now, no doubt of the sensation, his lips turned into her hair, and his hands loosened over hers, his thumb drawing a casual stroke down her inner wrist. For a moment they breathed together in the silence, her body tightening and trembling like a drawn bow, anticipating where his lips would move next.

Slowly, so slowly, his right hand moved to her waist, lightly stroking her hip, while his left hand remained atop hers. And into her ear he said, “You are kind.”

Or a fool. She had no will to withdraw from his touch.
I have loved you for a very long time . . .

“But there was a choice for me, you know,” he continued. “I might have stayed abroad. France welcomed me very gently. Only . . . I could not forget where I belonged.”

She bit her lip and drew a hard breath through her
nose. But why restrain agreement? “Nor could I have done. I—I know the claws sunk by the call of home. Were I ever to have had such a choice . . .” Were she to have found herself in a world where all her young dreams might have come true, where every choice would have been hers, where adventure and glory had attended her . . . she might not have stayed, either. “We are bred to our soil.”

“Yes.”
The word was harsh, expelled on a breath. “Bred to our soil: and yet, when here I returned, I felt myself a foreigner. What a homecoming, to return to that place where one finds himself always a stranger! It came to me then to wonder what cause I had for love of England. I found no gentle welcome here, Nora.”

No, he had not.

His soft laugh sounded dark. His knuckles traced a leisurely path up her ribs, then back again. “But I needn’t speak of this to you,” he said. “You know better than anyone what cost my religion exacted. It touched you, too—more cruelly, mayhap, than it ever did me.”

His warm lips pressed against her temple. The simplicity of the kiss fractured something inside her. Her throat closed; she felt on the edge of tears. Where his words were leading, she could not guess, but she felt, in their roughness and the increasing pressure of his hand massaging her waist, what it cost him to speak.

She would have answered him, but all possible answers threatened her.
Yes, we paid a high price: my father treated you cruelly, and abandoned me to Towe because you had touched me. Yes, you learned a cruel lesson at the hands of my kin. And so did I.

But she did not need to speak, for he had followed her thoughts. His cheek came against hers now. He laid his palm flat over her belly.

“Had I been other than I was,” he murmured, “a son of the High Church, a son of some other man, then you and I would know no arguments. We would have children now. A strapping boy of five years—”

“Stop.” She closed her eyes. She would not see this image he conjured. It pained her in her very marrow. “Such fantasies are for fools. You are who you are.” She would not have wished him otherwise, even when her suffering had been sharpest.

What a truth!

It rang through her like a bell. In its echoing aftermath she felt shaken and . . . suspended, poised on the edge of something momentous.

“And now you are speaking as I do.” The barest trace of humor skated through his words. “You resolve to be immune to all but plain truths.”

She tried to turn toward him but his arms tightened, holding her in place.

“I made plain truth my guide,” he said. “After I lost you, I saw what faith had cost me and I could not envision a greater loss. And so I turned away from it. I would not live as a stranger in my own land. But that cost me, too. I had lost you, and now, in the loss of my faith, I lost my family as well. Even as I profited from the fruits of my new resolve—even as the queen showed me favor and the court began to curry favor with me—those of my blood turned their faces away.”

She had wondered of his family. Never in London had she glimpsed him in the company of his kin. “I am . . . so sorry.”

“Do not be. Do not be sorry for a cowardice your soul would never permit.” Now he did turn her, so they knelt together in the afternoon light. “Do you not see?” His callous palms framed her face. His green eyes looked so earnest. “Had I realized in France what course my return would take, I still would have come back to England. It was home that I could not abandon—home, which remains after all else falls away. As to my family . . . I regret not the loss of those who would abandon me. I regret very little. There is only one person whom I have known to remain true in the face of such tests. And that is
you
.”

His speech robbed her of breath. She laid her hands over his, pressing hard. He leaned toward her and their mouths met.

This kiss took her away from herself. Slow and soft, his lips and tongue ravished her. Such sweetness in tasting him. It would be so easy, amidst such kisses and such words, to forget that he had ridden roughshod over her, and taken by force what his words and touch now addressed so seductively.

Where was her fear, then? It was lost in his kiss. When her grip tightened, his thumb stroked once beneath her lower lip, as though to acknowledge it, or—mad thought—to reassure her:
Yes,
said his touch,
it is this way for me as well. How can you doubt?

When their lips parted, he rested his forehead against hers, and spoke looking into her eyes. “Your loyalty is not
to me. Well do I know it, Nora. But that only strengthens my course. You alone . . .” He traced the line of her cheek, his finger following it like a whisper to her jaw. “You alone,” he whispered, “among every creature in my knowledge, will never let go of what is yours, no matter how it pains you. And so I know I cannot ask for your glad cooperation.” Now he hooked his finger around the curve of her ear. “I cannot demand your submission. I can only hold you, and pray I keep you safe, and spare you, by force if need be, from the consequences of what I admire in you most.”

Staring at him, she felt a flicker of amazement. How he looked at her! Most men reserved such regard for saints. “You think of me too highly.” Soon he would find a clearer view.

He smiled slightly. “No. You think of yourself too low.”

Something in her swelled at those words, something foolish and infinitely young: it was her pride.
Yes, you are right; this is who I am,
it said. How wondrous it seemed to hear such a verdict, how unbearably sweet to hear affirmed and lauded that which other men had scorned as flaws, as obstinacy, as vanity and willfulness.

He kissed her again, his hand brushing down her body, cupping her breast. The weight of his grip lent the kiss a new edge of possessiveness that awoke her caution.

To yield to his view of her was to accept that he tried to rule her from charitable and loving impulses. But she could not grant such motives to him without also accepting his rule.

She broke from his mouth. “I wish you would not praise me,” she whispered. “If kindness is your aim, it would be kinder to tell me a way to hate you.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But kindness is not my aim here. And well you know it.”

With the flat of his palm on the small of her back, he brought her to him again. Now his hand grew busy, stroking the cloth over her nipple as the gentle address of his lips warmed her in waves. In fevers one felt like this: sluggish, helplessly adrift in a warm, pulsing haze, unable to rouse oneself. When his lips dropped to her throat and he sucked the tender skin there, her eyes fluttered closed. She heard her own stuttering breath, the small sounds of her building pleasure. The place between her thighs clutched and ached.

“I promised myself I would leave you be,” he said against her skin. “For the day, at least.”

In her daze, she could think of nothing more cruel. His wandering hand now slipped from her breast, but an adjustment of an inch would satisfy her again. She made her own adjustments, running her hand down his abdomen, then farther yet, until she found with her hand the rigid shape of his cock.

His body did not desire restraint.

“And will you leave me be?” she asked hoarsely.

His laughter was soundless, a warmth along her neck. “Not all decisions are mine, love.”

The words stroked through her like a caress. She grasped his shoulder and tipped herself backward, drawing him over her, trusting his hand at the small
of her back to protect her from hard contact with the floor. Silent and graceful, he followed her down, pulling her collar aside to set his mouth to her bare shoulder. A small breath escaped her, a sigh that felt almost wistful.

The solar was small, the walls bare but for the instruments, whose polished mahogany bodies shone overhead in the sun. The rude stone floor made no romantic bed; the muffled voices from the hallway did not permit her imagination to paint a bower in her mind. But when he slid his hand up her bare calf and took hold of her inner knee, when he urged her legs apart, the feel of her own muscles bending to his direction felt like a revelation. She could imagine no greater enchantment than this: the flooding light, and the cool air of an autumn afternoon, and the music suspended above them, and this man who kissed her now, as reverently as though his kiss were a prayer, and she were his faith, and the press of their bodies, a sacrament.

“Come,” he said into her mouth. “Let me take you to bed.”

In the hushed stillness of her bedchamber, he made quick work of undressing her, amazed at his good fortune when she made no protest. They stood by the bed, he turning her in his arms, unveiling her: pale skin, and full breasts with nipples ripe for sucking, a slim waist that swelled into hips to hold her by when he laid her down, very soon. Her body might have been the inspiration
for a viola da gamba, the most harmonious collection of curves, producing the sweetest vibrations.

But when he stepped back to see her more fully—a breath of amazement escaping him—he noticed how her knees pressed together and a hot blush burned her face.

When she reached for her discarded gown, he took her wrist to stop her. She froze. “It is not . . . natural to me . . . to be so immodest in light of day,” she said in a strangled voice.

He let go of her wrist to catch a strand of hair and curl it behind her ear. “What is immodest here, Nora?” He watched his hand drop, tracking the unblemished curve of her shoulder, skimming the slope of her breast, heavy and full, the dusky tip hardening. The sight struck something raw and hot in him, so powerful that his hand trembled a little as it passed onward to the slope of her waist.

“This is you,” he said. “If to show yourself is a sin, then the sin is temptation, for any man in the world would covet you in his heart.”

“Flattery.” She seemed to attempt levity with this accusation, but her hitching voice did not manage it.

Nevertheless, he called up a smile for her. “I will show you flattery.” He dropped to his knees before her, breathing in the scent of her rounded belly, a voluptuous goad, softer than any man deserved. The flat of his hand could span the length from her pubis to navel, above which he placed his lips, touching her with her tongue so she gasped.

The sound unhinged some piece of him that he badly
required. He paused, gripping her hips, searching for his control as he came up against a dark truth in himself. He had bedded other women, and he had done it very well, so that both of them rose satisfied from bed. But what he did with this woman was no simple bedding. The desire that moved him to it was not simply concerned with satisfaction. This hunger in him wanted to break her open so completely that she would never recover her reserve; that she would forget, for eternity, that once her body had been aught else but his.

It was not an innocent craving.

It was too near to violence for him to trust.

But this was the only love he had known, and so perhaps this was the nature of love itself, nothing elegant or pretty in it. He was learning again, after six years, why love and bloodshed seemed to poets to be natural confederates, for he would split the skull of any man who came between him and this woman.

He kissed her belly again, slowly now, feeling in the sudden tension of her buttocks that she had divined his course. Her hands fell fretful into his hair as he pressed her by the hips to walk backward toward the bed, until she sat hesitantly onto the edge of the mattress. But her fingers were squeezing a protest, tightening to draw up his head.

Perhaps some wise instinct in her divined his greater aim. A sense of self-preservation drove her to resist what would give her pleasure. But pleasure was the greatest weapon he wielded against her now in his campaign to seduce her heart to his possession.

He took her hands in his and lifted them free of his hair, then stretched up on his knees to kiss her mouth before he pushed her by the shoulder, gently but firmly, into a reclining position on the bed. With his shoulder he parted her legs more widely, so she lay exposed to him, like a feast awaiting his leisure.

“I . . . do not think I like this,” she said in a high, nervous voice. But she did not close her legs. Between them, the heart of her opened like a flower, pink and scarlet, dewed beneath his touch. She bucked at the light stroke of his finger and an anxious noise escaped her, but her effort to squirm backward was halfhearted, halted easily by his hand on her knee.

He placed a kiss on her inner thigh, taking an almost savage gratification in how her flesh quivered beneath his lips. “I will teach you to like it,” he said hoarsely.

He slid his hands beneath her buttocks and lifted her to his mouth. Her moan reached his ears as he tasted her. Then, as though to correct herself, she said, “You needn’t—”