Lady Merry's Dashing Champion (18 page)

"I had it reframed," Giles said, his voice expecting some response.

"Yes, it's lovely," Meriel acknowledged, her eyes staring at the picture, not daring to say more.

"I know you were very young when your mother killed her— er, died, but I have never understood why you hated her...." He allowed his voice to trail away.

So this was a portrait of Felice's mother. But why did Giles hesitate about her death? Had he almost said she killed herself? Why? What had happened?

Giles raised the lantern so that she could see the portrait better.

Meriel stared into the woman's face, the eyes, a half-parted mouth. The resemblance to what she saw in her own mirror was obvious, or probably what she would see in a few years to come. Was she looking into the face of someone she should have known? Someone of her blood? No, it was all too fantastical. Ladies of position and wealth did not leave their children on cathedral porches. It might happen in a play about a lost princess waiting for her prince to rescue her, but not in life. She shook her head to rid herself of such thoughts, and real tears started, amazing her. She was not prepared for their coming.

Giles saw and his heart was stricken. He had never seen this tenderness in Felice. He wrapped his arms about her, and she was smothered against him. "Felice," he whispered, and sought her lips, tasting the salt of her tears. Her lips trembled against his, and he almost lost himself completely.

Meriel could not stop kissing him, realizing that she had longed for this moment since those first hard, angry kisses at Whitehall. She wanted those lips in warm, urgent flesh as she had first tasted them in hard marble. Her heart pounded faster, forcing heat to rush to her limbs and face from the furnace of her womanhood. Surely, he would feel it and stop. She clung tighter to hold him, to feel his lips taking hers as she had thought they could from her first sight of them, clung tighter to draw him deep into her and cool this demanding flame.

Giles lifted his mouth first, breathed deeply and stepped away abruptly. He rebelled against believing what he saw and more against what he felt. Desire had been a trap for man since Adam. Pulling away, he silently vowed to plant his seed until he got his heir. Then he would let her go. But, he had to admit, he would release her with a great deal more regret than he had ever imagined.

Meriel knew she had done something very wrong. How did Felice kiss him? Perhaps not as insistently, or with such bold demands. She had no idea, and she could not think rationally with her insides a melting torrent of guilt and yearning. She tried a jest to cover her vexation. "'Tis true the church has banned kissing on the Lord's Day?"

Giles nodded, his eyes everywhere but on her face, his voice barely controlled along with his desire to smile at the jibe. "The belief is that kissing leads to other carnal acts."

"I certainly hope so."
Hey, well, that might not be what Lady Felice would say, but it is true, and I need truth.

Giles laughed aloud, and the sound reverberated down the long picture gallery. He laughed as he had on the ketch, but this time with her, because suddenly Meriel could not stop laughing, too, as if a terrible tension were released.

She walked on before he did, fearing she would say or do the wrong thing, if she had not already done so. She could sense Giles studying her as he would a new book that held a secret, trying to understand what she could not explain.

They came out of the long portrait gallery and stood in front of her apartments.

Meriel halted by her door, scarce breathing, though she could not stop her mouth. "Does the plank end here, my lord?"

Giles rested his hands on her shoulders, his long fingers curling into her back. "I swore I'd never bed you again, Felice."

"Yet here we are." She touched his sleeve. Meriel caught at her breath, excitement racing through her, and out of her mouth came exactly the question she needed to know the answer to. "What changed your mind, Giles?

"I never changed my mind," he said huskily. "I'm not thinking with my head."

And indeed she noticed by the lantern light on his tight fawn breeches that another part of him was urging him to act, and, she suspected, most uncomfortably, too.

She threw open her bedchamber door.

Giles held his body away from Felice's, watching to see what she would do now that they had entered her bedchamber. For some reason that he did not know, he couldn't fall on her like a ravening beast. Though he knew she would despise him for treating her with tenderness—indeed, he would despise himself—he could not remember her wide smoke-gray eyes and bring himself to ravish her with no regard for her comfort and need. He had never been such a lover and would not be one now.

Moreover, Felice had responded to him in the picture gallery. Like a virgin, full of wonder.

He damned himself for a fool. It must be a clever act for her own purposes. Could the Felice he knew have so changed that she could return love truly, or was she playing some hideous game to amuse herself and her fellow libertines when she returned to court? Why should he believe her now? Why had this new and aching love risen in him from dead fire? He had tried in every way to halt such crazed feelings since she had returned to the palace so changed. He was near consumed by anger at his own stupid impulses. Yet that same mixture of anger and desire drove him on. He must finish this business, get Felice with child and be done with the woman.

Her back to Giles, so he could not read her face, Meriel came to a quick decision. She would not be Felice this night. She had no doubt that Chiffinch would have her followed to remind her of her mission to the Dutch.;.. The man had a single purpose to stop the Hollanders and she was his only means to that end.... So this night might be her only chance to lie in Giles's arms. A night to remember for all her life, or at the moment of her death. Whichever came first. And why shouldn't she have it?

She purposely shut out all moral doubts that she was taking what was not hers. And she was not thinking of furthering the king's cause or of England; only of her need to be loved by this man, praying that he would never learn the truth.

Not for her sake. For his.

When he looked upon Felice's dead body, he would believe that she died truly loving him. Meriel convinced herself that he would live out his days the better for that.

Giles moved in closer to her back, touching all of her, fitting his contours against hers, and again she felt the warmth of his body as she had in the bow of the ketch. "Help me from this gown, my lord husband," she said in a small, choked voice she scarcely recognized as her own. They were words she had never uttered before, indeed had no right to say, but they sounded wonderful in her ears.

She felt his hands on her shoulders, his fingers untying her ribbons, his moist, hot lips on the back of her neck where it curved into her shoulder.

"Felice," he whispered, and she felt his breath like summer wind beating against her skin.

She twisted around in his arms to look up into his adored face.
Meriel! Meriel!
She wanted to scream her name at him. She wanted him to know the true name of the woman he would love this night.

Finally, she wanted as much truth between them as she could tell. "Giles, I love you," she breathed, burying her head in the hollow of his neck. "Only you. Always you."

Felice spoke of love. What did she think she was doing? He stopped her lies with his mouth, or tried to, but the lie continued in the pressure of her soft, yielding lips on his, the hesitant tongue she thrust out to mock his. Lies, all lies! He didn't need them or want them. But her hands were at his neck cloth, pushing at his coat buttons, as he pulled at her waist ties. Perhaps he could not have all, her honesty and her desire.

She wanted him. He could see it, feel it, despite his constant denials as if to remind himself of the rage that was being pushed aside in his need for her. He shrugged out of his coat and untied the sash at his waist, one hand disrobing himself, the other tearing at her clothes.

He hated the words as they came from his mouth, but he could not help himself. "It's been so long," he said, "so very long."

Meriel, in all honesty, could only nod in agreement. Never was indeed a very long time.

In between his words and her thoughts, she was not idle. Her two hands joined his until four hands were flying about in haste, sometimes entangling, with laughter inevitable. Their lips touched and parted, touched and parted, bringing a moan from deep within her, some place that had held it for all her life, waiting for this man to rouse it. She had never felt such stinging urgency. If Giles did not fill her, and soon, she would die, consumed by rolling waves of heat near to melting her body. And that throbbing, beating against her swollen woman's place like a storm surge against a ship's hull, threatening to wreck her on some far rocky shoal. This is what it was to hunger for a beloved man. And it was beyond anything she had imagined or heard whispered.

At last in her shift, and Giles in his drawers and hosen, Meriel felt her feet leave the floor as he earned her cradled against the broad, hard planes of his bared chest, from candle sconce to candle sconce around the paneled room, blowing out each light in its turn.

They were left in a room lit by pale moonlight and the glowing coals of a dying fire, sending flickering beams over the down coverlet on the huge bed, its curtains gaping open to receive them.

His lips descended on hers again, and he laid her gently on the bed. As he straightened, he tried to slow himself before he spilled his manhood into his drawers like a lad with his first maid. "My lady, shall I call a servant to help you with your
robe de chambrel"

"Do you need help?" Meriel asked, unable to resist being herself.

Giles smiled, his eyes crinkling in the corners. "What think you, hoyden?"

He bent over her and held her gaze with his for so long that Meriel thought his dark eyes must certainly see through her disguise when she wanted them only to consume her.

"Do you yet ache from my kidnap?" he asked, his voice low and thick, as he sat on the bed, pulled off his hosen and dropped them, adding to the trail of clothes about the room.

"I... I ache, yes, but not—"

Giles turned her over as if she weighed not half a stone. Then he slipped her shift from her shoulders and began to knead the soft flesh of her back and buttocks, her skin dewy with need, or he was much mistaken. Why was he delaying? Why not just take her, spill out his seed and leave? Getting a son was what he was about this night. No words need be said, no promises made, nothing to remember or regret. And yet he wanted to linger over her body, trace her shoulders with his forefinger, place his hands on her sides where he could feel the first swelling of her breasts.
Rot me!
He was teasing himself as if this were his first true love.

Meriel felt the warmth of his palms, the pressure of his lithe fingers, each one making their separate way down her spine. She shivered. She knew how to resist a man. How to scratch and kick. But she did not know what Giles wanted from her unless she could see his face.

She rolled onto her back and pulled him down beside her, acting the wanton. She was sure this was the right way. A man could not expect a woman to be a lumpen thing, a mere receptacle. Then why was surprise writ plain upon his face? Without doubt, loving a man was like the science of experimenting. She would have to do it many ways, then replicate those ways that worked.
Hey, well, repeat them more than once!

Giles thought she played the practiced wanton well, but her wide eyes, drowning in firelit innocence, did not show him an experienced courtesan. "You didn't like my fingers kneading your back? They say the Moors do it with scented oil in their harems. But you would know that."

Meriel was not angered by that insinuation. He had a right to believe Felice a slattern. Still, she could not accept his thinking it of her.

"I adore how
you
do it, Giles. I have never known such strong, warm hands that were yet gentle. I feel safe in them." She wanted to add, /
hope that's what love is,
but she didn't dare.

"Felice," he whispered.

Meriel could not bear that name. Not tonight. So she went back to a childhood memory and pulled up a name the youngest orphans had given her when they couldn't say her real name. "My lord, call me Merry tonight, since happiness is my mood."

He jerked away from her touch. "Do you think me such a fool that I would honor Buck and Rochester and the rest of the merry gang in my own house and bed? Earlier, I had a hope—"

"Shush, Giles. That is not my intent," she said, the words shaking with as much truth as she could tell him. "It is a name for a new beginning." She had some sense that she had gone too far, and held on to any other words.

"You're shaking. Are you cold?"

"No. Frightened."

Now the anger and uncertainty lurking beneath Giles's surface exploded. "I frighten
you!"
he shouted. "I have never so much as—"

Meriel clasped him to her. "No. No. Hear me, my lord. It is not you who frightens me." Although he did a little in this mood. All his arm muscles were taut. Even the dark, curling hair on his chest seemed to be angrily erect. She could see him taking gulps of air.

"Then who?"

"Me, Giles. I am the frightened one ... at how much I need you. Want you more than—"

The words were too real to ignore. Not even Felice could be that skilled at lying and was very much too lazy to bother. He stood and quickly unloosed the ties of his drawers.

MeriePs mind whirled at what she saw, and she heard the trapped-animal sound again deep within her throat. Giles was magnificent. The king had made a grievous mistake commissioning a statue only of his hero's head. His body was fit for the finest Carrara marble. His wide shoulders tapering to a narrow waist atop long, lithe legs ... and those curving tight buttocks ... could have been copied from Michelangelo's David. And in between, prominent—indeed, most prominent—rose the insistent manhood that reminded her of an illustration on a wicked ancient papyrus Sir Edward had brought from his Mediterranean voyages.