By Design (21 page)

Which only made his brooding seem darker.

He noticed her watching him. It pulled him out of his reverie. The way his mouth hardened made her wish it had not.

“What did you want with that knight, Joan?”

He had seen. His deep mood had to do with her. He was jealous. “I arrived early, and went to watch the sword-play in the practice yard. I only complimented him on his skill.”

“A long compliment.”

“I asked him some questions, too. It was not what you think.”

“What do I think, Joan? That you looked like some loose woman fawning over a handsome young man?”

The insinuation made her burn with embarrassment, and with indignation. “So you want me loose only for you? You should have made that clear.”

The glint turned steely. “Aye, only for me. It has been clear enough, even if we never speak of it.”

She decided that not speaking at all might be a good idea.

Except he would not permit that. “What questions did you ask him?”

“About his horse. His life. Such things as that.”

“I would not be evasive, Joan. I have learned to tell when you lie.”

“If I lie, it is because you are too curious.”

“You asked about his life and his horse. Did you ask about his purse?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you examined the man as if you sought to buy him.”

His insight stunned her. How much did he suspect?

“Except it could not be that, could it?” he continued. “Even if you harbored some childish plan to avenge your family, you could not afford such as he.”

Childish!
“Of course not. See how silly you are being.”

“Of course, you might think to pay with other than coin, but you did not have to wait three years for that. Unless you have suddenly grown impatient.”

“We spoke the usual pleasantries, that is all. What I said to Sir Gerard is not of your concern. It had nothing to do with you.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Lightning flashed in those blue eyes.

He angled the wagon off the road, beside a copse of trees. He jumped down and came over and lifted her out. She hurled objections at him, but he ignored her. Face set like stone, eyes sparking, he dragged her in among the trees. “Aye, it has nothing to do with me. You tell me that often. Where you are going and when you will leave and what you will do and what is in your heart has nothing to do with me.” He pulled her against an oak, into his arms. “But it has everything to do with me, because this does.”

He kissed her. Hard. Furiously. A kiss of demand and
claim. An assertion of the ability to possess her passion if he chose.

It frightened her. Not the heat, nor the iron hold of his embrace. Her reaction frightened her. For all of her outrage and shock, that kiss defeated her at once. Even as she struggled, her body grew pliant. The inner voice of denial faded, drowned out by an onslaught of visceral affirmation. Those wings of her womanhood took to flight and soared, soared, glorying at the dizzying height made possible by the winds of his storm.

Nothing mattered. Not her misgivings or her plans or her decisions. That world ceased to exist when he kissed her. It always had. She had no resistance against the beauty of that. Her heart longed to have the hard things obscured.

He ended the kiss, but did not release her. He rested against the oak, and pulled her closer. He eased his knee between her legs until she straddled it, her toes barely skimming the ground. His eyes glinted as he saw her reaction to the firm pressure.

“This part of your life definitely has to do with me, Joan. To my mind that means the rest of it does too.”

“You have the poorest part, Rhys. The weakest way to make a claim.”

His knee kept pressing her, keeping her arousal alive, reminding her of where this might have gone. Should have gone. “It is the oldest way between men and women, pretty dove. The first way. And if you did not join me in this pleasure, I might not think to claim more of your body or your heart or your mind.”

He spoke of so much. Of what this might be. Her heart twisted. It could never happen, not with her. The first way, the oldest way, the way essential to the sharing he meant, was blocked to her.

She had to make him understand how hopeless this was. How painful. “It is only pleasurable up to a point for me,
and then that dies. I have told you from the first that I can not give you what you want, that I do not like men in that way.”

She expected more surprise. Instead he only wrapped her tighter with his arms, and looked down at her. A long, thoughtful gaze. Too long, too thoughtful.

“Did you give yourself to your betrothed, Joan?”

The question shocked her.

“Did you?”

“Nay.”

“So you were a maid when he died?”

He prodded at something bruised and sore. She recoiled from the intrusion.

“I do not think that you are a virgin now, though. Am I wrong about that?”

She gritted her teeth. “Nay. Now are you contented? Will you leave this alone?”

“I want to know why you are afraid of this. Why does the pleasure die?”

She fought to control the dreadful emotions that his questions tapped, but they started oozing into her heart.

“Did something happen when that army came? After your men were killed and you were unprotected? Is that why you want to earn coin and meet a champion? Do you dream of avenging the loss of more than your family and home?”

She could not answer. She could not face him. She wanted him to stop asking about this. Wanted it so dreadfully that she desperately raised her face to kiss him. To distract him.

He accepted the offering, but did not kiss back. He broke it gently, as though he knew what she was about.

“Joan, were you raped?”

Mortification poured through her. Utterly engulfed her. Her throat and eyes burned as she struggled to
suppress the onslaught of disgrace. Fear and disgust and deadening sadness blew through her.

And anger, too. At Rhys. He could not leave it alone. He had to dig and dig until he undermined her feeble defenses. He had to throw her back into it, just to satisfy his vanity that her denial was not a repudiation of him.

Barely controlling the pointless tears that she had sworn never to shed again, she roughly pushed out of his arms. She faced him, more furious than she had ever been in her life.

He wanted to know? He needed to know? Then let him know, damn it.

“It was not rape. I was not forced.” She started striding back to the wagon. “I went willingly. I sold myself.”

C
HAPTER
14

T
HE DEVIL IN HIM
had taken over, and now he sorely regretted it.

Joan rode the rest of the way in utter silence. Unmoving. A figure carved in stone, with all of her humanity drawn in beneath a hard surface.

He turned and glimpsed her eyes. Shadowed with pain, they peered inward and noticed neither his concern nor her surroundings. He knew that look. He had seen it before, on a dark-haired woman carrying a dead bastard in her womb.

They got back to the city an hour before sunset. Joan hopped out of the cart when he stopped by the stable, and scurried into the house. He unhitched the wagon as Mark arrived to take care of the horse.

“What is this?” Mark asked, lifting a large twine sack. “It is awful heavy.”

Rhys had forgotten it was there. “It is clay.”

“Clay? For Joan? Let me go tell her. She looks unhappy. This will brighten her up.”

“Nay, hand it to me. Let her be alone now. Take care of the horse, and then go visit your friend David.”

Rhys carried the bag into the garden and put it on the table. Since the sunlight was still strong, and since Joan needed her privacy, he uncovered the statue. Angling it low, he straddled the bench by the face and took up his fine rippler to finish the mouth.

Ursula, the virgin martyr. She had died rather than lie with the pagan leader of the Huns. Eleven thousand young women had perished with her, in the name of Christian purity. He decided that he did not like Ursula and the other virgin saints much, even if he loved this statue. What message did her story give to the Joans of the world who had to bargain with the devil in order to survive?

He lost himself in the work as he had hoped he would. And so he did not notice her in the garden until she set the cup of ale on the table.

Despite her unhappiness, she had gone to the tavern. The fresh ale had become a little ritual, and every evening it waited for him in the hall when he returned. If the night had grown cool she usually built up the fire in the hearth there, too, and placed the master's chair nearby. He rarely used that, though. He normally carried the ale back into the kitchen, and spent the time before supper with her and Mark.

He glanced at her face, and her sadness tore at his heart. He had guessed her story, but he had never suspected how raw her soul still was.

Too raw. She had accepted the things she could change, and had ignored the ones she could not, but that did not weaken the worst sorrows. A grief that was not embraced would have its day eventually. It slowly ate its way out of its hiding place, destroying whatever lay in its path.

She began to return to the house, but noticed the sack.
He watched while she considered it, and poked its side curiously. She peeked inside. He returned to his rippler.

Nothing. No sound at all. Finally he looked over.

She still peered into the sack, but her expression had lost its deadness.

“You bought this for me?”

“The potter from Kent had extra. He was willing to give me some.”

“It is very fine clay. And it is a lot.”

“You can put some in water to save, nay?”

She pulled the sack down and stared at the lump, as though she did not remember what to do.

He got up and found a wide board. He set it across the other end of the bench. “You can work it here.”

“I have no kiln.”

“For a price, George will let you use his. And even if you can not fire them, it is the craft that gives satisfaction as much as the product. At least it is for me.”

“Aye, for me, too.”

He returned to his place. She contemplated the clay. Clawing away a big chunk, she carried it to the board. “It is too stiff. It requires kneading.”

Ignoring his presence, she unlaced her gown and slipped it off. Bare-armed and bare-legged, wearing only her shift, she straddled the bench and sank her hands into the grayish mass.

She did not lose herself in it, though. He might be gone, but her own thoughts were not. They silently quaked through the air. He felt her sadness as surely as the tool in his hand.

The clay proved very stiff. Almost unyielding.

“It needs a little water, nay?” he asked.

“Probably,” she said dully.

He rose and got some from the well, brought it back, and straddled the other side of the board. He dripped
some on, and then lent his own hands and strength to the chore.

They kneaded together in silence. Her movements were rote and not very effective. Her bare knees peeked out from the hitched up shift, but she neither noticed nor cared.

“You knew,” she muttered.

“I guessed. I was not sure.”

“How?”

“Things that you had said. Bits here and there. I am somewhat practiced at hearing the thoughts behind a word or two.”

“So you had to ask, because you hoped it was not true.”

“That it is true matters not to me, Joan. Not in the way that you think.”

She glanced up with complete disbelief, then slammed her fist into the clay. “Well, it matters to
me
.”

He debated his course, and hoped that he chose the right one. “When I was a boy, just younger than Mark, a woman I knew caught the eye of a powerful man. He was the son of the local lord's overlord, and accustomed to having what he wanted. She refused him, but he did not relent. She was freeborn, of a craftsman's family, but it did not matter.”

She did not look at him, but her fingers stretched tensely through the clay.

“He might have just caught her alone and forced her, but that was not his way. Instead he made her suffer. Not just herself, but her family. He saw that no one sold them food or gave them work. He threatened everyone who might help, but he never directly hurt her. All of her kin went hungry, even the children.”

Her hands stopped. She stared at the clay. “What did she do?”

“What could she do? She went to him. Willingly, as his
vanity wanted. But there was no will in it at all. If he had held a knife to her throat, it would have been more her choice than it was. Nor did he welcome her as a lover. He made her bargain for her family, so she would know his power. It was the first of many degradations.”

She closed her eyes. A tremor shook her body.

He slid his hand over hers. “For what were you forced to bargain, Joan?”

She barely moved, but the hand under his clawed into the clay. “For Mark,” she whispered. “For my brother's life. He would have killed him, and no one else could stop it.”

Jesus
. He grasped her hand tightly, as much to contain his own emotion as to soothe hers. She did not have to say who “he” was. It had not been some knight drunk on victory, but the man who flew Mortimer's banner. “You had no choice, darling. See that, and know the truth of it, and never say that you sold yourself again.”