For Love And Honor (32 page)

“It’s nothing,” Joanna called. “I stumbled
when I got up to latch the window shutter. My shin hurt so much
that I couldn’t answer you at first.”

“
I know
I’m not supposed to speak to you, but I am concerned.
Shall
I call Lady Rohaise?”

“No need to trouble her,” Joanna replied.
“It’s only a bruise. It’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“As you wish.” They could hear the sound of
footsteps moving away, descending the first five or six steps below
Joanna’s chamber.

“What’s he doing, watching Samira’s chamber
door, too?” asked Alain. This supposition was confirmed by a sleepy
question poised in Piers’s voice and a laughing reply from the
guardsman. Alain fervently hoped that Piers would leave the matter
alone and go back to his feigned sleep instead of trying to come to
his aid.

“Get off me, you brute,” Joanna ordered.

“
Not just
yet.” Hearing no further comments from either the guard or Piers,
Alain let himself relax a bit. As he did, he became intensely aware
of Joanna’s body beneath his. Her room was warmed by braziers set
at either side of her bed, and after his precipitous entry the open
shutter had swung back until it nearly covered the window again,
thus blocking the inflow of cold outside air. Alain’s fingers were
warmer; he could feel his nose and cheeks again,
and in the center of his being there was a
lively stirring in response to Joanna’s closeness. She felt it,
too.

“You disgusting man,” she hissed, trying her
best to push him off her. “How I hate you.”

“You loved me once,” he said. “I love you
still.”

“You do not. If you did, you would have
rescued me long before this.”

“It was impossible. I’ve been away from
England”.

He saw
her eyes blaze blue fire, saw her mouth open to shout at him.
This
time he risked it. He
brought his mouth down on hers, claiming the kiss he had
wanted for so many years.

She fought him. She pulled his hair and
pounded her fists on his back and thrashed her legs about until he
clamped his thighs over hers and held her still.

He paid
no attention to her muffled cries of outrage or to the sobbing
moans that came later. These were the lips he had dreamed of, this
was the body he had ached for, this was Joanna, his beloved, in his
arms at last, and he did not let her g
o for a long, long
time.

“Have you finished?” she asked coldly.

“I will never be finished with you. That was
but a kiss. I want all of you, everything you have to give me.”

“If you want anything from me, you’ll have to
take it by force,” she snarled.

“If that was true, you’d have called the
guard in here when you had the chance.”

“
Oh, I’ll
call the guard,” she said, “but not until I’ve heard the wonderful
excuse you must have for leaving me here to rot, after you promised
to come back and save me.” With that, she began to struggle
again.

“Have done, woman,” he growled. “I’m not a
boy any longer, and it was hard work climbing up the tower
wall.”

“
It’s too
bad you didn’t fall and break your neck,” she told him, trying to
get her wrists out
of
his grasp.

“The Joanna I once knew would never have said
such a cruel thing to me.”

“I am much changed, my lord.” She drew a
long, sobbing breath. “Did it never occur to you to take me with
you when you fled?”

“Would you have gone with me?” he asked,
beginning to be angry at her continued rage. “Or would you have
stayed to weep over poor Crispin?”

“
He was a
better man than you,” she declared.
“You
left me to my father’s kindness. Crispin
gave me a son.”

“I’ve met him. The resemblance is
terrifying.”

“You left me.” Her voice cracked and broke.
“You ran away and never came back for me.”

“I’m here now. Joanna, I never stopped loving
you, or thinking about you, but I had to wait to return until the
time was right.”

“
Eighteen years?
A long wait, my dear, dear lord.”

The sarcasm in her voice lacerated his
tightly controlled emotions. This was not the way he had imagined
their reunion. He looked at the woman lying beneath him, lying so
still that he began to suspect she was planning some new trick to
bring the guard back to her door. Still holding her wrists at each
side of her head, he moved, stretching his full length on her,
thigh to thigh, breast to breast, all of her, soft and curving and
infinitely desirable, all of her beneath him.

“I have dreamed of your mouth for every day
of those eighteen years,” he said, and kissed her again. This time
she did not fight him. In fact, she lay inert, letting him caress
her mouth with his.

“Joanna,” he whispered. “My dear love.”

“I hate you,” she murmured. “Don’t do this to
me. Let me go on hating you. It
gives me strength.”

He would not stop. He kissed her until she
began to respond, until he dared to release her wrists and her
hands crept around his back to hold him closer to her. He kissed
her until her lips opened and she took his tongue inside her hot
sweetness.

“You did that once before,” she said
afterward. “You kissed me in the herb garden and put your tongue in
my mouth and I thought my heart would stop beating.”

“Joanna,” he said, most reluctantly leaving
her and sitting up. “I would gladly spend the whole night making
love to you, but that’s not why I’ve come.”

“Then why are you here?” she asked, with a
return to her earlier coldness toward him.

“I have much to tell, and much to ask of
you,” he said. “Will you listen?”

“I will, but only because you said I might
have a chance at freedom.” She rose from the bed, smoothing her
skirts. She gave him an odd, considering look, one side of her
mouth tilting upward in a half smile. “Think well, Alain. Do you
really want to free me? I am no longer the innocent, meek creature
you once knew. What I have endured has changed me, and I cannot
revert to what I once was.”

“I did notice the change,” he said ruefully,
rubbing the back of his neck where she had hit him and looking at
the wine pitcher on the floor.

“You have changed, too,” she said, her eyes
still on him. “You’ve grown a beard, there’s grey in your hair, and
your shoulders are so broad that I’m surprised you were able to get
through the window.”

“It wasn’t easy,” he admitted.

“Will you go back the same way?” There was
just the shadow of a smile in her eyes.

“If I live long enough,” he told her.

The humor went out of her. She sat beside him
on the bed, folding her hands in her lap.

“Tell me what you want to say, Alain. I will
listen without interrupting.”

Quickly he recounted all that had happened
since he and Piers had fled Banningford, leaving Crispin dead in
his young wife’s arms. He described their careers in Sicily under
King Roger, Piers’s marriage and his wife’s death, his own refusal
to wed because of his love for Joanna. He finished with an account
of their return to England and their hopes of discovering the
identity of Crispin’s murderer.

“So, Piers has a daughter,” she said when he
was done. “I am surprised he would bring her here, into such
danger.”

“She is a strong-minded and resourceful young
woman.” He smiled, thinking of Samira. “I don’t think he could have
prevented her from coming with us.”

“And you say you never married. But I presume
there were women.”

“A few. None of them was you.”

“Well, I need not protest my fidelity to my
dead husband,” she said, an edge of bitterness in her voice, “or
the purity of my affection for a young man who kissed me once. I
have had no opportunity to sin. It’s too bad, really. There were
children I would have liked to have. Children…” Her voice trailed
off into a sad silence.

“I’m sorry.” His hand rested on hers.

“Do I look much older to you?”

“You appear to be remarkably young. You have
no gray hair; there are only a few tiny lines around your eyes;
your skin is as soft and smooth as I remember.”

“That’s what Rohaise says, but I wanted to
hear it from you. I suppose it’s because I haven’t done much
living. I have been like an insect trapped in amber, immobilized,
frozen in time.” She removed his hand from hers and refolded her
own hands in her lap. “You said you have much to ask of me. Tell me
what you want.”

Taken aback by her coolness, he did not
respond at once.

“You spoke of a chance for my freedom,” she
prompted.

“To prove that I am innocent of Crispin’s
death,” he said, “and that Piers is innocent of complicity with me,
we have to discover who the real murderer is.”

“I see.” There was no sign of emotion on her
part.

“There is also the question of why your
father has kept you here, in this room, for so many years.”

“It’s perfectly obvious,” she said.

“Do you know who killed Crispin?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve known since the beginning. The
problem was, I forgot some of the details. I suppose it was because
I was so upset by seeing Crispin all covered with blood. And then
he died in my arms. Living through something like that makes small
incidents seem unimportant, and so I forgot part of that night.”
She rose, to walk about the room. “But, confined here for so long,
I have had more than enough time to remember and to work it all
through.”

“Tell me everything,” he demanded.

“I require a promise from you first.”

“Joanna, I will give you anything you want.”
He went to her to take her hands and hold them against his chest,
over his heart. “I love you. I have never loved anyone else.”

To his dismay, she took her hands out of his,
folding them in front of her in the same way in which she had
folded them in her lap. Alain wondered if she did so to keep them
from trembling. In her dark gown with her hair pulled back into a
tight braid she looked like a nun, severe and unapproachable. He
felt a chill in his heart as he began to understand just how
different she was from the girl he had once known.

“I want justice,” she said.

“You shall have it.”

“More than justice, I want revenge.”

“
Joanna—”

“
A good
man was deprived of life,” she went on as if he had not spoken. “My
son was made fatherless, and I
– I have lost eighteen years of my life. My youth is gone.
All that I might have been, or seen, or done during those years was
taken from me. I want to see the guilty punished.”

“You have my word on it.”

“
You
don’t under
stand. I want to participate. I
will not sit here, alone, waiting
patiently while someone else does what must be done. You will
include me in your plans or I will not tell you what I
know.”

“Your silence won’t get you out of this
room,” he reminded her.

“Until an hour ago I thought only death would
get me out of this room,” she replied. “If you will not do as I
want, then nothing has changed for me. Well, my lord, am I to help
you, or are you to leave Banningford at first light and never look
back?”

“Your strength of will and your courage shame
me,” he murmured. “You will not relent, will you?”

“No.” She met him with a look he knew well.
He had seen it often enough in men about to go into battle. He
could not refuse her.

“All right,” he said, adding, “Joanna, there
isn’t much time. I have to get down that rope and through the
postern gate before sunrise.”

“I understand.”

“I wish you would be a little more
emotional,” he said.

“As I was when you first arrived in my room?”
She allowed herself a smile. “Perhaps after I have emptied my heart
and my thoughts of the knowledge of foul villainy that has
fermented inside me for so many years, perhaps then I will find
room in myself for some gentler feelings. But first, the story as I
know it. This is what happened.”

It took her a while to tell everything. Alain
interrupted, asked questions, made her repeat portions of the
story.

“My God,” he said when she was finished. “I
have no doubt that you are right about this, but how terrible. How
twisted, and stupid.”

“It’s the result of madness,” she said.
“Telling it to you, I began to realize that something must be done
at once; otherwise my son will become involved. I am glad you have
come back, Alain.”

“Unfortunately, I have to leave you now,” he
said. “I have stayed much too long.”

“You promised I could play a part in your
scheme,” she reminded him.

“So you shall. If I possibly can, I will
return tonight. Will you be good enough to leave the shutter
unlatched for me?”

“Not only that, I’ll give you wine in a cup
instead of straight out of the pitcher,” she said, letting the
corners of her mouth tilt upward.

“One day soon, I hope to hear you laugh
again,” he murmured, touching her face. He went to the window
niche, then stopped with one knee on the padded seat. “If anything
should prevent me from coming to you this way, we will make an
attempt to get you out by the stairs. If someone you do not know
opens your door and says, ‘Alain sent me,’ go with that person
without fear.”

“The guard outside my door tonight is Owain,”
she said. “He’s Baird’s man, yet I think he is sympathetic to me.
He is the only man-at-arms who dares to break the rule against
speaking to me. He might prove useful to you.”

“It’s good to know you have someone among the
men to care what happens to you,” he said, adding, “I must go.”

“Do not forget, Alain, you promised I could
be part of your plan. You gave your word.”