By Arrangement (36 page)

He shook his head. “I had not decided what I would do once I got here, but I expected to come back in either case. If I had given the Comte the port of Bordeaux, and he had gone there, Edward would never have suspected me or anyone else even if the whole of France waited for him. Half of their army is already in the south dealing with Grossmont. The rest might have received reports of the ships sailing down the coast, or have gone to reinforce the siege at Angiullon down there. I fully expected to return, assuming that Theobald would permit it.”

His steady gaze and quiet voice, his face so close to hers, disconcerted her. Her resolve began loosening. She pushed his shoulder so that she could rinse off the soap, and he turned away.

“But now Lady Catherine has told Edward about you,
and so you cannot go back. Why would she do this? Is she angry about the property in Hampstead?”

He didn't respond for several moments. She suspected that he debated his answer. She braced herself for more lies.

“Lady Catherine and I have a long history. The property is a small and recent part of it. She did me an injury when I was a youth. The evidence is beneath your fingers now. Some months ago I responded in kind.”

She rocked back on her heels in shock. She looked down at the strong back and the diagonal scars on it. Despite her determination to treat him with the same indifference he felt for her, her heart tore.

She didn't need to hear the story, because she could imagine it. Her fingertips traced the thin, permanent welts. She pictured him being flogged as a boy. She saw Lady Catherine, secure in the immunity that her nobility gave her, ordering it for some perceived slight or crime. Not in London, of course. Even as an apprentice, he would have been protected there.

He had responded in kind. Did that mean Catherine's own skin bore scars now? She hoped so.

She felt a wave of tenderness for the youth who had been so harshly abused. She barely resisted the urge to kiss those welts.

This is madness
, she admonished herself.
He wants no sympathy or tenderness from me. I am no part of his history or his revenge. I have no role in the pageant unfolding now, either. At best I am an inconvenience with which the Comte has complicated his plans.

“You say that you have not decided what to do, David. What will happen if you will not give the port tomorrow?”

She was glad that she couldn't see his face. If he lied to her, she didn't want to know.

“The Comte has done everything possible to ensure that that isn't much of a choice anymore. Catherine did go to Edward as I said, but the Comte's surprise at the news was false. He sent her to betray me, to force my hand in this. Her plan to keep me in England so that Edward could capture me was all her own, however. Still, he sought to force me out of England, and he took you so that I would have to come here. With my life endangered in England, he knows that his offer becomes very attractive.” He paused. “However, kin or not, I do not think that he will allow me to leave here alive if I refuse him.”

She wished that he had indeed lied. “Then you have no choice.”

“Of course I do.”

She felt sick. On the one hand, status and wealth awaited. More than he had ever expected in life. Senlis was his right and his due and he should take it. But, dear God, men whom she knew and loved would ride those ships to France. Her brother, her King, Thomas and others … and now he had all but said that Theobald would kill him if he did not cooperate.

It should not matter to her. He should not matter.

She almost embraced him and begged him to find a way to take both choices and thus none at all.

She returned to the stool. “Were you truly almost captured?”

“No one challenged or questioned me. The armor proved a good disguise, since there are knights moving everywhere in England. Even here, it helped me travel without suspicion.”

“The coat of arms on your shield?”

“Do you like it? I could hardly pass myself off as a knight with a blank shield. Fortunately, I met no heralds who would know it was new and unofficial.”

“You followed me north, then?”

“Aye.” He shot her a piercing look. “Do not worry. He was not harmed. Although when Sieg threatened to make him a eunuch, I thought he might die of fright. Since I saved him from that, he will probably be glad to lay down his life for me now.”

She glanced to the hearth, not much caring if Sieg had made Stephen a eunuch, whatever that was.

“We were further delayed when Oliver insisted on taking the girl with Stephen under his wing and trying to save her from her family's wrath.”

She barely heard him. She went over to the hearth. A bucket of water warmed there and she picked it up and carried it the few steps to the tub.

She noticed David looking at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Didn't you hear me? Aren't you jealous? I said he had a girl with him.”

She narrowed her eyes. “For a clever man, you can be an idiot!” she shrieked, pouring the water over his head. She upturned the bucket, slammed it down to his ears, and stomped away.

She stared at the wall, blind with fury. She heard him leave the tub and dry himself. A few moments later he came up behind her.

He touched her shoulder lightly.

“You still do not believe me,” she spat, shrugging off his hand. “You have told me lie after lie, while I gave you nothing but the truth from the beginning. Do you assume that everyone lives the kind of deceptions that you do?”

“I believe you. But I wonder if you still love him. You never said that you had stopped.”

“I told you it was over.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“You should have just asked me, then, if you wondered.”

He stepped closer and spoke quietly. “I did not ask you about this, just as you did not ask me about France, and for the same reasons. We have not spoken to each other about the things which might pain us. I never asked you, because I feared the answer. I hoped that time would deal with it. But we have run out of time and I am asking you now. Do you still love him?”

She closed her eyes and savored the sound of his beautiful voice and wished that its quiet tones were not asking questions which led down this path. She feared where it might lead.

Still, he was right. Finally, today, he had given her honesty. She should not start her own deceptions now. But honesty about them, the two of them, could well leave her bereft of everything even as it destroyed the fragile resolve with which her anger had conquered her passion and love.

“I no longer care for him at all and doubt that I ever loved him.”

“Why do you doubt it?”

Because I know what love feels like now
, she almost said.

The silence pulsed as he awaited her answer. She suddenly felt terribly vulnerable. This was the second question that if answered honestly would demand an admission of love from her.

Why not just tell him? Admit the truth, and then walk out the door. She grimaced. A grand gesture totally lacking the hoped-for drama and impact. He would simply let her go, and then proceed to live the life he chose for himself. He did not care enough to be touched by either the admission or the rejection.

“Why do you believe me now about that meeting, David? Did Stephen tell you the truth? Did you believe that fool when you hadn't believed me?”

“He told me, but he would have sworn to being chaste from birth under the circumstances. It did not matter because I already believed you. Whenever I thought about that day, I kept seeing a beautiful girl running into my arms. Full of joy, not guilt or fear.” His hands gently took her shoulders. “What was it you wanted to tell me then?”

Again a probing question.

He suspects
, she realized with shock.
His mind's reflection has seen what his anger did not
.

She became acutely conscious of his warmth and scent behind her. The silence tightened as something else flowed from him. Something expectant and impatient.

She ached to say it, but she thought about the things she had thrown at him that afternoon in their chamber. She remembered how she had avoided him and his affections during their betrothal. She imagined the apprentice being tortured at the will of the noble Lady Catherine.

She certainly could not tell him now. Even if he put some small value on her feelings for him, he would think that his change in fortune from merchant to baronial heir had made her find sudden love.

“I do not remember,” she muttered.

He stayed silent, softly stroking her arms. She closed her eyes and absorbed his touch and closeness. His exciting intensity surrounded her in a luring, seductive way. Despite the knot into which the day's revelations had tied her emotions, despite her decision to leave this stranger, she drew amazing comfort from his slow caress.

“I need to know some things from you now,” he finally said.

“No story I can tell will be nearly as interesting as yours.”

“Were you harmed at all?”

“Nay. Not really. We rode for days and my rump
got sore from the saddle and my skin red from the summer sun, but that is all. At nights we stayed in rude inns and all shared one hot chamber, but the men did not bother me, although one looked at me too boldly for comfort. The food was horrible and the sea trip frightening, and I arrived looking like the worst peasant, and smelling too ripe for decent company, but I was not harmed.”

He turned her around. He had thrown on a loose, long robe, like something a Saracen might wear. She looked up into his face and saw things hiding beneath his calm expression that she had never witnessed in him before. Worry. Indecision. Doubt. He looked much less contained than he had in the bath.

He touched her face. “If I do this thing, you need not stay. Very soon Edward will accept that you were no part of it. You can return home.”

She gazed at him, her love twisting her heart. This small contact of skin on skin was enough to awaken all of her senses to him. “That is why you put the properties in my name, isn't it? So they could not be confiscated.”

“Aye. There was always the chance that Edward would learn enough to suspect me, no matter what my intentions. I did not want you left dependent if this dangerous game went wrong.”

“Why didn't you wait? To marry? You said that this began long before we met. Long before you offered for me. Why complicate things thus for yourself?”

Even as she said it, an eerie sensation swept through her. A knowledge that she did not want to face stretched and stood tall and presented itself squarely. An explanation for one of the first and most enduring questions she had ever had about this man stared at her.

Dear God.
Dear God
. Even that had been a lie, an illusion! It hadn't been much, but at least, as her love sought
a compromise with her life, it had been something to hold on to.

His fingers still rested on her face. She looked desperately into his blue eyes and sought all the awareness she had ever had of him during their closest intimacy. She gazed through the veils and intensity, trying to see his soul.

“You never offered for me, did you?” she said. “It was Edward's idea. He proposed this marriage, for my sake perhaps, but also to get money out of you. You could not refuse him.”

He took her face in his hands and bent closer. He looked straight back at her. The control and restraint fell away and he permitted her to see what she sought. He let her look through the shadows and layers, down to his depths. Naked of all defenses and armor he met her inspection. Her breath caught at the emotions suddenly exposed to her.

“Nay,” he said quietly. “I saw you and wanted you and paid Edward a fortune to have you. And I did not wait because I could not. It was selfish of me.” His thumbs stroked her cheekbones. “I am out of time, Christiana. I need to know my true choices, and what I gain and what I lose. If I do this thing, are you going to stay with me?”

She barely heard his words because the stunning truth written inside him made the events which had created this marriage suddenly irrelevant. She could not turn from his warm, binding gaze. She did not want to lose this soulful connection, this total knowing that he offered her. She doubted that he had ever before let anyone, even his mother, see him thus.

Everything was reflected in those deep eyes. Everything. His guilt at endangering her. His fear of himself. His hard hungers and conflicting needs and dark
inclinations. But illuminating all of those shadows, warming their chilly depths, flowed a sparkling emotion that she recognized for its beauty and joy and salvation. Her own love spread and reached out to meet it gratefully. His lips parted and a glorious warmth suffused his gaze. An exquisite, anguished relief poured out of him.

“Will you stay?” he repeated, his face inches from hers.

“I will not leave,” she whispered, for there could be no other answer after what she had just seen. “Noble or merchant, I will stay with you.”

He pulled her into an embracing kiss. She grasped his shoulders and lost herself in a warm rush of poignant intimacy. For a breathless, eternal moment, their bodies seemed to dissolve within the dazzling brilliance flowing between them.

The connection and knowing was so complete that she felt no need to speak of it. But David did.

“What did you want to say to me that day, Christiana?”

“Couldn't you tell? I was sure that you would see it at once.”

“My anger and pain blinded me to everything else. I stepped off that boat with a head and heart full of love for you, and Oliver's tale cut me like a dagger and made me a madman.”

She lifted her eyes to his, rendered speechless by this calm articulation of what she had just seen and felt in him. In speaking first, he made it easier for her. He had always done that, every step of the way. Out of sympathy and understanding at first maybe, but later because of his love.

She touched his face. She let her fingers drift over the tanned ridges of his cheekbones and jaw, and caress his lips. “I wanted to tell you that day that I was in love with
you. I realized it when Catherine delivered me to Stephen. The love was just there, very obvious and completely real. I knew that I have loved you a long while.”