The Last Arrow RH3 (47 page)

"Are you insane?" she asked again, each word crisp and precise.

He tossed aside the stick he had been using to stir up silvered ripples on the water and pushed to his feet. He unfolded his over-six-foot frame with a measured precision

at caused Brenna to retreat a discreet step as he turned

ward her.

"No," he answered with equal precision. "I am quite within my own mind."

"You do not consider throwing yourself to the wolves to be a touch addled?"

"I have been doing much the same thing for seven years now. It has almost become a way of life."

"Whatever you have done, you have done for yourself. What you propose to do now—putting yourself forward as bait for Guy of Gisbourne—"

"I do for myself as well," he interrupted softly. "And for you, oddly enough."

"Me?"

"In truth, for something you said: that some things ere more important than simple cockfights and boasting contests."

"Some things are, but—"

"You doubted I would have the character to see them?" She flushed. "I did not say that."

"No, not in so many words. But you did accuse me of having sold my honor along with my sword."

"You are doing this because of something I said in a fit of anger?"

"No. I am doing it because it needs to be done. I am the Earl of Huntington. I should have been the one to stand up and fight for my people, not skulk away in the dark of night and hide behind the anonymity of a new name, a new guise."

"You said yourself you were very young. The king would have hunted you down and killed you."

"Would I not then, in your eyes, have died with some shreds of honor draped about me?"

"You twist everything I say, and now you try to twist what I think." She looked away a moment. "You are mocking me, sir."

He took a casual step closer to her. "I am mocking myself, dear lady. Something I have been doing with alarming frequency lately ... ever since I saw you standing by the river at Amboise, in fact. It was a disconcerting sight, to say the least, for I rather prided myself on my ability to avoid traps and pitfalls. But I never heard you, never saw you coming, never had the faintest inkling of the danger I was in the moment I decided to challenge that look in your eye."

"I ... am sure I do not know what look you mean."

"You should. It is a formidable weapon and pierced clean through my heart like no mere arrow could. Fool that I was, I thought I had built up enough armor to protect me, but I could not have been more wrong."

This last was said so softly, it startled Brenna's gaze up to his face again. The moonlight was streaming through the trees, hazed blue by the mist, but bright enough she could see his face in all its stark beauty. He had moved to within arm's reach, close enough for her to feel the sworls of displaced mist curling around her ankles.

"You were wrong?"

"As ever a fool can be who thinks he has hardened himself against thinking that someone could care for him again, despite all his flaws."

"But"—her chin quivered and her heel scraped the root of a tall oak as she back up against it—"I do not care for you," she whispered. "I do not even like you, sir." "Yet you convinced your brother to rescue me from Sainbridge's clutches."

She watched his mouth form the words and felt the echo of them shiver along her spine.

"Saving you from Saintonge was the least we could do," he stammered. "Robin does not like being indebted to anyone."

"That would explain his reasons for charging into the words at Les Andelys. But what about yours?" Softly: "Mine?"

'"You were on the verge of shooting me at one point. The next, you were offering to go anywhere with me, be any manner of companion I wished you to be." "I w-was not in my right mind," she stammered, lowering her lashes. "I was desperate and frantic and—" He tucked a finger beneath her chin, coaxing it upward again. "And I wanted you so badly I almost agreed." She took two full breaths before she regained the ability speak. "But you did not agree."

"No," he mused. "I did not. And 1 shall probably regret at decision for the rest of my life."

"Wh-whereas I shall probably regret making the offer for the rest of mine."

"Meaning ... you would not propose it again?" "No."

"Not under any circumstance?"

"No. You play too easily with people's lives. You play too easily with your own for that matter, and I could not imagine what a life with you would entail." "You cannot imagine it ... or you are too afraid to imagine it?"

"I am not afraid of you, Griffyn Renaud."

"I did not say you were afraid of me." A darkened spiral of hair had sprung forward over her forehead and he brushed it aside with a breath of a kiss. "You are afraid of this," he whispered, trailing the caress to her temple and down to the curl of her ear. "And this." He bent his head and she felt the black silk of his hair on her cheek. His lips were on her throat, in the crook of her neck, and she closed her eyes, her breath coming even hotter and faster than before. Her heart beat with a wildness that frightened her, and she felt as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff, the hypnotic lure of danger pulling her forward and the safe sanctuary of solid ground calling her back.

"How ... can you expect me to believe you?" she gasped. "After everything that has happened ... the lies, the dis-honesty, the cruel games—?"

"The night we spent together at Gaillard was no game."

A hot, stinging liquid blurred her eyes and she shook her head again, helpless to counter the heat of his arms, the ravaging tenderness of his lips. She wanted to believe him. She wanted it more than anything, but the rational part of her mind—the part that cried out to her to step back from the edge of the cliff—was still reluctant to trust him with something so fragile as her heart.

Feeling her resistance, his hands cradled her face and his eyes blazed with the same searing intensity as the moonlight. "What will it take to convince you?"

With her tears spilling faster than she could blink them free, she watched the dark outline of his face bend toward her. Like wax before a flame, she melted into the heat of his mouth, wavering, shimmering, turning soft and malleable inside, lacking any strength or substance to hold her firm against the tenderness of his assault.

She felt his hand sliding down her hip, catching and dragging the hem of the wool skirt upward to uncover the smooth, yielding flesh of her thigh. She felt the dampness of the moss-covered bark against her back as he lifted her bared leg and seated it around his waist, and she felt his hand between them, tugging at and loosening the points of his hose. His own flesh sprang hot and free, and she moaned beneath the pressure of his mouth, but it was too late.

He was there. He was touching her, he was inside her, pushing upward into the sleek, moist warmth, groaning as the silky muscles tightened greedily around him and sucked him deeper ... deeper still.

"Tell me," he rasped, "you do not believe this."

Her reply was a breathless sob and the softest of oaths took his mouth away from hers but only long enough for him to bare her other leg and urge it up around his waist. His hands went beneath her bottom and he lifted her, the muscles in his arms trembling where she clutched at them for support. She felt the driving shock of his strength, the tightening within herself that held him all the more possessively, and with a swiftness that took her breath away, her need became as fierce, as primitive as his own. She pushed herself onto him, her flesh aching-wet, abandoning all of her senses to respond to the force of his passion. Her skin flamed and her blood sang through her veins. A streaking heat shuddered through her with each powerful thrust, its intensity pushing her beyond common sense, beyond all ability to deny the pleasure, the hunger, the need to feel him surging and thrusting and gasping her name against her throat.

His body stretched and throbbed and filled her with a wet, pulsating heat, and the ecstasy lifted her, sent her soaring through one exquisite crest after another, each spasm splintering her body into tiny fragments of pleasure. Her fingers curled into his hair and she had to clench her teeth together to keep from screaming as the shivers ran down her thighs, spiraled through her arms, coiled between her thighs, her belly, her breasts. Her hips continued to meet each savage thrust, though she did not know where she found the strength to do so. The tightness inside her would not relent until she felt him stiffen a second time and a third, the pleasure flooding out of him in long, sweet bursts of shuddered relief.

She gasped for air and found his mouth. Her body was glowing, almost steaming from the extravagant release or pent-up emotions, and she groaned, burying her face in his throat, mortified to feel the proof of their excesses slippery on her thighs.

Griffyn was in hardly better shape. His one hand was braced against the trunk of the tree for support; the other was still cupped beneath her hips. He was afraid to let her go, afraid to move at all in case his knees gave way and sent them both tumbling onto the ground. She was still a very real threat to his senses, for she continued to pulsate softly around him, to hold him in the warm, velvety grasp of her womanhood as if the thought of his leaving her did not even warrant consideration. And for the moment, no thought was further from his mind.

"One of these days," he murmured against her ear, "we really must try doing this in a bed."

Since he was more or less echoing her own thoughts, Brenna felt compelled to lift her head from his shoulder and gaze up into the silvery glow of his eyes. His gentle smile closed like a fist around her heart and she uttered a helpless gasp as yet another silky wash of sensation rippled through her body.

"Or in the clouds," he mused. "Where it will be my pleasure to make you faint as many times as you wish it."

He shifted his hands, sending one up beneath the tunic to circle and engulf her breast even as he sank carefully onto his knees in the mist. He managed, somehow, to keep her firmly in place on his lap, even to move her gently to and fro so that she could feel his heat still deep within her. His arms tightened around her and his lips were on her temple, on her cheeks, on the salt-bathed warmth of her mouth, and she returned his kiss with shameless fervor, her body leaning into his, pressing into his, eager to feel the strength of his passion engulfing her once more.

Brenna's sigh shivered the entire length of her body. Her head was pressed back into the moss, her hair was scattered in a damp tangle beneath. Her body was sprawled in a puddle of moonlit mist, her limbs immodestly spread, bent at the knee, one bare foot still draped indolently over Griffyn's shoulder while the other was being gently lowered and warmed by his breath and his hands.

Able to think of nothing that made a modicum of sense at that precise moment, she tilted her head to one side and peered down at him from beneath a small frown.

"Locksley. Is that your real name?"

He kissed her instep and frowned as if he had to think about it a moment. "Rowen Hode of Locksley. A name I have not thought of or used in too many years to remember."

"Rowen?" She arched an eyebrow in surprise.

"A name conferred upon me by Hern the Hunter, so the story goes," he murmured in acknowledgment. "My mother gave birth to me in this very forest and claimed the ghost of Hern led her to shelter in a sacred cavern. She told me later it was actually just a hole beneath two rocks, but it was a good enough tale to make my father think I should become moderately proficient with the bow and arrow."

"Moderately proficient?"

"I have been known to miss the mark occasionally. At any rate, he sent me to Wales when I was ten, where I was given my first introduction to the longbow—a weapon I confess at first was more terrifying to me than it was to any hare in the forest. I had also thought it a weapon native to that land alone, which makes me admit to some curiosity as to how one ended up so far away in Touraine, wielded with such expertise by a golden-haired minx hardly as tall as the bow itself."

Brenna rested the warmed foot in the crease of his belly while he lowered and massaged the other.

"Will's mother—Lady Gillian—was the daughter of a Welsh bowyer. She taught us both ... all of us actually, though it was only Will and I who became ... moderately proficient. Robin has a fair hand and eye, but he is too impatient.

Richard and Dag ... well ... they disdain any weapon that does not allow them to feel the splash of their enemy's blood."

He smoothed his hands absently down her thighs and stroked his thumbs over flesh that was still flushed and dewy from his recent ministrations.

"I would have thought Sparrow to have the least patience of all," he remarked, lowering his mouth to the top of her thigh.

"The least patience," she agreed with a small start, "and the least tolerance. But the most love for my father and, in turn, all of us."

"And Littlejohn?"

"Littlejohn has"—she sucked her breath in through her teeth as his tongue swirled and explored, and finally relented to lick a meandering path up onto her belly—"has been known to tear a man apart with his bare hands."

He laid his own hand on the little fluttered contractions he could feel skittering beneath the surface of her skin and grinned. "I will keep that in mind."

"You should. I do not think he likes you overmuch."

"Neither does Will. Have I ... intruded on territory he was hoping to claim for himself?"

"Will'um? Good heavens, no. We slept in the same cradle when we were babes, and if ever we gave a thought to sharing something bigger now, my sister Rhiannon would behead us both. No, Will is just... Will. He is very much like his father, who can often see things hidden behind a man's demeanor that no one else can."

"Between him and your brother-in-law I feel like a bug in a bottle."

"Geoffrey? He is the easiest-natured of the lot."