Conqueror (14 page)

When her body shuddered, Griffyn almost took possession of her right there. Spread her thighs apart with his knee and plunged himself into her wetness. The hot place between her thighs stroked against his erection, pushing, prodding, dangerous, perfect pleasure. Tongue, lips, sucking, teasing, the woman was
good
and he ached to slide her legs apart and make her fill the room with howls of pleasure. Her hands were around his neck, her thighs quivering on the tabletop, her body arching backwards into his invasion. She was ready.

A pounding erupted at the door.
Bham, bham, bham!

Someone was hammering at the door.

He ripped his mouth away. “Leave us,” he growled, but the door was flung open before the words were out.

“Pagan!” Alex ran in shouting. “There’s news!”

Griffyn spun, planting his body in front of Raven’s, his hand going reflexively for a non-existent sword.

Alex put his heels to wood. “Pagan?” he said more quietly, and hesitantly. His gaze avoided lifting over Griffyn’s shoulder. “There’s news.”

Griffyn nodded, but his words were soft-spoken and lethal. “Go. Now.”

“My lord.” Alex bent his head and retreated out of the door.

Gwyn sat up. They were frozen in their positions for half a minute, then he felt her shift behind him.

“I should just shrivel up and die now, really,” she said quietly.

He turned around. Poor idea. She was barely human, all hot desire and imagination. Quivering body, dark hair spilling over the table, tapestry beginning to part and reveal silky inner thighs, debauched she would be if she did but inhale again.

He spun on his heel and crossed to the opposite end of the room. Outside the storm had descended with riotous enthusiasm. Propping the heels of his hands on the wall, he dropped his head and stared at the floor, trying to calm his breathing.

A rustling drew his attention back to the table. He shifted his gaze to peer under the length of his outstretched arm. She was sliding off the table. Her feet hit the ground with a small thump.

“I believe ’tis my turn to say I am sorry,” she said.

He looked away and shook his head. “Nay. ’Tis I, again, who am at fault.” His muffled words rose up from between his outstretched arms.

“No.” He heard her coming, the soft padding of her feet, the slight whisper of the ridiculous tapestry trailing behind her. He spotted a blotch of red fabric out of the corner of his eye. “You told me,” she insisted. “You warned me.”

He took one hand off the wall and rubbed it along his jaw. He drew a deep, centering breath. “And
I
knew you were not one to listen. I should have left.”

Her hand touched his arm briefly, then dropped away. “I knew what was happening.” Her face flushed pink. “I mean, I did not
know
, but I…I am sorry. I will be…good.”

Feeling slightly relieved that they were talking again rather than wrapped in a lust-pounding embrace, he pulled back from the wall and looked at her skeptically. “Does that mean obedient?”

A smile pressed against the corners of her lips. He could see the dented dimple beginning to peek out again.
God
, to have a woman like this.

“I expect it does not, but we may hold out hope,” she observed dryly.

He chuckled low in his throat, feeling strangely weary after this battle of seduction. “Mistress, if ever you become docile, may God have mercy on all our souls.”

“He will surely spare a pagan.”

“He will surely damn me for what I was about to do.”

“But I would not.”

God’s truth, she was perfection. Brave spirit, intelligent eyes, body of a seductress, she was funny and sweet and like nothing he’d ever known before.

Not for him.

He turned and strode out the door.

Gwyn watched him disappear with long, self-assured strides, leaving her heart hammering in her chest so swiftly she worried for her health. She fell asleep with a smile on her face and no Ache in her heart for the first time in twelve years.

Alexander was waiting when he emerged into the narrow corridor. Griffyn said nothing as he pulled the door shut and started down the hallway. Alex fell into step beside him.

“How long were you at the door?”

“I wasn’t at the door. I was downstairs, intent on matters holy.”

Griffyn gave him a sideways glance as they thumped down the stairs. “Holy? Sounds serious. I wouldn’t have expected it of you, Alex.”

“I’ve been known.”

“To what?”

“Do what we all do—seek redemption. Or vengeance,” Alex added as they swung into the gathering hall.

His men sat in a small circle in front of a brazier, trying to keep themselves warm in the dampness permeating the room. Outside the storm battered against the walls. The wind screamed, then went silent, losing its voice momentarily. On the table, a candle flame flickered wildly, pulling upwards towards the ceiling, then squatting low and fat around the wick, huddling close for its own warmth.

Griffyn pulled a blanket over his shoulders and sat on a bench amid the circle of shadowy men. They all looked back at him, oddly quiet. Griffyn scanned their faces.

“Redemption or vengeance.” He turned to Alex. “Why do I have the feeling you are expecting one or the other from me tonight?”

“There’s news.”

“What?”

“Ionnes de l’Ami is dead.”

He lifted a mug and splashed ale into it. The only sign he’d even heard was his knuckles tightening into whiteness around the handle.

“When?”

“A fortnight ago. They’ve been trying to keep it quiet.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” he asked in a tone devoid of emotion. The foul traitor, the focus of his silent enmity for these seventeen years, dead? The man who had betrayed his father, forsworn his oath, stolen Griffyn’s home, broken his heart,
dead
? And not by Griffyn’s hand?

“His heir.”

“Heir? The son died years ago.”

“There’s a daughter.”

Griffyn stared into the flames. “I forget. What’s her name?”

“Guinevere.”

He entered the bedchamber long after the moon had risen and watched as she slept. Her hair drifted across his pillows like some dark, exotic silk. Her face lay half pressed against his pillows, her stunning body stretched beneath the blankets.

De l’Ami spawn.

God was cruel. Ionnes de l’Ami had been too many things to count. The worst of enemies and closest of friends. He had once saved Griffyn’s father’s life, deep in the depths of Palestine. He’d been the man whom Griffyn once called ‘Uncle’ and thought threw the very stars into the sky.

Griffyn collapsed onto a bench by the bed and leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, watching Gwyn but not seeing her.

He had been young back then, fewer than eight years to weigh against the centuries-old destiny awaiting him, back when de l’Ami had been ‘Uncle’ and the summers had been long. The laughing, grey-haired bear, Ionnes de l’Ami had known Griffyn’s destiny, cared for him more than his own father did. Taught him some of his earliest lessons: how to wield a sword, the right way to carve a duck, the importance of laughing at oneself.

Oath-breaker.

Liar.

Betrayer.

His hand went to the key around his neck.
Your inheritance. I am sorry
, Griffyn’s father had whispered, then died. About time, too. Past time.

His father’s half-mad ravings those last few years had been awful, and unbelievable. His violence more awful and unbelievable yet.

Griffyn no longer had time for the rages of old men, deformed by greed and cunning too long practiced. Everoot was his inheritance, and this little iron weight around his neck was surely not the key to the castle. That rested in his name and sword arm. And he was finished with people standing in his way.

He felt like pounding the wall. He smashed his fingers through his hair and sat forward, grinding his elbows into the tops of his knees. What, then? Ionnes de l’Ami was dead, so he was to wreak his vengeance on a woman who was two at the time of the betrayal?

To what end?
he asked himself bleakly. Stake her up by the fingernails and she still wouldn’t be the one who’d hurt him.

He stared down at his fists.

Every truth he’d ever believed, every person he’d ever trusted, every lesson he’d ever learned, had turned out to be false. How could she ever be the exception?

Everyone got infected with the sickness of soul. Everyone who knew of the hallowed treasure in Everoot’s vaults got corrupted, deformed. Ruined.

Which brought him sharply around to Marcus fitzMiles. Endshire was sniffing around Everoot’s skirts, was he? If men at their best were greedy and corrupt, Marcus was a worm in the muck. Let him try to batter the Nest—she had defences Marcus hadn’t dreamed of.

Griffyn sat back and crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes narrowed in on the candle flame. The old King Henri had put Marcus’s father, Miles, into a baronage because the wily royal dog saw the virtue of keeping his enemies close to hand. It was a prudent move. Not prudent enough, though.

First father, then son, had taken several vows to honour the old king’s daughter Mathilda as successor, as had the rest of the English nobility. Then, when it suited his purposes, Marcus had turned to King Stephen. As had the rest. And, when it further suited his purposes, he set himself to imprison beautiful women and stock his own coffers forthwith.

Henri fitzEmpress would be coming to take back the land of traitors exactly like d’Endshire. Griffyn suddenly decided he’d ask to ride in the van the day the army rode north and set fire to fitzMiles’s keep.

His gaze drifted back down to the sleeping beauty in his bed. When had he last laughed from the depth of his gut? When last had his blood pounded and spun his head from pure, perfect passion? When had he last been surprised, intrigued, impressed by a woman? Not in all the bloody long days of his life.

He would burn d’Endshire to the ground.

Half an hour later, as he watched with a half-drawn lid, his thoughts far from his bedside vigil, her eyelids fluttered open.

It was the crash of thunder that awakened her. Gwyn dragged her eyes open. A pale, uncanny light illuminated the room. Not yet dawn, but that was all she knew for certes. Such an awakening could be hours away, or a moment. Or never. The darkness was secretive and alarming.

Where was she?

She lifted her hands into the air. They were pale, shadowy things in the firelit chamber. Moving her head to the left showed more darkness.

“Where am I?” she whispered.

“Safe,” came the murmured reply. She looked to her right. A dark hulk slumped on a bench against the wall, but his eyes glinted firelight as he watched her. Everything rushed back.

The Nest besieged, Marcus’s absurd, dangerous proposal, the attack on the highway, her saviour, Saxons and Hipping, dream-like wandering through hidden paths. What a mysterious night, clogged with phantasms and caped heroes. And searing kisses, straight to the centre of her soul.

This last thought swept the cobwebs away entirely. Pushing aside the heavy weight of furs, she swung her legs out.

Her sore muscles had stiffened while she slept, and the sudden movement sent them screaming in protest. She dropped back to the pillows with a small cry.

Griffyn watched from the bench without moving. “Lie back,” he ordered in a quiet voice.

She nodded obediently. The soft, rough sound of hair moving against linen accompanied her nod. An arc of hair puffed above her head on the pillow, fine strands of black silk that reflected the glimmering candlelight in the room. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks puffy and creased red from the pillow. A rather large bump on her head had swelled to noteworthy proportions already, but Griffyn’s experience with battle injuries told him it would be fine. Her hand fluttered towards her head and found the nub.

She sat up again, but more slowly this time. “My head?”

“Was knocked right well, but you’ll be fine.”

Gwyn nodded doubtfully. She examined the room, then turned her gaze back to him. “I can never repay you, Pagan.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” he said woodenly and pushed to his feet.

Gwyn perched back on her elbows and watched him, unable, even had she wanted, to take her eyes off his striding, vaguely predatory form as it paced the room. There was something different about him, altered from before her sleep, something that not only made her think of rocky cliffs, but about being dashed against them. She slid back under the covers.

He suddenly paused in his restless march and pinned his grey gaze on her. “So, who are you, lass, and how came you to be alone on the king’s highway?”

“I told you: Lord Endshire is too eager a suitor.”

“And you were going to the Abbey to await rescue?”

She paused. “I have already been rescued.”

“What do you think Endshire wanted with you?”

“My money, for certes,” she said tartly.

“Have you so very much?”

“Not anymore.”

He kept watching her with the leonine regard, and some perverse part of herself felt both afraid and aroused. “You squandered it?” he suggested dryly. “Marcus will weep when he hears the news.”

“The wars weep with it.”

He turned away. “They weep with blood, mistress.” He crossed to the brazier to stir the coals. His face was backlit by the orange glow, and the planes of his face deepened, so he looked sculpted from some smooth stone, hard and impenetrable. Yet thus far, he’d been nothing but gentle.

Almost.

Gwyn felt a small sliver of unease and slipped further under the covers, peering at him down the slope of her nose. “They do indeed. With blood and money and the wails of women whose husbands have died.”

He looked over his quite broad shoulder. “Have you lost a husband?”

“None would be satisfied with me.”

He looked back at the coals. “A father, perhaps?”

She sat up a little straighter. “Aye. How do you know that?”

He didn’t answer.

“You men may keep your wars,” she said sharply, urged on by some grating force inside. “My father fought far too many in the Outremer, and thought them rousing things.”