Silken Threads (43 page)

“I’ll bet I know why Master Lionel has
warmed up to Olive the way he has,” Joanna said, opening the little
jar of fragrant liniment. “A few days ago, she told me she was
going to concoct some sort of elixir for his stomach. It must have
worked, is all I can think.”

Graeham smiled. “Did you see the way Olive
was looking at Damian while she spoke her vows?”

Joanna smiled. “And the way he was looking
at her
—
aye. Rolf le Fever will be a distant memory soon
enough, I think. By the time that baby comes, they’ll have
forgotten who really fathered it.”

“Love has a strange kind of power,” Graeham
said. “It seems to be able to change the very nature of things,
like alchemy.” He met her gaze and then looked quickly away.

Joanna turned her back to Graeham and sat on
the edge of the cot by his legs, facing away from him. Graeham had
not spoken to her of love, had not returned her whispered
declaration after they’d stumbled out of Rolf le Fever’s burning
house. Perhaps he hadn’t heard it.

Perhaps he had.

She wouldn’t say it again, she’d decided,
not until she heard it from him. She knew what was in his heart;
the magic that swirled around them was too powerful to be coming
from her alone. He loved her. He must love her.

Perhaps it troubled him that he was a
soldier, and unlanded. Perhaps he thought he didn’t have any right
to fall in love, or that it was unwise to have done so. Certainly
it was unwise; no one knew that better than Joanna, and she had no
easy answer as to what the future held in store for them. All she
knew was that she loved him, and she couldn’t fathom that he didn’t
love her back.

He would tell her when he was ready. Pray
God he did so before he left for Paris.

He planned to leave
—
he and Ada le
Fever
—
on the fifteenth of July, which was but four days
hence, and had written to Lord Gui to expect them in Paris no later
than the twentieth. Ada, who’d spent the past nine days
recuperating at St. Bartholemew’s Hospital, was nearly recovered
from the effects of the slow poisoning Elswyth had subjected her to
since Christmastide. Joanna visited her every day, gratified to see
her cheeks blooming with color, her eyes sparkling with renewed
vitality. No longer confined to bed, she’d taken to helping the
nuns nurse the other patients, an activity she seemed to find great
satisfaction in. Although never keen on logic and philosophy, as
her sister Phillipa was, Ada thought she might like to study
medicine when she returned to Paris. Perhaps, she’d speculated, she
could even talk her papa into sending her to the great medical
school at Salerno, where women as well as men were educated to
become physicians.

“Joanna?” She felt Graeham’s fingers, warm
and rough, on the back of her neck and closed her eyes to savor the
gentle caress. “You’re very quiet suddenly. Is anything wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly, but
immediately amended it. “Nay. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s been a long and trying day.”

His hand stroked a comforting path down her
back. “Any day that begins with the funeral of a friend is
trying.”

Joanna nodded. She’d wept uncontrollably as
Thomas’s shrouded body was lowered into the ground; Graeham had
held her, whispering words of solace her in a voice choked with
emotion.

“He died trying to save Ada and me,” she
said.

“‘Twas how he wanted to die, I
think
—
not as a
thing,
eaten away with disease, but
as a man, the best kind of man. He was trapped in that ruined body,
but his soul is free of it now. He would want us to rejoice for
him, not mourn him.”

Joanna forced herself to smile. “I know
that.” Scooping up a dollop of the translucent balm, she set the
jar on the other side of Graeham, where she could reach it, and
rubbed her hands together to warm the liniment. He sighed when she
smoothed her hands down his leg from knee to ankle, and up again.
“How does that feel?”

“I could take a firmer touch.”

He’d told her that just last night, about a
different kind of touch. Joanna grew warm at the memory of their
uninhibited lovemaking.

As she massaged him, she felt the taut
muscles of his calf gradually relax.

“A little higher,” he said.

Scooting back, she dipped up some more
liniment and rubbed his knee, his thigh.

Graeham lifted his shirt, untied his
underdrawers, opened them; he was fully aroused. “A little
higher?”

He took her hand, slick with the oily balm,
and closed it over his straining shaft. She stroked him, not
needing to be told to use a firm, steady pressure. During their
long, breathless nights together, she was learning the appetites of
his body, just as he was learning hers.

He whipped off his shirt, kicked off his
drawers and sat up. “Where do
you
ache?” he asked softly,
pulling at the cord that laced up the back of her kirtle.

Suddenly short of breath, Joanna answered
him with a sigh as he unlaced her. He peeled the gown off her
shoulders, untied her shift and tugged both garments down to her
hips as she slid her arms free. Her braids hung over her chest. He
gathered them behind her, untied them and trailed his fingers
through her hair until it hung in a rippling sheet down her
back.

Her heart thudded in anticipation when he
reached into the little jar and scooped some of its contents onto
his fingertips.

“Where, Joanna?” he whispered into her ear,
tucking himself up behind her, his legs to either side of her,
their feet on the floor. “Where do you ache?”

She gripped his thighs, waiting.

“Tell me.”

She shook her head, thrumming with need but
reticent, even after all those nights with him, to give voice to
it.

Banding an arm around her waist, he touched
a balm-slicked finger to her left nipple. “Here?”

She hitched in a breath, nodded.

His lips grazed the back of her neck,
scratchy-soft kisses, one after the other, while his hand slid warm
and slippery over her weighty flesh, stroking, squeezing. He
caressed her other breast the same way as she arched back against
him, her breath coming faster, her breasts swelling beneath his
touch.

“Where else do you ache?”

She whimpered, her fingers digging into his
thighs.

Dipping into the balm jar again, he rubbed
his fingertips together to spread the thick ointment over them and
slipped his hand beneath the garments bunched at her waist.

Joanna held her breath.

His first light, probing touch incited a
spasm of pleasure that made her flinch. He tightened his arm around
her waist to hold her still and worked the balm into her aching
flesh, at first gently, almost tenderly, then pressing into her and
stroking her deep, finding her wet, so wet, his sex slick and rigid
against the small of her back as he held her tight for this sweet
assault.

She struggled against him, moaning, the
mounting pleasure as acute as pain. “Stop,” she gasped as the
pleasure quivered through her, building fast, ready to spill over.
She clutched at his unyielding arm, ropy with iron bands of muscle.
“Stop, wait.”

“Nay,” he murmured in her ear. “I want to
feel you come like this.” He slid his finger deep inside her,
ground his palm against her.

She shouted as her climax overtook her, hard
and jolting, a shock of pleasure that crested over and over as he
prolonged it with his insistent caress.

Her ears rang as she slumped back against
him. Swiftly he withdrew his hand and stripped off her kirtle and
shift, leaving her in naught but her black silken stockings.

Scooping her up in his arms, he laid her on
her side, with him behind her. He wrapped one arm around her from
beneath, closing it over a breast. His other hand brushed her
bottom as he reached between them. She felt his fingers between her
legs, opening her, and the hot, sleek pressure of him pushing into
her from behind, impaling her in one stroke, both of them slick
with balm and trembling with need.

Leaning over her, he kissed her cheek, his
breath harsh in her ear. “I wish I could stay,” he whispered,
something almost hopeless in his voice. “I wish to God I didn’t
have to leave you.”

Finally she asked what she’d avoided asking
for so long, hoping she wouldn’t have to, hoping he’d simply tell
her. “Will...will you come back?”

Graeham’s hand, resting on her hip,
tightened fractionally. She felt his chest rise and fall against
her back. “I’ll return to England in a few weeks.”

“For good?”

Again he hesitated. “Aye.”

“Truly?” Filled with joy, she twisted her
head to look at him, but he lay down and buried his face in her
hair.

“I’ll miss you,” he said.

“‘Twill only be for a few weeks, and then
you’ll be back.”

He said nothing. She felt his erection wane
within her.

“I’ll miss you, too, Graeham, but we have
four days together until you have to leave. We should make the best
of that time.” She took his free arm and draped it over her waist,
guiding his hand between her legs.

She writhed as he caressed her, swept up
once more by an unstoppable tide of arousal. From within her came
an insistent thickening as he swelled and filled her. He rocked
into her, deep, gliding thrusts that drove her closer,
closer...

She clawed at the bed covers as her climax
neared, cried out as it overtook her. Gripping her hip, he drove in
hard, his stabbing thrusts ever more urgent.

“Oh, God, Joanna.” He rolled her facedown
and bucked savagely against her, one hand fisted in her hair,
groaning in an almost despairing way. It seemed to Joanna that he
was in the grip of something dark and desperate, an animal
compulsion to mate, to claim.

All too abruptly, he uncoupled from her.
Seizing her roughly, he turned her faceup and fell on her, an
anguished moan rising in his throat as his release shuddered
through him.

He shivered afterward; she held him, stroked
his back, his hair.

He raised his face to look at her; there was
something haunted in his eyes. “Did I hurt you?”

She smiled and laid her palm against his
raspy cheek. “You could never hurt me, Graeham.”

Closing his eyes, he nestled his head back
in the crook of her neck. “Yes, I could.”

* * *

“Isn’t it beautiful here?” Joanna asked her
brother as they strolled with the other wedding guests from
Ramswick’s little stone chapel, where Robert and Margaret had just
been married, to a clover-festooned meadow bisected by a stream,
where the bride ale would be celebrated.

“You could have been mistress of all this,”
Hugh said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the sprawling
farmstead, green and gold and perfect beneath an afternoon sky
studded with puffball clouds.

Joanna didn’t need Hugh to remind her of
that. She’d thought of little else since they’d arrived at nones
for the wedding. Ramswick was her idea of
heaven
—
sheep-dotted pastures, well-tended fields, woods
and streams and a lovely little village of thatched cottages. She
felt a sense of peace here. She felt at home here, much more than
she did in noisome, crowded West Cheap
—
although, of
course, she’d seen to it that Ramswick would never be her home.

Nodding toward the bridal couple, walking
hand-in-hand at the head of the procession, their heads bent
together in laughter, Joanna said, “Look at them. ‘Twas always
meant to be. They belong here, together.”

After a moment, Hugh said, quietly, “And I
suppose you and Graeham belong together.”

Hugh had discovered the relationship one
morning when he’d arrived earlier than usual for his visit, having
stayed up all night throwing dice and drinking, and found Graeham
coming down from the solar in his drawers. He’d accused the serjant
of reneging on his promise not to compromise Joanna, and reminded
him of some threat he’d once made about slicing off a certain body
part and feeding it to him. No doubt he would have demanded that
Graeham marry her, were it not that he’d be such an unsuitable
choice for a husband. Of course, Hugh’s wrath was short-lived, as
usual, evaporating in the face of Joanna’s indignant declaration
that she hadn’t been compromised or taken advantage of.

She reminded him of that now, because she
sensed another of his cautionary lectures coming on. “I took a
lover, Hugh. That might be sinful and it might be unwise, but I’m a
grown woman, after all. I’m free to make my own mistakes.”

“That’s just it, sister,” Hugh said, keeping
his voice low because of all the people walking with them. “You’ve
always done just exactly as you pleased, but more often than not,
you’ve come to regret it. I just don’t want you to be hurt
again.”

“Graeham isn’t Prewitt, Hugh.”

“Not in any obvious ways. God’s bones, I
like the man. But think about it. Prewitt laid claim to you and
then disappeared abroad. So has Graeham.”

“Graeham hasn’t ‘disappeared,’” Joanna said
testily. “He had to take Ada le Fever back to Paris. That’s why he
was sent here in the first place, to bring her home. He’s coming
back in a few weeks
—
I told you that.”

“Aye, but you didn’t tell me why.”

“Why?”

“He’s returning to England for good, he
said. Did he tell you why? Is Lord Gui releasing him from his
service? Will he attach himself to a new overlord? Will he sell his
services overseas, as I do?”

“Nay
—
I’m sure he wouldn’t do that.”
Joanna couldn’t live with that. It was bad enough having a beloved
brother who was away so much, risking his life on foreign soil for
other people’s kings; she couldn’t bear it if Graeham became a
mercenary, too.