Conqueror (29 page)

Maybe it was an hour later, maybe less, when she finally curled into the bed beside him and fell into a dreamless sleep. It was still dark when Griffyn awoke. Still lying down, he scanned the bedchamber in his mind. He was home. Everything was as he’d dreamed. And it was hollow, like a gourd scraped and mashed. It was baffling. And infuriating. And he had the vague sense that Guinevere was both part of the reason and most of the cure.

It was almost as if she sensed his thoughts, for she stirred beside him in the bed. She mumbled something, then quieted again.

He looked over at her, tumbled beneath the furs, still clothed, her dress bunched up around her hips, her hair still in pins. A few strands had pulled free and were curled above her head on the pillow, like dark winding roads spied from a hilltop. She shifted again, flinging her hand out. It made contact with his chest but she didn’t wake. The back of her hand stayed on his chest for a moment, then slid down to the furs.

What was he to do? Home with a mission denied and a wife who hated him, and he was starting to lose control. Guinevere was far too much woman for this marriage to be tranquil or predictable, but that was not the problem. The problem was, could he keep making the leap between the ledges of passion and respect, humour and hatred, when such dizzying chasms echoed below?

And if not, then what?

More to the point, the problem was, she was de l’Ami’s daughter, and he did not know if he could ever forgive her for that.

But he wanted to. Enough cold remove, enough of wanting and never finding. Guinevere was everything he’d never known to wish for.

He rolled to his feet and pulled on his chausses. The air was cold. He placed another piece of wood on the fire and walked to the window. The shutters were swung wide, and he stepped into the stream of chalky light triangulated on the floor, leaning his shoulder against the wall. He stared out. The winds had passed, giving no rain, but leaving the world reverent and hushed in their wake.

He must have stood there for half an hour. Only twice did he move, both times to glance at the bed. A candle flame flared up, crackling fiercely before settling into a steady burn. The stream of white moonlight moved slowly across the floor.

“Griffyn?”

He didn’t turn.

“My lord?”

He angled his head slightly in her direction.

“Is all well?”

The question was so sweeping, the realm of possible answers so vast, he had a sudden urge to laugh. Instead, he nodded.

“Sometimes when I cannot sleep, I walk the walls.”

Her voice was quiet but her words had none of the indolence of sleep. He looked over his shoulder. “How often do you find the need to disturb the sentries?”

“Often.”

He turned the rest of his body and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Oft enough that they have told me I must bring them something from the kitchen each time I do,” she said softly. “Thus I pay for my disturbance.”

He flicked his eyes to the window again. “The storm does not come.”

He heard the soft rustle of furs. “Will you walk with me, my lord?”

She was standing in her rumpled green gown, her hair in utter disarray and falling down her back. He pushed off from the wall.

Wordlessly he picked up his shirt and tunic and threw them over his head, then sat on the edge of the bed and began pulling on his boots. Gwyn was sitting on the other side, putting on her own shoes. He could feel the bed dip and shift in small movements each time she bent over. His side of the mattress lowered more significantly when she rose, and he glanced over his shoulder.

Her back was to him. The loose sleeves of her tunic fell up around her shoulders when she bent her arms and fumbled with her hair to reassemble the mess of curls and knots.

“Don’t.”

Her hair spilled down over her shoulders as she simply dropped her hands and walked to the door. It was a brief climb to the doorway that led to the rooftop. The night was chilled, crisp and clear and full. Griffyn held the door for her, his arm stretched over her head as she ducked beneath him and stepped out onto the northern ramparts.

“God’s in His Heaven when I am up here,” she murmured, pulling her cape around her shoulders.

Griffyn ran his palm along the wall as they walked, feeling its cold solidness against his skin. It was a good castle, a good home. He let his gaze drift across the open plains. Curving in a smooth arc from west to east was a darkness that heralded the forests. But the trees were far ahead, and closer to hand stretched open fields and meadows, brown and russet in the darkness.

Further down, below the crest his army camped on, he could see the darkened humps of village buildings. He thought he could make out the farthest one, the apothecary shop. It was one of two places he had most loved as a boy. The stables and the leech, he mused. Horses and herbs.

A sudden memory leapt to mind. He’d been young, wandering on horseback on a lazy autumn evening after a hard day’s ride, his beloved pony Rebel under him, his dog Tor at his side. The smells of heather, dying evergreen needles, and the distant sea had been pungent, making him linger in the woods even when the sky began to turn purple. His father would be furious, his mother worried, but Griffyn didn’t turn his pony back yet. He was eight years old and set free upon the world. His father might have spawned him, his mother might have borned him, but ’twas this land that pulsed through his blood.

He’d paused his pony in the river. He could still feel the bones of Rebel’s withers between his legs, the flat, firm feel of equine shoulder blades under his knees as the pony bent his muzzle into the cold water. Tor did the same, lunging into the water and splashing his reluctant playmate, barking and leaping in circles around the snow-white pony. Angling a dark, liquid brown eye at the nuisance, the pony swept her hoof through the burbling creek, drowning the puppy in an unexpected wave of water. The dog squeaked in amazement and sat down in the middle of the stream, puppy face dripping with water, utterly brought to heel. Griffyn had laughed aloud. He remembered knowing, even as a child, his life, at that moment, was as perfect as it might ever be.

“I used to feel that way too,” he finally said.

The longing in his words drew Gwyn’s gaze, but she didn’t speak. They walked across the ramparts from west to east, silent. The sentries they passed nodded wordlessly, and the only sound was the wind sighing at the stones and an owl winging down from a tree branch to chase a hare racing across the field.

By unspoken agreement, they stopped near a merlon and let the wind pull at their capes. The moon was close to setting. Potent energy crouched both in the night and in the man beside her. Gwyn looked out over the distant hills, hills that she’d always thought of as her own.

Upon a time, there had been no question of what had gone before her, of how many other eyes had once passed over the lands and seen what she saw, felt what she felt. There had been no past, no connection to anything larger or other. What was had always been. But now everything was changed.

Griffyn had haunted these ramparts too, perhaps balanced on the stones in a perilous display of courageous idiocy as she had at seven years old, until her mother had pulled her down, holding Gwyn with one hand, her heart with the other.

Griffyn had walked these ramparts long before she had, ridden across the moors and felt the breeze at his back, just like she had.

Griffyn had surely watched sunrises from here, and laughed at thunderstorms, feeling secure in the bulwark of solid stone that lay underfoot. Just like she had.

What a sad place the world was, spinning itself out while people played at God. If she were taken from this place, her heart would break into a hundred jagged pieces, sharp edges of sorrow that would poke at her forever. This was her home.

And it was his too.

“I am sorry,” she said dully.

The dark head beside her lifted. He’d been resting his chin on his outstretched arms and staring across the plains, but at the sound of her voice, he turned.

“Sorry for what?”

“For all of this.” She swept her hand in a wide arc, indicating the world around them.

He paused. “For the nighttime, or just the fields?”

His gentle jest confused her. “For the wars, for the taking and losing.” She waved her hand. “For what was done to you, because you had to leave this beautiful place.”

A tear spilled over and sped down her face.

“Why, lady,” he said in surprise, stepping closer. “’Tisn’t your fault. I mayn’t act it at times, but I do know that much.”

“But if ever
I
was forced to leave,” she explained through the tears that were now tumbling down her cheeks, “I would be so heartsick I think I might die.”

He looked at the tears, then back into her eyes. “Indeed, I thought I might. But I didn’t, and I am home again.”

“And I am
glad
,” she said almost viciously, gritting her teeth. To snatch one small moment of happiness amid all the sorrow of the world was but a small victory, but good, and she felt possessive of it as she had towards Jerv earlier, only this was more primal.

“You are glad?”

“I am glad,” she vowed in a harsh whisper. “In all this wreck of a world, that one man can return to his home, ’tis a thing goodly beyond imagining, and I am
glad
.”

Grey eyes roamed her tear-stained face. “Well, lady, you have astonished me once again.”

“Again?”

“Again. As you did outside London, as you did in the bailey, as you did at dinner. I have known you for the length of two days, and you have already given me more to think about than a year of campaigns.”

She gave a watery laugh. “Mayhap that is because there is not much to think about in a battle. Strike here, trample there. Let me see,” she pretended to muse, resting her chin on her curled fingers, “would it be better to cut his heart out, or stick his head on a spike?” She dropped her hand. “These are not the kinds of things I would think would greatly tax one with a mind.”

“But you,” he said, reaching out to run the pad of his thumb along her jaw, “will tax me greatly, I suppose.”

“I will try not to.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

He shook his head, a dark swing in the night air. “Just be what you are. I think I will enjoy getting to know you.”

Whoever I am is changing swiftly
, she decided,
for I have never felt like this before. Except when I was with you
.

His beautiful, chiseled features were dark and dangerous, the scar slashed across his cheek even more so. Whenever he moved the slightest bit, a ripple of rock-hewn flesh disturbed the soft material of his tunic. But this she had steeled herself against when he first arrived, his raw masculinity. It could never have turned her heart. It was his eyes that were her undoing. His battered, beautiful eyes.

“Griffyn. I did not…”

“Did not what?”

She stared out over the battlement wall. “Did not mean for them to capture you.”

He absorbed this in silence. Then, “What?”

“I did not send them after you, Marcus and his men. ’Twas a terrible accident. I did not tell them your name apurpose, nor where you were.”

“You didn’t?”

She shook her head, still looking over the wall. “I tried to…”

“You tried to what?”

“Stop them,” she said in a voice so small he could not possibly have heard unless he was standing directly at her back. Which he was.

“You tried to stop them,” he repeated softly. His fingertip brushed against the sensitive skin at the base of her neck.

She inhaled sharply.

“Why?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

His mouth pressed against the nape of her neck. Hot shivers danced out across her skin, like stars. “I know one thing, Raven.”

“What?” she squeaked, because his fingers had slid around her waist.

“You’re going to like what I’m about to do to you.”

She turned to him just as a gust of wind blew through the embrasure they stood beside. Inside the billowing hood of de l’Ami green spun a sea of ebony curls, framing her upturned face, her cheeks beginning to blush pink from his words.

Griffyn slipped his hand into the warm nest of silk and flesh and cupped the nape of her neck. This intelligent, complicated woman who fairly pulsed with passion was going to be his wife. And suddenly, that did not seem so terrible a thing.

He laced his fingers through her hair, tipped her head back, and kissed her very gently. She shifted, leaned her head back, and opened for him.

There was nothing else to wait for. He deepened the kiss at once, no longer teasing or testing, but taking possession. His blood was charging, hot and slow. His tongue lashed at her, drawing out small whimpers and pants, inflaming him further.

His hands moved restlessly over her body, slipping into the curve of her waist, cupping her rounded bottom, pushing up her spine. And every move he made, Gwyn bent into it, her hands running over his shoulders and chest with equal fervor.

He crowded her against the wall, groaning as he nipped at her lips and neck. Her breath exploded out in a hot rush. Restrained power vibrated in the muscular thighs trapping her against the wall. A pulsing, wicked heat was pounding in her groin, her body aching for more. Slow and hot, the greedy little urges started pulsing between her thighs, making her push her hips forward into his.

“Not here,” he said hoarsely, and grabbed her hand.

How long it took to get back to their room, Gwyn had no idea. If they passed sentries, she didn’t know it. If the castle had caught fire and was burning, she wouldn’t have felt it; her own body was ignited into flaming heat.

But when they entered the bedchamber, everything came into heightened awareness. The low burning fire, the faint scent of wood smoke, one candle still guttering in its holder. The way her skirts rustled against her thighs. The way he was looking at her.

“I am not in an easy way tonight, Guinevere,” he rasped.

“We have ne’er had an easy way of it yet, Griffyn. Just let us be.”