Prisoner of the Flames (Leisure Historical Romance) (34 page)

No. He would not frighten her. It would be best that she be taken by surprise if he was forced to do the thing he feared most. If that moment came, his thrust must be quick, and clean. It would be kinder if she were unaware. Could he do it? A
warrior ought have no truck with love
, he thought bitterly, wrestling with that.

“If we ride hard, we will reach the keep by nightfall,” he said. “There, you will be safe. We are not safe here—
you
are not safe, blind, and alone, if something were to happen to me, Violette. This is my land, and I know it. I know when it is safe, and when it is not. You must trust me. Now, enough! I shall put you back on the horse, and we will ride for Paxton Keep. I never should have let you do this. We waste precious time.”

“With no soft word…no comforting embrace…no lover’s kiss?” she cried. “You speak the right words, but you have changed toward me. I know it…I can
feel
it. No! I cannot bear it, this.” Breaking away, she ran through the
heather, her arms outstretched before her, her sobs riding the wind.

Robert ran after her, calling her name at the top of his voice. Behind, the horse he’d left grazing shied and complained at the sound of his footsteps and the sudden appearance of a flock of airborne thrushes their feet had raised from the tall grass.

Robert stopped in his tracks, his attention oscillating between the frightened horse ready to bolt, and Violette running headlong toward the brow of a lowland vale. It wasn’t a dangerous drop, but blind.…

“Violette! Stop.” he called at the top of his voice. “The land falls away…you’ll go over the edge!”

If she even heard over her sobs, she made no response, and cold chills gripped him, recalling the sight of her running in her blindness straight toward the burning forest beside the Huguenot village. If he hadn’t reached her when he did on that occasion, she would have blundered into the burning wood.

Caught between two urgencies, he hesitated, deciding. She wasn’t that far distant. He could reach her with ease on horseback, and he ran back the way he’d come. Without a horse to speed them to the keep, it would be days before they reached it over the rough terrain on foot.

It was too late. Frightened by the birds, the untethered horse galloped off before Robert could reach him, scattering irate thrushes dropping half-eaten berries in all directions. The sky was gray with them. It wasn’t until then that Robert spied the patch of bramble bushes where they had been feeding, obscured by the tall grass, where the heather thinned to the south. They had unwittingly disbursed them, and he loosed a troop of curses after them, and after the animal that had carried off their provisions as well.

The horse had galloped out of sight, but Robert wasn’t given long to lament the loss. A blood-chilling scream
turned him around, and he scanned the crest of the hill with frantic eyes.

“Violette!”
he thundered, scanning the perimeter for some sign of her, but there was none. She was gone.

T
he Scot raced over the uneven ground, his heart hammering
against his ribs, to the place he’d last glimpsed Violette. Traveling the brow of the hill, he scanned the valley below. The descent was steeper and rockier than he’d thought, snarled with bracken and thistles and all manner of ground-creeping vines. It was a moment before a splotch of indigo caught his eye. It seemed like a lifetime.

“Violette!”
he cried, slipping and sliding down the grade until he reached her, lying in a bed of thistles. Lifting her into his arms, he carried her lower, and set her down on softer ground beneath a rock that formed a natural shelter, addressing her sobs.

“Are you hurt?” he urged, feeling for broken bones, and picking the thistles from her hair.

“N-no…just winded,” she moaned.

“Your nonsense has cost us the horse—and our provisions into the bargain. Have you any idea how long it will take us to reach Paxton Keep afoot? What would have taken hours on horseback will now take days.”

“I…I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“Where did you think you were going?”

“Away from a man who doesn’t love me,” she shot back, “…where it matters not.”

Robert stared. How beautiful she was with the sun beaming down on her face, on her moist doelike eyes looking right into it. A sighted lass would have shielded her eyes from the glare. How fragrant she was surrounded by the
heather. What still remained of the blooms that she had gleaned before and tucked into her bodice and pockets had been bruised in her fall, making their fragrance more acute. It assailed his senses, and a throbbing sensation began in his sex. Her words haunted him.
“We are wed…
”. The worst of it was, she was right.

It was no use. Nobility and conscience be damned! The sight and scent of her, the malleable pressure of her soft flesh pressed up against his hard body had aroused him, and he seized her in a smothering embrace, and laid her back in the heather.

“This is not how I wanted it to be,” he said as she clung to him. “I wanted to have you in a proper bed, made with quilts and bolsters and pillows of down.”

“What finer bed could there be than these wonderful flowers,” she murmured, reaching for his lips.

Robert’s heart raced. He had fantasized about this moment since fate thrust them together, but she was a virgin. With no experience save bedding whores, he had no knowledge of the protocol of deflowering maidens. It would be awkward at best, but nothing would deter him now. It had gone too far for that.

Her hands groped his face, his body. Nothing mattered then but her feather-light touch, seeking to pleasure him, and the excruciating ecstasy that touch ignited. He had never felt the like. All at once Nostradamus’s words assailed his ears as if he stood beside them: “…Not whom,
what.
Love is your last hope, young ram…”

So this was love, this all-consuming, conscience-killing agony—this sorcery that made him forget the reason for his mad journey. He couldn’t remember when he’d last thought about his face. Time and place, purpose and resolve, meant nothing then. Lost in the magic of her embrace, and no longer able to deny the demands of his body, he ripped off his codpiece, and exposed his sex to her hand. When her
hand stroked it tenderly, it responded against her fingers, and he groaned.

“Does this seem like the member of a man who finds you…unsatisfactory?” he panted against her ear. “I think not.” He bared her breasts to his lips. They were full and round, just as he remembered from the Huguenot village, when his eyes had first feasted upon them. She shuddered with pleasure as his tongue caressed the nipples, first one, and then the other, tugging them erect until the rosy peaks hardened against his lips, and the surrounding puckered flesh was flushed with the bloom of arousal.

“There may be pain.” he said. “You are a virgin, and I have never taken one. I am not skilled enough to do it painlessly. It will not always be so, but this first time—”

Her fingers pressed against his mouth quieted whatever blundering words he might have spoken next, and when her lips replaced them, he gathered her to him greedily, sliding his hand over her belly and thighs. Inching the skirt of her frock up, he reached beneath. How soft her skin was, how supple and warm to the touch. The silky hair between her thighs was moist with the essence of her first awakening. He probed deeper to the engorged bud of her sex and the swollen folds beneath.

Arching her body against his hand, Violette spread her legs, and he struggled between them, acutely aware of the tender flesh he was about to penetrate. Her breath caught when his member touched it, caught again as he moved against her—slow, shallow strokes at first, taking her deeper with each thrust until she clasped him tighter, clinging to him—crying out as he entered her.

How sweet, how yielding she was. How perfectly they fitted together, just as he knew they would. Clinging to his back, she swayed to the rhythm of his thrusts as his hands roamed over her body in an unstoppable frenzy to know every inch of her and make it his own.

Blistering waves of pulsating heat raced through his loins. He felt as if he would shatter in her arms as her hands explored him just as his explored her, seeking skin beneath the layers of cloth that girded him.

On the brink of release, he slowed his pace in a vain attempt to prolong her pleasure, but she forestalled that by wrapping her legs around his waist, and took him deeper still—too deep to stave off the climax. He moaned as her sex gripped him in palpitating contractions, and cried out as the warm rush of his seed filled her. Though he froze in her arms, she moved against him still, until her own breath caught, then left her lungs in the shape of a deep, throaty groan, siphoned off on the wind that stirred the heather all around them.

Robert dropped his head down on her shoulder. His hot brow was running with sweat, and his heart hammered against his ribs—echoing through his body until the last shuddering eruption drained his strength.

She was his. There would be no more talk of being unsatisfactory. Robert heaved a ragged sigh.
What have
I
done?
said his conscience, come alive again.
Have I planted the seed of my heir in this exquisite body?
He couldn’t shake the feelings of unease. He wasn’t given the chance. Robert had scarcely withdrawn himself and gathered her into his arms, when a vibration in the earth beneath them clenched every fiber in his body. He stopped fondling her and listened, urging her to be still with a gentle hand clamped over the sweet mouth murmuring soft words in his ear.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“Horses—many horses,” he said. “They come this way. No—do not move. You cannot be seen beneath this ledge. If they are ours, we are safe home, if not…”

“Where are you going?” she cried as he fastened his codpiece in place and crawled toward the sound of the horses’ hooves.

“Stay, I said,” he charged. “I need to see if these soldiers are mine.”

“D-don’t leave me,” she murmured, clutching the sleeve of his tunic.

“I will never leave you, Violette,” he whispered, “but if these are my legions, and we let them pass us by…”

With no more said, he raised his head above the grass spears just high enough to observe the lay of the land. Disobedient to a fault, Violette raised hers also, and he shoved it down in the tall grass with a quick hand.

“Lie still, I say,” he gritted. “What use for you to rise? You cannot see.”

“I do not need to see,” she returned, “—only to hear.” She inclined her head toward the noise, grown louder now. “They are many,” she said, “not so many as a legion…not so few as a scouting party. More than a hundred strong, I think—
warhorses
, dressed for battle. Some are armored, others clad in leather. I hear the clinking of the one, and the thud of the other. Their masters drive them cruelly. Don’t you hear their complaints?”

Dumbstruck, Robert stared. Indeed, it was a column of great horses, more than a hundred strong—closer to two hundred—some sporting silvery armor that shone in the sun, others wearing pierced, fringed leather, studded with nail heads. Robert’s heart sank. The striped banner the standard bearer carried was red and gold.
Northumberland’s men!

“Are they your soldiers?” she said.

“What? You can’t tell?” he flashed wryly. Her perception never ceased to amaze him.

“You mock me now,” she pouted.

“No, my love,” he murmured. “I am in awe. I forget how your other senses are enhanced. You had them to a fault, just now, and no, they are not my men, they are the raiders I feared we’d come upon…from Northumbria. We must
be very careful now, Violette. Unless I miscalculate, they head for Paxton Keep. The only other fortress hereabouts is Hume Castle, and they are too few in number to take it. Unless more follow, they will strike hard, pillage, and withdraw to the border to report their conquest before regrouping. I have seen it many times. These leave a swath of blood behind. If my mother’s consort is the man I think him to be, he will make short work of them, but I have not been home in some time to prove him. In any case, he must be warned, and we must warn him. How, I do not know, but we must try. There is a forest on the far side of the vale. Once I am certain that these are gone, we make for it. There is a village some leagues west that we will reach by nightfall if we hurry. There, with the help of God, we will find horses.”

Violette cleaned herself with grass, and he helped her order her clothing, and hide her flowing hair beneath her cap and hood. That done, they waited what seemed an eternity to Robert before he dared lead her into the valley. The sun was sliding low in the midafternoon sky by the time they reached the wood. Safely inside, yet close enough to the thicket to see all comers, they picked their way west through the ancient pines toward the village that Robert hoped the raiders had passed by.

It was cool and fragrant inside the forest. Fallen needles crunched under their feet, spreading their heady pine scent. Violette breathed it in deeply.

“I have caused our misfortune,” she said, low-voiced. “If I hadn’t made such a scene and wandered off—”

“If you hadn’t ‘run’ off, when you did,” he amended, “we would have been out in the open, in full view, and they would have overtaken us, Violette. Do not reproach yourself. Just do not entertain the thought of doing anything similar again, now that we know what we are facing here. These men are dangerous, and I am useless against them—one against two hundred. They would slaughter us both.”

She said no more, and by dusk, the trees began to thin where the land dipped low again. To the south, a ribbon of water snaked its way through the valley, catching glints of the sun in the west.

“Soon we lose our cover,” he told her, “but the village I spoke of isn’t far. We will reach it by dark, and if we can find a mount, we’ll be at the keep by dawn. You must follow my lead, and do exactly as I say now, Violette; our lives could well depend upon it. These raiders carry swords and axes. I have only my
sgian dubh.”
She made no reply, though her hand tightened on his arm as he led her along.