The Holding - Book 1 in The Medieval Knights Series (29 page)

His eyes were shards that she would have avoided if she could, but he held her firm and forced her to face him and his words.

"Do you not know," he continued more calmly, "that Lambert's relationship with you is as water to blood? I joined my life, my blood, to yours, Cathryn, the moment we were wed. All that has passed before cannot wash away or dilute the blood bond we share."

His words were sweet, and she longed to believe him, but she could not. The stain of her sin was great, greater than even the force of William le Brouillard.

William read her rejection of his words in the darkness of her eyes.

"You are my wife, Cathryn, bound to me throughout this life. You share my blood, which I would shed gladly in defense of you," he stated. "What went before has no part in this; indeed, it is so weak as to be candle flame to bonfire. You are my wife," he repeated with heat. "You have never been so joined. Trust me," he implored. "I would show you the fire so that you will know what a dim candle has lit your world."

His words tore at her, beckoning her from the safe if lonely place she had constructed for herself.

"I would love you, Cathryn," he whispered against her hair, and then his hands moved upon her. They moved as she had yearned for them to move before, but now she was not in control and William would not be stopped.

Both hands in play, he caressed her bosom until both peaks throbbed against his palms. He played upon her nipples till she scarcely could remember a time when he had not had her under his hands.

With kisses deep he smothered anything she would have said to stop him, and, after so little a span of time, she could think of no words to halt his progress. His tongue plunged into her mouth, and he was welcomed. His seduction was both so rapid and so heated that she did not have time to be reluctant. He carried her away on a tide of his own making, and she found no thought in her head to dislike it. In truth, her mind was wiped clean of all thought.

And so William had designed.

She rubbed her hips against his as she arched into his hands, seeking, wanting, needing... and more. She had never known such searching.

This, William had known.

"Close your eyes, Cathryn," he ordered softly. "Do not think or reason now. Now is a time for feeling."

She obeyed him, and in the darkness the sensations became so intense that she thought she saw color explode and swirl in her mind's eye.

He flicked his thumbs against her swollen nipples as he flicked her questing tongue, and she groaned into his mouth.

The sound, coming so unexpectedly from her, shocked her into stillness. In truth, she was embarrassed.

"Do not stop yourself," he reprimanded in a whisper, his mouth against her throat. "You must relinquish control over your body."

Cathryn covered his hands with her own, wanting him to stop his erotic torment.

"And give it to whom?"

"To me, of course." He grinned wolfishly before kissing his way to an eager nipple.

With a giggle at his comical expression, she fell back upon the mattress. But the giggle turned quickly to a moan as he feasted upon her, his mouth moving from one small breast to the other until she was twisting and moaning with an abandon that she had not thought possible.

A vision of Lambert hovering over her sprang to her mind, and her eyes flashed open.

She absorbed the sight of William's black hair nestled against her breast. It calmed her.

"Speak to me," she commanded. She needed to hear the sound of his voice, a voice unlike any other she had known. A voice not Lambert's.

And he obeyed her.

"I will speak to you for the rest of my days of things great and small. You are my wife. Our blood, our bodies, our flesh, are one," he began, his words warm against her bosom. "You are beautiful, wife. Your skin is finer than any of the silks I labored to win... and so much more pleasurable to clean."

She giggled again, and the movement planted a nipple firmly in his mouth. He suckled at her breast in a way unlike any babe and then moved up to lick the rim of her ear.

"What else would you have me speak of?" he murmured, sending chills down her back.

"Anything," she murmured back, becoming lost in the sensation of his touch again. "Speak of anything; I would but hear your voice."

"And you shall," he promised, "as well as feel the touch of my hand upon your silken flesh."

His hand moved with husbandly authority down over the small swell of her breast to the dip of waist and abdomen and to the protrusion of her hip.

"You are well curved, wife, in the way a husband wants his wife to be curved."

With a fingertip, he explored the folds of her heat as his other hand rolled a nipple almost casually. Cathryn's legs began to tremble when he inserted his thigh between her knees.

"Do you tremble for me? Or because of me?" he asked softly before covering her mouth with his own in a kiss both deep and quick. Still, his fingers explored the most secret and vulnerable part of her, and the heat in her breast seemed close to a burning fire. His triple attack left her without any thought but the most fluttering kind, and the trembling worsened.

As he had intended.

"And your eyes," he continued, leaving her mouth and kissing his way down past her breasts, "are as dark and unfathomable as the wells of Nicaea, surrounded as they are by the golden sands of the desert, sultry in its heat. Such are you, wife."

And she was hot. He could feel her heat as if he stood on the desert sands at midday, and he burned with her. For her.

Cathryn writhed beneath his hand, moaning intermittently. William stretched her legs wider, positioning his bent knees between her thighs. With one hand he rubbed and teased the nub of desire that now rose against the soft folds of her womanhood. With the other he twisted and rubbed her reddened nipple, and with his mouth he feasted on her breast, nipping and licking in turn.

He would leave no part of his wife unattended. She thrashed beneath his hands, moaning continuously now, and clutching at his dark hair.

William abandoned her breasts. Cathryn opened her eyes slowly. William, without stopping his nether hand, turned her so that she lay upon her stomach.

This was new to her, and a frisson of fear shot through her. Brushing her hair aside, with his fingers ever in play, William kissed the full globes of her derriere.

Cathryn cried out softly and lifted her hips in the direction of her husband's mouth, thereby opening herself to him more fully. His drenched finger took advantage and inserted itself into her full length. Her drawn-out moan of pleasure and desire made him tremble.

With force, William flipped his wife onto her back, spreading her legs to their utmost width and holding her by her ankles. Cathryn, desperate for a handhold on the physical world that was falling away from her, reached up to hold the headboard with both hands and hung on tenaciously.

He watched her, her legs spread and quaking beneath his grip, her nipples red in the firelight, her yellow hair a tangled mat beneath her weight.

"You torment me, wife," he said hoarsely.

"Why... why," she choked out through parched lips, "why do you wait?"

Gray eyes of smoke and sword impaled her.

"I wait for thee," he answered in a rough whisper.

And, holding her wide to receive him, he bent to take her with his mouth.

Cathryn lost control quickly at that. She did not know exactly what he did—she did not want to know—but the power of it knocked the breath from her lungs.

She had never been more afraid.

"Nay! Stop! William, please!" she cried, trying to pull his black head from between her legs.

His hands released her ankles and she thought for a moment that he had heeded her, but it was not so. With his broad shoulders he kept her legs apart, and with his arms he pushed her back and held her down, her strength no match for his.

"Follow where I lead you," he commanded. "Release the reins of this horse you are riding and fly!"

His mouth closed on her again and she sobbed out his name, thrashing and jerking beneath his grip.

Her cry did not end, but became a long and unending wail that had nothing of fear in it, only passion—uncontrollable, consuming passion.

She clutched his hair, hanging on to him, unable to bear another moment of his delicious torture and eager for the next touch of his tongue against her, wanting it to end and wanting it to go on so that she thought she would tear herself in two with her conflicting desires.

Something, some weight, was building inside of her, crushing her, and again she sought the reassuring feel of wood beneath her hands.

Her wail increased in pitch. Her legs grew hard and stiff. Something was coming—something like being thrown off a cliff with no bottom, a cliff that faced the stars and was grounded in starlight.

And William would not relent. He increased the tempo of his tongue and brought his hands to her breasts, where, with rapid rhythm, he squeezed and pinched.

With a scream, Cathryn was hurled off the cliff, where she fell... and fell... and fell... with a scream never-ending. A throbbing pounded at the juncture of her legs with a force stronger and more demanding than the beating of her heart. She was certain that she faced her death—death from exquisite pleasure.

William rose up and plunged into her, and her scream, which was lowering, rose again, but this time she did not fall alone. This time she fell with her arms around the strong back of her husband.

When their frenzied thrusting stilled, William lay atop her, his weight a reassuring thing. Cathryn clung to his shoulders to keep him there.

With eyes wide and unblinking, she could only whisper breathlessly, "Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God..." with each panting breath.

William smiled into the sweetness of her hair and said softly, "You have a way of trammeling my vanity, wife. What you should be saying is, 'Oh, William, oh, William, oh, William.'..."

Hugging him closer still, Cathryn laughed as loudly and as long as she had just screamed her pleasure.

* * *

The echo of her cry drifted in the air of the great hall below as lightly and as lingeringly as the scent of costly perfume. Kendall looked up from the chessboard to say to his opponent, "Cathryn's part of the song is quite stirring. William is an apt instructor, is he not?"

Rowland reached casually across the board to cuff him.

Chapter 14

The dawning saw Kendall and Rowland ready to depart for the king. It would be no easy matter to find him, for he traveled constantly with his court, making his presence known in all the lands of his domain. It was a wise policy, and one Stephen could have put to better use. In the case of Henry, Rowland was not dismayed that their journey would by necessity be a circuitous one, for that was the main objective. He would cast wide for sign of Lambert, though Kendall would have no knowledge of it, thinking they searched exclusively for King Henry.

"We shall have no gay farewells and wishes of Godspeed, it seems," Kendall remarked with a mischievous smile. "'Tis unlike William. What think you detains him in his bed this mom?"

"Your head is thick, Kendall," Rowland stated calmly.

"'Tis well it is for all the pounding you give it with your meaty hand." He chuckled.

"Mayhap the pounding will soften it, much as with tough meat that must be pounded before releasing its juices."

"Ah, and now we speak again of why William remains abed." Kendall smiled. "'Tis that he must pound his wife so that she will release her own sweet juice."

Rowland's dark eyes tried to mask their shining amusement at Kendall's remark, and to help, he struck his companion a glancing blow upon his neck.

When Kendall rose from the dirt, he was smiling still.

"We had best be off before I am too bruised to begin."

"Yea," Rowland agreed, "and ride not at my side or I will be holding back a temptation that I find I have a little chance of besting."

Kendall laughed as he mounted and kicked his horse into a quick canter away from his traveling companion. They left the walls of Greneforde behind and crossed the river Brent without delay. The day was one of struggling sun, and Kendall's mood ran high; it was highly unlikely that they should encounter the king this day, and he looked forward to a day of roving freedom in woodland and meadow.