The Last Arrow RH3 (33 page)

A stunned, breathless shudder brought her melting back to earth again, and he took his mouth away only long enough to cast his own clothing aside. With the disbelief shining in her eyes she watched as he lowered himself over her again, this time with flesh pressing flesh, with his hands bracing her thighs and his heat thrusting into the lush wetness he had so ably prepared. She felt the tender, inward stretching and she gasped as he pushed forward, throbbing and hard and uncompromisingly virile. He thrust past the flimsy barrier that was no barrier at all but a floodgate ... a floodgate that opened and welcomed him with warm spasms of moist heat.

Lacking the wit or sense of what to do next, Brenna could only trust his strength, his power, and cling to him as he began to move within her, to withdraw and thrust, withdraw and thrust with long, silky strokes. He was inside her!

He was inside her and she could feel him moving, flesh into flesh, heat into heat, sliding and probing, making her gasp and writhe in utter disbelief. His dark head was bowed over her breast. His lips were working their magic on her tormented flesh and she begged again, without shame or modesty, urging him to plunge deeper, thrust harder.

The waves of pleasure seemed to ripple back into themselves, now hot, now cool, and it was like nothing she could have imagined, nothing she could have prepared for, and when the ecstasy came, she rose to meet it, her eyes shocked wide and glazed with astonishment. It was there, just within her grasp, and she clawed her hands into the plunging motion of his hips, thrilling in the primitive savagery of the act even as she dug her heels into the soft earth and sought to match him thrust for thrust.

Bright, raging torrents of pleasure swept through her and her senses dissolved in a rushing, white-hot orgasm. Her body tightened around one mighty spasm after another and she was vaguely aware of Griffyn arching his head back and crying out in the grips of some similar cataclysm. It held him there for an eternity and more, the pleasure pure and undiluted and unrelenting in its intensity. It held them locked together, their bodies straining for more ... more...

A final massive shudder gave way to the finer ecstasies of whispered words and urgent, pressing closeness. He tried to hold her but his arms were without strength. He tried to reassure her but his own body was quaking with shock, with breathlessness, with awe. He tried to fake bravado, as if such a monumental explosion of the senses was commonplace and routine, but his own body betrayed him, thrusting again and again in decreasing increments, not wanting to admit she had shattered him as much as he had shattered her.

But she had. The proof was in the deep, thudding pulsations as he melted into her arms, melted into her body, confirming he still had a soul, that he was a man who could feel and want and need.

* * *

When he was finally able to lift his head out of the crook of her neck, it was only to kiss her mouth, her throat, the valley between her breasts.

Brenna kept her arms wrapped tightly around him. Her heart was drumming so loudly in her chest she was sure he could hear it, certain that was why he laid his head upon her breast. He was still a formidable presence inside her, a huge and heated presence above her, and she tried not to picture the sight they made, his black hair scattered over her naked breasts, her legs gleaming white and hooked over

his like pincers, surely looking utterly heathen on their bed

of grass.

She blushed so hot it hurt. Hot enough he must have felt it for he stirred and roused himself enough to lever some of his weight onto his elbows. He brushed the back of his fingers across her cheek and traced the flow of warmth down her chin, her throat, and onto the satiny curve of her shoulder. Tight, damp tendrils of hair were curled forward on

her temples, and as he toyed with them, he studied her face, seeing it as if he had the benefit of a hundred blazing candles to light the way.

Suddenly self-conscious, she let her limbs ease down onto the grass. She half expected him to move as well, or to at least detach himself and allow her to redeem a semblance of her dignity, but he did not. He seemed quite content to keep himself wedged comfortably between her thighs, to keep himself cocooned inside her and his fingers stroking absently down the side of her neck. Each stroke sent a corresponding shiver down her spine and across her breasts, gathering and tightening the flesh so that he could hardly help but notice the reaction ... notice it and take advantage of her defenselessness by kissing a warm path from one puckered crown to the other.

"Wh-what are you doing?"

"Obeying your command, demoiselle. You ordered a thousand pleasures; we have nine hundred and ninety-nine to go."

"I was ... only jesting," she stammered. "I was not."

She sucked a breath through her teeth as his hand slid under her hips and raised her so that she could feel he was not nearly as depleted as she had supposed him to be. His naked legs slid against her inner thighs as he positioned himself more deeply and she made a soft, helpless sound in her throat.

"Let yourself-go," he whispered. "Trust me."

Let go? she thought wildly. What was there left to hold on to? She was lying naked in the grass with a man she barely knew. She had sacrificed her virginity and her common sense for a few moments of reckless passion with someone too dangerous and too unscrupulous to trust with the smallest part of her heart.

He held her tight, pushing into her with ever-strengthening thrusts, and she had no choice but to trust him. She let his hands guide her knees up to his waist and she shook with the deep, explicit friction, championing it with such stunning proficiency, she felt his body stretch and stiffen and flood her with a welter of shimmering heat. He held her tight and showed her how to move, how to create her own friction where she needed it most, and this time, when she cried out, she cried out his name, and they swept over the brink together, their release long and splendid and scalding in its intensity.

It was noisy as well, and the watcher high up on the riverbank smiled and closed his eyes, fitting pictures to the groans and shivered sobs, the damp sound of flesh sliding into flesh. He felt himself growing too hard to remain crouched in the bushes much longer and, besides, he had found out what he wanted to know. The sister of Robert Wardieu d'Amboise rutting with the vaunted Prince of Darkness! It was enough to make him want to laugh out loud.

Gerome de Saintonge had scarcely believed his eyes when he had seen them together in the stable. He had been keeping a close watch on Griffyn Renaud at his father's request and had seen him meet with what he thought was a young boy on the edge of the encampment. That would have been interesting in itself, though not altogether unheard of in men who fought like demons to prove their manliness in other ways. The Lionheart himself, according to some old Crusaders, had spent more time choosing his pages than he had his bride.

But the torchlight had revealed curves and shapes beneath the leather surcoat and leggings and when the hat had come off, the recognizable cloud of tarnished gold hair made the long crawl through the dew-slicked grass all the more rewarding.

The haughty little bitch!

Who was she to laugh in his face and refuse his offer of marriage! Who was she to stab him with an eating knife when he tried to steal a kiss, and how many more offers was she likely to have at the lofty age of eighteen? Most women were married and breeding at fourteen; few had anywhere to go after nineteen but a convent!

Or a grassy riverbank like a common slut.

The noises stopped and Gerome raised his head above the tall bank of grass. They were still lying there, a tangle of naked arms and legs, collapsed in blissful exhaustion. On a smiling thought, he ignored his own discomfort and crept a few feet closer. The breeze was ruffling the grass, camouflaging any sounds he made, and he was able to inch right up to where the bank leveled and the grass became thick as a carpet underfoot. They had obviously been in a hurry, for there were clothes strewn in a wide circle around them, and he was able to use the tip of his sword to pluck a particularly feminine article off a nearby rock and fish it back to where he crouched in the darkness.

For a moment, he debated simply standing up and shouting out his discovery, but he remembered Renaud's quickness and cold, deadly instincts, and he decided to keep his skin intact. He tucked the scrap of silk beneath his surcoat and retreated the way he had come, careful not to step on any twig or root that might disturb the dozing lovers.

Brenna heard voices nearby and they wakened her. At first she did not know where she was, she was only aware of a strong, warm body curved around her and deep, even breathing against her nape. She was curled like a child in his strong arms, shoulders to chest, back to belly, rump to hip, cradled there in the languid fatigue that had claimed them both. Some time during the night he had covered them loosely with their discarded clothing, but she did not notice the cool air where it touched her exposed skin; it was a welcome relief after the extravagance of heat and energy they had expended. She had not fainted, but she had come perilously close on more than one occasion when the sheer magnitude of her pleasure had become almost too much to bear.

The voices faded and Brenna risked lifting her head to peek over the thick wall of grass. She was shocked to see a watery blue film of light along the horizon and to realize the voices she had heard belonged to early risers, not late revelers.

She glanced down at Griffyn and his eyes were open, waiting.

"I have to go," she gasped. "I have to get back to camp before I am missed ... if I have not been already."

She scrambled to sort out the various articles of clothing and cursed when she could not find her chemise among the scattered trappings. She dressed without it, shivering when the coarse linen of her shirt chafed skin that had become far too sensitive to the slightest touch. Her hair flew in an untamed mass of curls over her shoulders; she made a few futile attempts to comb it with her fingers before giving up and cursing it back into a tail. "Here," he said, "let me help."

"I can do it myself," she insisted, recoiling from his hands.

He watched her fumble with the laces of her surcoat and when all she managed to do was tangle them in knots, he gently grasped hold of her wrists and moved them away, then took up the thongs himself and fastened them with silent efficiency.

"I had best walk you back."

"No!" She looked up in mild horror. "No. My God, what would Robin or the others think if they saw us together?"

He stared at her a moment, as if she had reached out unexpectedly and cut him with a knife. As if, after the night they had just spent together, he was surprised she still had the arrogance to remind him of his unsuitability to be the lover of a nobleman's daughter.

"Forgive me, my lady," he murmured, bowing. "I forgot myself."

"I did not mean that the way it sounded," she said quickly. "I only meant..."

"I know what you meant. And you are absolutely right. Your brother would likely kill both of us if he knew."

He finished tying off the last knot and gave her a perfunctory smile as he bent over to retrieve his own clothes. He had pulled on his braies and hose but was still magnificently bare from the waist up, and as she watched him push his arms into the sleeves of his shirt, all she wanted to do was lean into his heat again, feel those arms go around her that they might protect her against the waves of anxiety and guilt that were threatening to overwhelm her. As it was, she could hardly believe it had not just been some wild, other-worldly dream she had experienced and she would waken and find it had not really happened. She had not really crept away from camp. She had not really allowed him to seduce her and then given so freely of herself, doing things ... begging to have things done that would, indeed, keep her pink with mortification all day long.

"Perhaps this should not have happened," she agreed on a ragged whisper. "But I am not sorry it did. I do not regret a single moment of last night... I... I only wish ..."

He stopped tugging on the hem of his shirt and glanced at her intently. "You wish what?"

"I wish ..." She moistened her lips and glanced at the growing bloom of dawn light. "I wish we had more time. I wish ... we had the chance to know each other better."

He seemed surprised. "Why? I thought you had already made up your mind as to who and what I was—a common mercenary with few scruples and no conscience. Good God," he muttered through a half smile, "you were not expecting more from me, were you? You were not expecting me to turn out to be something more than what I am?"

Her heart tripped over a single poignant beat and she had to look away, look down at her hands, look over at the flattened grass that marked her initiation into all these strange new emotions surfacing within her. She was not expecting anything from him at all and was certainly under no illusions of any obligations owed. In two days' time they would be going their separate ways, and the likelihood of ever seeing one another again was too remote to even contemplate. But she did not want to think about that, not with her body aching in places it had never ached before, wanting more of what she had never wanted before.