The Maiden Bride (26 page)

Too soon. Too lush.

"Oh, Nicholas." He felt the rush of her breath beneath his chin as he dutifully stuck her arms back inside the gaping sleeves, trying to ignore the scent of her bath—that downy lavender she brought each night to their chamber to make him senseless with wanting.

And now here she was, inches from him, her eyes huge and suddenly teary, her mouth a glistening pout as she watched him tug the hem of her gown slowly down the length of her. It took all of his resolve not to stay and play there.

But there was more to this night than that, and he would have to restrain himself at every turn—else he'd become that man he used to be, would plunge and thrust mindlessly, and be done far too soon.

Tonight was for his love, his Eleanor.

"You
do want me then, Nicholas?" She frowned at him as though she could possibly doubt it, when his hands were hot and quaking as he threaded his fingers through her hair; when he was breathing her scent, deeply, his senses spinning out of control.

"Oh, my lady, I want you as I've wanted no other woman in all my life." The moment was a stolen, blazing miracle that he meant to see through to the end with his wits intact. But she cupped his chin with her soft hand, moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, then grazed his mouth—a gentle, exploring pressure that grew bolder, hotter, until he was aching.

"And do you plan, Nicholas, to—" Another kiss, just under his ear, drawing a long, lingering hiss from him.

"Breach your maidenhead?"
To drown in your embrace, to hear my name on your lips.
"Oh, yes, madam."

"Tonight?" All that unnecessary pleading, breathed against his mouth.

"God, yes, Eleanor."
Tonight and always, you'll be in my heart.

She smiled and looked up at him with eyes that promised magic. "But then, why—"

"The gown?"

"Mmmm." She made a slow pivot, holding out the hem, making a silhouette of her curves.

"Because I want to start again. At the beginning."

"Ah, Nicholas, that would be at my father's house."

"What?" He heard only the sweep of his pulse through his ears.

"At our wedding."

"Ours?" His heart thundered against his chest. But she looked like peace itself, the dangerous sort that beckoned from the shore when one was standing to the neck in rising floodwaters.

"Aye, if you're to stand in my husband's stead in the matter of my virginity, Nicholas, then you ought to know all that you missed at this proxy wedding of ours."

Well. There was some logic here, and his curiosity to be appeased. Sorrel had never been forthcoming about the details of the wedding and Nicholas had never asked, beyond the success of gaining the dowry.

"Yes, of course." He sat down on the edge of the table, one foot on the bench, his ardor simmering for the moment.

She poured a cup of wine and handed it to him. "I suppose I must begin earlier, when I was kidnapped from St. Catherine's in the dead of night by a half dozen men I'd never seen before."

"What?" He set the cup down hard on the table, took hold of her shoulders, and brought her against his thighs. "Say that again, Eleanor. You were kidnapped?"

For all the violence of her tale, she wore a glint of mischief in her eyes and at the corner of her mouth. "Aye, three of my father's guards and three of Bayard's, I learned later."

This was madness. He hadn't ordered her kidnapped. "The bloody bastards didn't tell you that you were being taken to be married?"

She shook her head and toyed with the ties at his cuff, her touch light and inviting. "I knew nothing until I arrived at Glenstow."

Christ, no wonder she reviled him.
"You
didn't have to agree to the marriage. Why did you?"

Now she was at his other cuff, running her fingers delicately between his. "Spoken like a man who's always been allowed to decide such things for himself. My dear father threatened his dungeon for me. I was too fond of my gardens to survive that kind of punishment."

Outraged, he pulled her close. "Your own father threatened you?"

Her eyes softened as she met his with all her trust, and admiration that he didn't deserve. "It takes more than blood and bone to be a father, Nicholas. You know that as few men do. But I was resigned and hopeful—despite what I knew of the man I was marrying. I hoped to discover some goodness in William Bayard that I could love unconditionally. So I said my vows, Nicholas."

But not to me, my love.
His heart filled up with longing for what might have been. She was summer honey coursing through him, pouring into his loins, heating and hardening him.

"And then?"

She slipped out of his arms and drew him toward the parted curtains and their marriage bed. "And then I was escorted to my chamber, where my attendants stripped me and put me under the counterpane in my bed."

"Why? You had no bridegroom to come to you." He almost felt sorry for himself, that he hadn't been there to bed her then—but she was here now, tugging on his belt. She'd somehow relieved him of his leather jerkin sometime back, and his sleeves were hanging loose.

"What are you doing to me, madam?" He shucked off his tunic and tossed it aside, to his wife's approving smile.

"What was done at my proxy wedding. The lack of a bridegroom made the bedding ritual that much more important, so John Sorrel joined me there."

"The bastard got in bed with you?" he roared. "He saw you without your clothes?"

"Oh, my." She looked down at his chest, and lower, at the bulge at the top of his breeches.

Wanting to kill Sorrel with his bare hands, he tilted her chin to him and found her blushing and bright-eyed, her gown drooping off the shoulder again. "Did Sorrel get into bed with you?"

"Partially." She stepped back from him, appraising him from head to foot. "Oh, but Nicholas, he wasn't nearly the man that you are."

"What the hell does 'partially' mean? Did he come to you naked?"

"Only his leg, when he shoved it beneath the counterpane next to mine—as is the custom in these matters." That same lithely naked leg came out of the folds of her gown like a pagan offering, slim and pink-toed and
his.

And John bloody Sorrel had been naked with her in
his
marriage bed? Sorrel was a man who would take a mile when offered an inch. "Did he touch you further?"

"He tried to."

"And?"

Her smile was wicked, worldly, and he wanted her. "He never tried again. But I do wonder, Nicholas, when you mean to begin our wedding night. I have a craving to touch you everywhere, and to be touched by you."

Eleanor recognized that singularly masculine look in her husband's eyes: hunger and longing, lighting her pulse and sending it soaring, making her wonder what she was going to do with him, this steward that she loved too
much.

This husband that she would die for.

He was the resonance of her heart, the thunder that slipped through her veins and into her belly when he whispered against her ear. "Oh, my love, may this wedding night forever erase the first."

"This
is
the first, Nicholas. Never doubt it."

"Christ, Eleanor, you are my heart." He finally came to her, his bay and woodsmoke surrounding her completely. His kiss was deep and lasting, made her crazy and writhing with need for him—a slow, molten exploration of her mouth, then down her throat to the cleaving of her breasts, where he met the limits of the linen and moaned, as though he were starving to taste beneath it.

"The gown, Nicholas. Now?" She reached down to rid herself of the barrier between them, but he caught her wrist and made love to it and then her fingers, before he looked into her eyes.

"Not yet, my love." He kept calling her "love" and "sweet," whispering his heart, making her wish that she wasn't deceiving him in this. Still, she ached for his great, scalding hands to hold her, and pressed herself into his splintering kiss wherever it wandered.

He slid the gown off her shoulder, letting it droop to her elbow. Then, his eyes glittering, he gently lifted her breast from its cradle of linen, holding it in his palm like a gem. Slowly, maddeningly so, he lowered his eyes to look, to admire; then he breathed his magic against her nipple, dashing it with his searing breath. And then he took it into his wondrous mouth.

"Oh, Nicholas. Oh, that's—" She felt a gentle, flickering tug that sent stars into the sky. Then he nibbled, tugged again, and possessed her completely with his startling kiss—an insistent pressure that made her arch into him, made her hips writhe as she rose up on her toes, to be closer to his rioting.

"Now the gown, Eleanor." But he took long delicious minutes raising the hem to her thighs, nuzzling her toes, then the back of her knees. He steamed his kiss through the linen to find the peaks of her breasts, his hands finally tugging the fabric over her head so that she felt free and new.

He stood away from her, looking wolflike and hungry, his body hard flesh and golden shadows.

"You are beautiful, wife."

Wife. Oh, God! She prayed that he hadn't heard himself, that he so often used the word in his thoughts that he wouldn't notice his slip. Because this was all becoming too tangled, too sweet. She didn't want to hurt him. Didn't want to stop.

He smiled, lighting little fires inside her, at the ends of her fingers and across her breasts.

"You're not undressed, Nicholas." She found the ties at the front of his breeches, and he sucked in his breath.

"You're killing me, you know."

"I was hoping so. You feel very good here, Nicholas. Mysterious, and warm." She cupped the marvelous shape of him with her hand.

"Great bleeding saints, woman!" He scooped her into his arms and carried her back against the mountain of pillows on the bed, his eyes wild and glittering.

"I only wanted to touch."

"Not yet, love. I'll not make it through the night."

Through the night, and all the rest of her days with the man she adored, who cared for her people as she did, who held Dickon's esteem and Pippa's heart. Feeling wicked and possessive, she pushed at the center of his chest when he would have gone back to his kissing. "Yes, but you still have your breeches on. And your boots."

She felt tightly coiled and aching, and even more so when he raised a brow and then left to shuck his clothes. Following him to the end of the bed, she clung to the bedpost and watched him undress—something she planned to do every night, every day of her life.

She gasped, nearly lost her balance and fell off the bed when he turned back to her. He was magnificent, his large tarse standing proud and quick, the rest of him rippling muscles.

She knew exactly what all that maleness was for, exactly where it was meant to be, for that opposite part of her was aching for him now, hot and damp. And she wondered how he would taste, and if he would like to be kissed there.

Nicholas was striving with all of his might not to drive his wife back into the bed and take her swiftly. He could barely think beyond the shapes of her: her breasts set free, and ready for his hands, his mouth; the shadowy triangle, dark red and scented for him.

She was utterly irresistible, waiting for him on her knees, clinging to the bedpost, looking at him in wanton appraisal.

"You're astounding, Nicholas."

"And you are beyond all my dreams." He knelt on the bed in front of her, pulled her against him, and drew her sigh into his kiss.

She arched against him, measuring his arousal with the rhythm of her hips, until she was his pulse and his heartbeat, and he was making new bargains with God. Just one more moment with her, one more day. Then he'd spend all the rest of his life in penance.

"It feels so wonderful, Nicholas. Large and just right and just there."

"And here, my love." He took her sigh deep into his heart as he slid his palm down her stomach, and then watched her astonishment as he spread his fingers and sifted through her damp curls, softly, lightly, until she was pressing herself into his hand, gasping.

"Oh, Nicholas, what you're doing!"

He parted her with his fingers, taking her mouth at the same time, plunging into both fevered slicknesses, reveling in her crooning, in her clutching at him, delving deeply to meet the rising, primitive tilt of her hips. Her eyes were glassy and the color of an October forest.

"Oh, Nicholas—our wedding night is quite wonderful, don't you think?"

It's heaven and hell, my wife.
He lifted her against the pillows and knelt between her legs, then trailed his caress down her silky belly, kissing her. He was so hungry for her he had to taste her there just once, even knowing the firestorm that it would unleash inside him. He prayed that he could weather it.

Eleanor could hardly breathe for the pleasure, for her husband's intimacies, and her battered heart. She was open to him, and glad of it, her thighs spread and the great man kneeling between them. So husbandly, so familiar, and so unaware of the way that she was looking at him—as the man she had married. Her blood was on fire, her skin ached for him to hold her, and to be just where he was, trailing his mouth down her belly toward the fever that had gathered between her legs.