Knight of Love (9 page)

She couldn't fight him; he was easily twice her bulk. But nor could she simply allow him to bed her.

He gave her a sad smile, as if reading her thoughts. “I know, lady. Life is not fair.” He pushed up to stand, and the cot heaved. “Let me pour you more wine.”

She accepted more of the ice wine. Why not? Perhaps it would help. Then he turned from her and began to disrobe matter-of-factly. His coat was already off and one cuff undone; he started in on his vest and shirt.

“What are you doing?” she sputtered, startled into splashing drops of wine across her boy's trousers.

He looked at her over his shoulder, a smile again dimpling his cheek. “Preparing for bed. I'm afraid the tent leaves little space for privacy. It seems only fair that I should be exposed to you, laid bare to your inspection.”

“I have no need for any inspection, I assure you!” She licked wine off her fingers.

He finished unbuttoning the front of his shirt. “Germany has taken so much from you; I will not claim any right to privacy.”

His logic seemed twisted somehow, but her exhaustion and the wine coupled to offer some appeal to his argument. The distraction of that emerging male flesh worked its effects as well as he shrugged out of the shirt.

So he stripped himself for her inspection to abase his dignity before her?

In the dim light of moonshine filtering in through the tent walls and from a single candle on the table, the planes of his body were a dark muscled mass of strength and will. She sat on the bed, sipping her wine and looking at him, caught in such queer dread and confusion that she knew not what to think.

Except that he
was
beautiful. Dark, fierce, angled planes of a chiseled face. A hard, massive body of corded muscle. A skull near shorn of hair, highlighting the bulging slope of shoulder into neck. A clean white bandage wrapping his upper arm. A lightly furred chest of dark hair angling downward across a tight abdomen.

When he was down to trousers and bare feet, he sat beside her on the narrow bed and brushed a loose strand of hair from her cheek. “Just feel, lady,” he whispered in her ear. “Let yourself feel.”

It was too easy. She would not give in to this man. She kept her gaze directed straight ahead. “No,” she said. “I don't want this. You are not my husband, and I do not give you leave to bed me.”

“I know,” he said soothingly. “I know. You are most cruelly importuned by this fool of a knight who insists he must bed you as his cherished bride. Yet you have no choice but to give in. You cannot fight him. He is surrounded by his loyal men. Circumstances force you to allow him his wicked way with you. Perhaps it would be best if you just lay very, very still and let him kiss his way across your most delightful person.”

She knew not whether to laugh or cry. “You are a beast.”

“My precious bride, there is a beast within all of us. Mine will not hurt you.”

“You will. You do.” Her fists curled on her lap, and her breath caught on a sob.

“
Nein
, never,” he whispered.

He shifted over and picked her up to lay her carefully onto her stomach on the bed. Her braid caught under her. He pulled it free and began to unplait it, fanning the hair free to hang over the side. His long fingers rubbed circles against her neck and through her hair against her scalp.

“Relax,” he said. “You must have been living on horseback to travel so far in a week. It's hard on the back, when you're not accustomed to it—even if you hadn't been healing from that blackguard's lashing.”

Her boy's shirt was easy enough for him to unbutton from behind. He got it undone and eased it down her back and arms while she lay belly down. She kept her eyes tightly shut. The earl's weight shifted off the bed. The sound of a bottle being unstopped preceded a waft of scent from over by the trunk—rosemary, with a hint of patchouli?

“Allow me to rub some oil into your back,
Liebling
. It will help with the final healing. Your skin is still somewhat bruised and must be tender.”

“Scented massage oil?” she said. “A rather exotic item for a soldier on campaign, isn't it?”

“One shouldn't give up all of life's little luxuries.”

“Do you and the men take turns trading massages?”

He snorted. “That would be quite the sight. A fine reputation we'd garner, as fierce revolutionaries.” He poured oil into his palms and warmed it before sliding those huge hands up and down her tense back.

When he moved onto her shoulders, she had to bite her cheek against the sigh threatening to escape. Knots of tension etched deep into her muscles began to loosen and melt under the rhythmic pressure of his hands.

“It was my mother who packed this bottle for me,” the earl continued, “back at Ravenhold in England. She made it herself, using rosemary from the kitchen gardens. She told me it's good for your skin, especially after bathing. I admit I quite like it.”

He worked his way slowly down her spine, gently kneading the muscles on either side with long, slow strokes, down to the curve of her buttocks and around to her hips, reaching just under the waistband of her breeches. He kissed each of her remaining bruises, then licked his lips. “You taste delicious,
Liebling
,” he said. He turned around on the cot, pulled off her boots and stockings, and spent an equal time on her feet, ankles, and calves. By the time he rubbed the last scented and slippery circles across the pads of her toes, she'd allowed herself a fleeting thought about whether marriage might even be worth it.

“Would you do this to a wife every night?” she asked.

He bent over to kiss her cheek. “It would be my greatest honor and pleasure, lady. Do you enjoy the feel of it?”

“You do seem to have a certain skill at massage,” she admitted, looking up at him over her shoulder.

“Roll over, then,” he prompted her, with a wicked grin, “and I'll show you more of my talents.”

She swallowed. “Ravensworth—”

He widened his eyes innocently. “I'm only half done with my services. Surely you won't stop me now?”

He stood to blow out the candle before she could think how to compose a reply to that impossible question.

“Do you like music, lady?” His new query came accompanied by the sound of him stripping off his trousers and smalls.

“Music? Yes, of course.” She wondered for a bewildered moment if he were proposing musical accompaniment to his forced seduction.

“You didn't want me to sing earlier. Someday I
will
have to sing and play my lute for you.”

“Why do you play the lute?” she asked, realizing distraction was his aim.

“You needn't sound so incredulous,” he said, without offense. “Why shouldn't I? And German
Lieder
are beautiful. Not so beautiful as you, of course, but very stirring nonetheless.”

Ignoring his compliment, she fished about for an answer to his question. “Surely singing is not the typical pastime of a gentleman warrior. And nobody plays the lute anymore.”

“I play the lute; I like it.” He padded back to the cot, sounding amused. “Nor is knife throwing the typical pastime of a lady,” he said as an afterthought.

In the dark of the tent, he climbed into the cot and pulled them both under the linen sheets and soft woolen blankets. The narrowness of the mattress left no room to move away from him. She considered leaping up, trying to run, fighting him—but to what end? His size and strength far outmatched hers, and the camp housed almost fifty soldiers, all loyal to him.

The moment was his.

Damn him.

He lay on his side behind her, one arm slipped beneath the pillow cushioning her head, his other arm brushing her hair off her face and twirling circles on her oil-slick shoulder.

His bare flesh pressed against hers; he was completely without clothing, while she was still in her breeches. Heat radiated off his body, but it did nothing to stop the trembling that shook her frame.

He reached behind him to the floor and came back a moment later with the bottle of scented oil. He poured it into his hands and then cupped her breasts.

The breath whooshed from her at his intimate touch. “Ravensworth, stop!” The sensation was overpowering as he set up a rhythm of firm slow strokes across the sensitive peaks of her breasts—spikes of pleasure warring with her resistance and fear. She tried to scramble away from his touch, but his length lined her back with immovable force and his arms ringed her.

“Hush, Lenora, I won't hurt you. And you must call me Wolfram. Please, I am Wolfram, your husband. It is only me. You mustn't fear me, not ever. You are so beautiful. You feel so wonderful, so precious, here in my arms.” He whispered the wicked words in her ear, licking and nibbling at the whorls there as he flicked at her nipples and rolled their slippery tips between his fingers.

She knew not what to say, what to do, how to process the sensations of his slick exploration of her body.

When he slid one large hand down her belly on a trail of oil, down into the front of her breeches, a whimper escaped her—or maybe it was a moan.

He shimmied the breeches down her hips, pushed them off her legs. More oil drizzled onto her flesh, across her buttocks and belly. The air around them was warm from his body and redolent with the scents of the oil and their flesh. Their bodies were slick with the oil.

He slid a hand over her hip, sliding across her inner thigh into the folds of her mound. Her hips arched in helpless reflex at his touch, and she had to bite her lip against the sound.

Definitely a moan.

Her stupid traitorous body
. She didn't want to give in to him, give in to this. Perhaps he was right, that under other circumstances they might have met and happily courted. They could have had a wedding night. But not like this, on a battlefield, against her will. “I can't do this!” she said, on a sob. “You take too much!”

“I know,” he whispered again in her ear. “The world is cruel, and women often suffer because of it.”

“You make it worse, with this sham marriage and seduction!”

“I understand. In your place, I'd feel the same. No one wants their choices taken away from them.”

“Then stop, you oaf!”

“I cannot.” His voice sounded heavy with genuine regret. “It must be this way, lady.”

Another moan escaped her as his long fingers leisurely explored her most secret parts, her despair and pleasure twining together into she knew not what. She had no framework, no prior experience, to grant her understanding of tonight.

This moment was not of Kurt, she knew—not his hellish schemes of pain and humiliation and fear. But Ravensworth—Wolfram—controlled the play all the same, and her will made no difference. She could not, would not, consent to having her choices taken away like this.

He seemed to read her thoughts. “I know,
Liebling,
you are right. Lovemaking should never be by force. I'll spend a lifetime atoning for tonight, however you deem fit to will it.”

He shifted against her, sliding his free arm under her shoulders, hugging her from behind with one hand across her breast and the other playing with the slickness between her thighs. She felt him from behind—that hard part of him. He was long, thick, insistent. The smooth head of him nudged into her oiled folds from behind. But he didn't enter her. He seemed content to play about the entrance to her sheath instead of thrusting home, as she imagined must be his desire. Just above, his fingers played leisurely at the focus of her pleasure. He circled her flesh there—
there
—with slick firm pressure. His other hand toyed with her nipples.

He seemed in no hurry at all. His warmth was everywhere around her, the hard length of his massive frame pressed against her back, his shaft stroking shallowly between her legs, his muscle-roped arms hugging her from behind. All the while, he purred at her ear, sucked gently on her earlobe, and whispered the most shocking nonsense praising her beauty and slick heat.

Despite her resistance, her pleasure grew. When it got too much—the tantalizing pleasure swirling across her flesh and through her loins—she tried to pull away sharply, on a spike of fear and anger. “No, this is not fair. You take advantage. I did not agree.”

But he tightened his arms. There was no escape. “
Liebling,
we do it together.”

“Then mount me and have done! You don't need to touch me like this, to try to get me to . . .” One did not talk of such things, but she had some sense of what he was after. She'd touched her own body in bed at night, under the covers, enough to know something of how this strange intensity worked. That he wanted to wring a response out of her as a way of bending her to his will. “Forcing pleasure on my body does not mean I've consented to this sham marriage.
I don't want this!
”

“I will not take your maidenhead without giving you pleasure in return.” She heard the stubbornness in his voice, grasped something of his notion of honor at work.

“Don't you understand? I don't want your pleasure! I won't give you the satisfaction of thinking this is in any way reciprocal. You only want to force pleasure on me to make yourself feel better, so you can fool yourself into believing I've granted some sort of agreement to your scheming. I refuse to give you that satisfaction.”

“
Nein,
lady. That's not it at all. The satisfaction can be all yours. You are in charge here. I serve your needs, your pleasure. Think of me as your bed slave, yours to order to bring you pleasure. Your body wants the release I can give it. That is only normal. Such pleasure should be yours,” he said, gently cajoling as his clever fingers swirled. “I know your will is opposed to the marriage; allowing your body to command mine to your pleasure doesn't change your will.”