Simon's Lady (25 page)

She took a step forward, and he moved with her. “So it is up to me to persuade you of the necessity of the household repairs?”

“As a good wife, yes.”

She chose a course as blunt and outrageous as Beresford himself had ever taken. “As a good wife,” she said demurely, “I have already made it possible for you to finance these repairs.”

“Ah? How so?”

“Through marriage to me, you received a vast tract of land and the earl’s third penny, so you can well afford what I am spending.” When Beresford did not immediately reply, she continued virtuously, “So you see, husband, it is rather up to you to persuade me that the craftsmen are unnecessary.”

Beresford did not miss the fact that she had just issued him a counterchallenge that he should pleasure
her
well this evening. After a very charged pause, he said with effort, “We had better hurry.”

They did, indeed, hurry along the balcony and across the threshold to Gwyneth’s bedchamber. Beresford kicked the door shut with his heel. He did not pause to comment on any of the changes she had wrought in the place, which included the cleanliness, new bed covers and a new curtain on the doorway leading to his own chamber. He most likely did not notice them, for he was divesting himself of his clothing in a haphazard fashion, more careless than usual and a good deal less efficient. Nevertheless, he was stripped to the comfort of his skin before she had had more than a chance to unpin her hair and unlace her bliaut.

When he came toward her, he said in a low voice, “Don’t fear me.” He waited for her to look up at him before he touched her.

She was grateful for the consideration, for just then, in the wake of her bravado on the balcony, she was losing her nerve. The urgency of the undressing reminded her of the intensity of previous violence and hurt and humiliation in her married life. Despite the knowledge that this husband would treat her well, a tremor of well-remembered fear closed her throat and made her fingers fumble with her clothing.

He gently helped her with the rest of her garments, so that her skin could be next to his completely. Then he gathered her in his arms and crushed her to him, nuzzling her neck and bending her this way and that, so that he could find a better fit with her. His hands traveled up and down her body insistently and finally came to rest on her shoulders. He raised his head and looked into her eyes.

She put her hands hesitantly on his shoulders in turn, and he smiled. He dipped his head to kiss first one of her hands, then the other. He ran his palms down her arms and laced his fingers with hers, then brought them to his lips, kissing her fingertips one by one.

She watched in fascination as he kissed her fingers, causing tiny, pleasurable shocks to travel up her arms. He brought the back of her hand to his lips, and her gaze fell on his long fingers. She remembered his touch from their wedding night and must have been regarding his fingers speculatively, for when she lifted her eyes to look into his face, she saw that his heavy brows were raised and that a distinct gleam lit his gray eyes.

“Well, now,” he said softly and very meaningfully. He unlaced his hands from hers and replaced the tips of her fingers on his shoulders. Then he trailed his hands down her collarbone to her breasts to her waist to her hips to her abdomen and through her curls, coming to a halt at the apex of her thighs. He cocked his head, as if considering possibilities.

He kissed her lips. He ran his tongue around the inside of her mouth, as he had earlier in the solar. He teased and tasted her. Still kissing her, he slid his fingers lightly between her legs. “Perhaps we should try something different.” He withdrew his fingers and said gruffly, “I’ll show you what I want to do.”

Something in his tone caused her to brace herself and look at him directly. She decided to be brave. “All right,” she said.

“You can tell me to stop at any time,” he said, as he lowered his head to her neck. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I won’t,” she breathed.

He lowered his head further to her breasts and touched the tip of each with his tongue. He was about to move lower but decided against it, instead opening his mouth to take in one nipple, then the other, sucking lightly and swirling his tongue lavishly over their hard peaks. His hands went around her back and slid down to her buttocks, where he grasped her firmly, so that she would remain steady on her feet.

As he kissed her navel, which he also swirled with his tongue, her hands remained upon his shoulders, her fingers flexed. Her breathing was becoming more ragged. She was not precisely afraid of what he was doing, for the feelings that were pulsing through her were entirely pleasurable. Rather she was apprehensive. Of the unknown. Of the intuition that this was different. Of the knowledge that he was going to know her in a way that was dangerously intimate.

He rubbed his lightly stubbled chin in the triangle of curls at the juncture of her thighs. His hands were grasping her buttocks and slightly separating them. She felt a surge of stimulation that caused her knees to wobble, but he kept her steady. Then he brought his hands around to the front of her thighs. Slowly, delicately, he parted her tender, secret, swollen lips with his thumbs, as he might open a tiny, hinged amulet containing a gem or secret potion. His thumbs grazed the pearl within once or twice, and dipped into the secret potion, thereby producing more of it.

He moved his head and his mouth and his lips and his tongue just a fraction lower, then another fraction. It was a precious, breathless moment for both of them. He was daring her to trust him, daring himself to meet her on this precarious level, to taste her essence and make it part of him. She was daring him to do it, to be forever the man who had braved this most extravagant kiss. She was daring herself to allow him to kiss her thus, to spread herself to him in a way that was well beyond embarrassment, well beyond intimacy. She feared being lost to him in a way that threatened her own security, and she fully experienced that threat in the strength of her desire for what was to come.

Just as she hoped and feared and dared, his thumbs spread her lips with just that irresistible amount of indecent possession, and his tongue came out to touch her pearl, to swirl around it, to lap experimentally. Then, acquiring the right pressure and the taste for it, his tongue became inquisitive and inventive.

She felt delicious with the exquisite sliding and swirling of his tongue, trying both to accept and to resist the sensations he was creating for her. It was, finally, impossible to resist. Under other circumstances, she might have felt embarrassed to be so exposed to him, or angry at his prying, or indignant at his audacity, or fearful of being hurt. Under other circumstances, she might have felt nobly regal, to have him kneeling before her, ministering to her like a slave. However, in these circumstances, she felt neither inferior nor superior to him. She felt only gloriously weak and lustily feminine and increasingly desirous. She wanted more: more touch, more tongue, more exposure, more sensations, more waves. She gulped in wondrously feminine gasps and moans.

When it seemed that he would not be able to keep her from falling from the effects of the shuddering pleasure she was experiencing, he lifted her up, and they toppled and tumbled gracelessly onto her bed, where he entwined himself instantly within her arms and legs. He burrowed his head in her neck.

In a voice edged with challenge, he said, “Now this is what I want you to do.”

She lazily opened her eyes and turned her head to regard him inquisitively. She had made the same mistake before, looking upon him while she was awash with the pleasure he had given her. She tried to mend the breached defenses within herself, the ones that kept her safe, but she was not entirely successful. When he told her what he wanted, daring her, she accepted the challenge, reasoning that, with Beresford, compliance was less risky than defiance. She hoped that his oddly tantalizing request would not cause her to lose any more of herself to him.

****

Later, when she awoke to gray gloom and stretched, he was awake as well and moved with her and under her, with intention.

****

She lazed at length, wishing to push back the faint light of dawn squeezing in and around the cracks in the door and shutters of her bedchamber. She must have moaned in protest, for the next moment a broad hand came down lightly, but with purpose, on her bare backside.

He said, “Enough of this. The day has come, and I’ve work to do.”

“I’m not stopping you,” she retorted, too smart in her half-sleeping state. She rolled over, trying to recapture full slumber, and in so doing, rolled back into his arms. She felt his erection next to her thigh, and she shot up to a sitting position.

“You’re not stopping me?” he queried. He was not in the least apologetic about his state, “Remember that I am the one who announced the day and our work.” He moved against her. “Consider this a promise. For later. You see. this morning I’m charged to take the useless castle guards back to the Tower first thing.”

With such a good dawning to the day, Gwyneth would have never predicted that it was to end in disaster.

The household came to life. At prime the fast was broken with bread and broth. By the terce the courtyard hummed with the activity of craftsmen, and Beresford had left with the castle guards for the day, which he would spend, presumably, at the Tower, in preparation for the tournament on the morrow. Thoughts of the tourney reminded her of Beresford’s squires and Valmey’s potential for treachery. She decided that at supper this evening she would relate to Beresford the conversation she had overheard between Valmey and Rosalyn, letting him make of it what he could.

Sometime during the morning activity, Gwyneth received a most unexpected visitor. She was busy in a far corner of the main courtyard, dividing her attention between the carpenters on the scaffolding and the plasterers who were raising buckets of water to the balcony. She was also attempting to involve Benedict and Gilbert in the work, while keeping them safe. Two buckets of water were just being raised when one of her serving women claimed her attention and informed her that a man had come to see her. By the tone of the woman’s voice, Gwyneth did not think her visitor to be a routine tradesman come with his wares.

Walking toward the shadows of the gallery where the man was waiting, Gwyneth wondered with a prick of anxiety whether it might be Geoffrey of Senlis again. Or perhaps, even worse, Cedric of Valmey. It would be just like that rat to come to her house, knowing that Beresford was away and occupied for the day.

But it was neither Senlis nor Valmey, nor anyone with anything to do with the court of King Stephen or even with the town of London. When she was close enough to discern the features of the man in the shadows, Gwyneth could hardly believe her eyes or contain her amazement.

“Gunnar? Gunnar Erickson? Is that you?” She spoke without thinking in Danish.

“It is, Gwyneth Andresdaughter,” the man returned in the same language, stepping from the shadows and into the bright sunshine.

Gunnar Erickson, big and blond and blue-eyed, was all that was familiar to her, and she should have been happier to see him, this link to her past. He had been the one man from her father’s employ who had gone with her to Castle Norham, as her guard and protector. He had been her father’s brute, and under close supervision from her father, his volatile temper had been governed. At Castle Norham, he had had no similar check on his temper, since his lord and master there had no control over his own. Her father’s brute had never harmed her at Castle Norham, but neither had he ever protected her from Canute, and she had witnessed more than once the terrifying lengths to which his temper could take him. In the past five years, she had learned to fear Gunnar Erickson.

Thus she was not wholly pleased by his presence in her new and so-far-safe household. She was justifiably puzzled to see him, as well, and even somewhat disturbed. Masking all of that in a flash, she smiled and clasped his forearms in greeting. “But what a welcome visit! Allow me first to recover from the great surprise of seeing you alive, and then I will ask you what you are doing here in London and at my door!”

Gunnar answered that, in the bloody confusion of the final hours of the siege, Gwyneth could not have known that he had not been killed by the Normans but had been taken prisoner.

“Which you are no longer?” Gwyneth ventured.

“They let me go after a few days.” He lifted his broad hands to signify a fatalistic acceptance of the incomprehensibility of Norman ways. “There were so few of us left, and the Norman pigs must have thought us harmless enough or, at least, not important enough to feed.”

Gwyneth felt uneasy about this explanation, but did not openly question it. Instead she asked, “Why did you come to London, of all places?”

“I was already halfway here when I was let go.”

“Yes, but this is the center of support for King Stephen. Why did you not stay in Northumbria—go to York, for instance, where you might remain among the supporters of Duke Henry?”

“After the wreck of Castle Norham, I thought there was little hope for Duke Henry.”

Gwyneth’s unease grew. She suddenly saw dangers everywhere, but could not say why or what form the dangers took. She had to ask, “But how on earth did you find me here?”

The brute’s smile crinkled his face hideously. “Now, Gwyneth Andresdaughter, that was as easy as walking into the meanest tavern and hearing the news of a Norman lord marrying a Saxon beauty from Northumbria.”

Gwyneth relaxed a little. Of course, the marriage of Simon of Beresford to Gwyneth of Northumbria was newsworthy enough to have been bruited about town, and certainly Beresford’s house would have been known to anyone Gunnar chanced to ask. She let out the breath she had not realized she was holding and said, “But what a lamentable hostess you find me, Gunnar Erickson! Please, come in and I will pour you some wine. Then you will tell me exactly how it goes with you and what your plans are for the future!”

At that fateful moment, a great crashing and clattering came from across the courtyard, followed by much magnificent cursing in Saxon, every word of which Gwyneth understood. She whirled and was immediately reassured that the accident had not involved Benedict and Gilbert, for the two boys were leaning over the balcony railing, looking with wide-eyed delight at the tangle of rope and spilled buckets and broken scaffolding and prostrate bodies below.