The Maiden Bride (15 page)

Chapter 13

«
^
»

N
icholas knew he was in dire trouble the moment his wife's hem hit the steam. He'd meant her only to sit on the ledge and dangle her legs and hands, but now she looked like a lounging selkie, waiting for a wave to come slip her back into the sea.

His exquisitely beautiful wife.

"So you fancy yourself a doctor, Nicholas, as well as a soldier and a mason and a diplomat." She smiled blissfully as she floated, her eyes closed, her hair playing loosely in the constant current, dancing with his senses.

"I am merely your steward, milady."

"Much more than that; Nicholas. What other secrets are you holding back from me? That you are an alchemist? Or a wizard—for there is no other explanation for a place like this."

He stood at the edge of the pool, hardly able to breathe, to think beyond her chemise floating in the lapping
waves,
the bobbing
of
her breasts and her dark nipples visible in the lamplight. He wanted to join her there. To join
with
her.

He turned away instead and tormented himself with the sound of her splashing and torrid thoughts of her toes and his tongue.

Christ.

"I give you but a few moments longer, my lady, then I want to see your blisters and that bruise of yours."
And every other part of you.

"You're right; we really should be in the office, planning the harvest campaign. But, ah, Nicholas, this is marvelous. And to think that I might have come to Faulkhurst as Bayard's bought-and-paid-for bride."

A safe enough conversation, if one that ate at his pride. "You find that so unthinkable?"

"Now, more than ever."
Splash. Sloosh.
A long, wispy sigh that he felt against his ear. "As entirely unimaginable as the marriage was itself. I was perfectly happy cloistered with the Sisters of Mercy."

What?
He shook his head of the buzzing. "You were what, madam? Cloistered?"

"Yes."

He spun around against his better judgment, certain that he heard thunder all the way down here, a bolt of holy scorn. "Cloistered, as in a nunnery?"

"At St. Catherine's. This is far too nice, Nicholas."

Bloody hell, he'd stolen a nun. This
ravishing
nun, from a very jealous God.

He stomped into the pool to his thighs—his boots be damned—and straddled her legs to tip her to her knees, then bent over all that sultry, steaming bliss.

"Tell me that again, madam. You were a nun when Bayard married you? A holy sister?"

She knelt like a coy mermaid peering up at him, one pink shoulder completely bare and tantalizing, the front of her gown drooping dangerously, just covering the maddeningly dark point of her breast.

"I wasn't anywhere near holy, Nicholas." She raked her fingers through the curtain of hair that was streaming out around her. "And I certainly wasn't a nun."

His heart climbing into his throat, he knelt too and made her look at him directly with those eyes of dark amber. "You weren't even
…
what is it called—betrothed? Promised to God, or whatever the devil they—"

"A novitiate?" The water defined her rising brows more clearly against her fairness and starred her lashes. "Good heavens, no. Why would you think so?"

He couldn't answer. She'd taken his breath away again, left him sputtering again. And relieved—because he hadn't been certain what he could have done, if he'd actually stolen her from a nunnery.

"I'm just curious about the lady I serve." Sopping wet to his breastbone, Nicholas leaned back against the edge of the low wall, crossed his arms against his chest, and stuck his heels into the stone paving of the pool.

"I wasn't well suited to the life. Not at all."

She smiled brightly at some secret facet of her past, then pushed backward in a swirl of skirts and a pale bare foot, only to come swimming back toward him, smiling, beguiling him again. "I loved my beds of hollyhocks and my daffodils too much for that. I dearly wanted to stay there forever, but I wasn't interested in vows."

"None beyond your marriage vows then."

"Not even them." She shook her head fiercely, as though he'd suggested she take up witchcraft. "Especially not marriage vows."

But we are married, wife, well and truly, until I take care of the matter.
He'd never actually considered her desires; she had merely been his bride. She needed only to show up and be married to him. He might have been a beastly scourge to her at the time, but he'd been a damned eligible one.

"Isn't that every woman's hope, my lady: marriage to a prosperous and powerful baron?"

Her laughter echoed off the vaulting. "How very like a man to think that a woman wishes to be handed from father to husband like a sack of turnips, forced to keep his household, to wait contentedly for him to come home from his warring and whoring, then to suffer his embrace—at his pleasure, and only long enough to beget him sons and sons and more sons—before he scurries off to his mistress's bed."

Here he was again, unjustly accused of deeds he'd never had the chance to commit against her. Not that he would have strayed a heartbeat from this woman—not if he'd known her as he did now.

"Sorry to have offended your sensibilities, madam. Now, let me see your hand." He stuck out his own and she paddled toward him.

"Oh, but you don't offend me, Nicholas. You're pigheaded and arrogant, and you try to negate my authority at every turn—"

"I've been more than patient with you—"

Her laughter ended in a delicate snort of disbelief. "But in all that, you've never offended me."

"That's good to know."

"I speak of my father's treatment of my poor mother, and as I'm sure my life would have gone with my husband." She stood up in her sopping, translucent chemise and gave her hand to him, already prunish around the blisters. He studied her palm with a pinpoint focus because to look up would be to see too much through her gown. A glance, and he would surely be blinded for his sins.

"He wouldn't have beaten you, my lady. He wasn't that kind of man."

She looked up from where their fingers entwined, dragging his gaze along with her, because he was nearly beyond resisting her. "How can you know for certain that William Bayard didn't beat his women?"

Hell's teeth; he set his own traps, then stepped right into them. "I would have heard of it, if he had. That sort of reputation precedes a man."

She pursed her lips, thwarted in her beliefs. "Well, whether he would have beat me or not, my wedding night to William Bayard was as abrupt and as quickly done as my wedding to him was."

He snorted. "Your wedding night? Madam, you haven't had a wedding night with your husband."

"I— But, I…" She paled to chalk and took in a small breath of terror. "What the devil do you mean by that, Nicholas?"

Christ, what
did
he mean? Damn, he hated this lopsided cat-and-mouse game. He scanned her face for clues, trying to recall what he'd just said, where he'd gone wrong. But he found only stark apprehension. What the hell would she
think
he meant? "That … well, my lady … that you couldn't possibly have—"

"Slept with my husband?" She stuck her fists into her hips. "Is that what you're accusing me of?"

Hardly an accusation. "If it seemed that way, it was only because you never met your husband."

"And?" She was a lunatic. Or he was.

He took a few steps closer, walking on thin and crackling ice here. "Then you couldn't possibly have slept with him, could you?"

"Damn you, William Bayard!" She turned away in her fury, sputtering curses.

Nicholas froze. His identity discovered, just like that. He couldn't move.

She whirled back on him and leveled an accusing finger. "Do you see, Nicholas, the position he's put me into? A marriage by proxy, and then he dies before he sends for me."

He.
Not
you.
He sagged with relief. She hadn't guessed his identity. He recovered enough to say, "Unfortunate."

"Unconsummated,
Nicholas." She threw out her arms. "Do you realize what that means?"

Yes, painfully so. The linen of her gown clung like window glass. "Well, my lady … that you are—"

"Not completely married."

Untried, he'd been about to say.

"I am in legal limbo, Nicholas, if anyone ever wanted to make an issue of who has the right to Faulkhurst. Our dear king, for one. I can't have that threat hanging over me."

Christ, she was right.

"It doesn't take a great Oxford scholar to realize that if William and I never met, then we never shared a bed. An unconsummated marriage isn't necessarily binding and has all sorts of dangling ends."

"Yes, it has." Another mark against his care, another pledge he must keep to her. That somehow she wouldn't lose her home. "I'm sorry, Eleanor. I wish that—"

"Eleanor." Her smile filled her entire face, lit her eyes, and sent his heart spinning out of control. "You said my name."

Because it felt so right. "Did I? I am sorry for the liberty."

"No, please. Whenever you wish to." Her hair swayed in time with her hips as she settled again into the water. "And I'm sorry about my ranting. I'll take care of it in my own way. It's just that … well, you startled me. And the subject of my marriage makes my blood boil."

He encouraged her to ramble while he gathered up his resolve. "It wasn't exactly the marriage celebration that you had imagined?"

A decisive business transaction on his part, because de Lacey had offered him the bridge at Laberre and an overlook of the whole Tampangne Valley.

"I wasn't given any time to imagine a celebration of any kind."

He remembered the swiftness of his decision; timing had been critical—and now it counted for nothing at all. She was the only thing that mattered now. And his pledge. "But at least there was a ceremony to consecrate the bargain between you and Bayard."

"Ha. It might just as well have been a bargain between me and my groom's ambassador. John Sorrel, if I remember his name rightly. Baron of something or other."

"Arrone." One of his fee knights, infamous for his skill at squeezing the opposition of its last objection. The very reason Nicholas had sent him to do the deed.

"Do you know John Sorrel, Nicholas?"

Blazing hell—that again. "I knew
of
the man only."

"When?" She narrowed that studying frown at him, her legs paddling behind her inside the billowing of her skirts.

"A soldier sees dozens of battlefields, my lady. Thousands of soldiers."

She stood and came toward him again, wearing her suspicions in her eyes, in the tilt of her head. "Aye, but you weren't just a foot soldier, were you, Nicholas?"

This was exhausting. As exhausting as watching her breasts sway in her clinging chemise, beautifully formed, and wholly forbidden to him.

He swallowed roughly. "How do you mean, my lady?"

"You speak as a knight and hold yourself as one, without an ounce of subservience to your nature. You read and you write." She came to stand directly in front of him, investigating his face. "You seem to know the innermost workings of a castle and the court, and have more than a passing acquaintance with men like my husband and my father and the Baron Arrone. I'd like to know who you are exactly, steward. Beyond your name."

He'd been working on this part of his fictional past, and it was an exceedingly clever story. Poignant, too, which she would appreciate. He shook his head wearily as he had practiced in the gatehouse, cast his gaze to the water, and even added a clicking noise with his tongue.

"Alas, my lady, the youngest of four brothers receives none of his father's titles, nor a teaspoon of his lands, and must find his own way in the world."

"The fourth son of a lord?"

"Langridge."

She clapped her hands together. "Just as I suspected: a landless knight errant."