The Wife Test (23 page)

“That is your father?” Chloe asked, looking between him and the earl.

“Only in the biblical sense.”

“He certainly is … is …” She sorted through a barrage of impressions for a word to sum up the earl’s powerful presence.

“Loud?” Hugh supplied several possibilities. “Arrogant? Overbearing? Infuriating?”

“Striking.” She glanced at the earl, who was busy charming noble ladies and serving women with equal familiarity. “You look very much alike.”

Hugh looked as if he’d just been doused with icy water.

“There is no need to be insulting.” He rose, cup in hand, and abandoned her at the table until the food was served.

After the wedding dinner, the company adjourned to the knights’ practice field to witness impromptu contests staged by a number of the younger knights and squires. Then as the sun lowered and the rest of the day went from tedious to terrible, tension over the coming night built steadily in all of the maids.

Despite the two full cups of unwatered wine, drunk in quick succession, Chloe’s body ached with tension, her hands were cold, and her tongue felt thick and clumsy. Her condition was not improved by rowdy voices recounting increasingly explicit stories about wedding nights and couples who managed their first bit of “night work” with something less than success.

How bad could it be? Chloe asked herself as Lady Marcella herded her and her sisters up the stairs and deposited them each in a borrowed chamber with a giggling maidservant. In her mind’s eye rose a vision of Sir Graham’s pale face and drink-dulled eyes. Apparently bad enough that experienced knights could dread it. And she had a good bit more to dread than the average knight or bride.

It was some time later that Sir Hugh arrived at the borrowed chamber with a group of ale-soaked well-wishers at his back and propelling him through the door toward the final step in forging a marital bond. As the maidservant slipped out and the door slammed shut on them, he blinked and looked around the small chamber, taking his bearings.

The furnishings were simple but pleasant; a modest-sized bed; a tall, delicately carved wooden chest; a brazier that at this time of year was empty; a table with two simple straight chairs; and a gold damask bed curtain that hung from the ceiling and was pulled back and tied on each side of the bed. They had been supplied with fresh linen, a flagon of wine and cups, and a sizable pair of fragrant bee’s wax candles that even now were supplying gentle golden light and sending their honeyed fragrance all through the chamber.

Chloe stood in the shadow of the bed curtain, wearing her spare shift and her hair down over her shoulders. She had given up trying to think of something clever or profound or even marginally charming to say. It was just as well; the sight of him standing there with his doublet loosened, his hair tousled, and his eyes dark and smoldering would have robbed her of speech in any case.

Her pulse began to skip and her lips felt bare and strangely warm. Every inch of her skin came alive beneath her shift, aching, yearning for contact of a sort that could only be satisfied in the depths of bone and sinew itself. Longing migrated inward along her limbs to pool in her middle. It felt strangely like physical hunger, and she suddenly understood why desire and appetite were often spoken of as one.

The way her body sprang to a life of its own, preparing, anticipating, shocked her. In a desperate bid to assert control over her own impulses, as well as the situation, she searched for a voice and found one. That of her inner abbess.

“This is all your fault, you know.”

Hugh stood in the small chamber, inhaling the honey-sweetened air, looking at the woman who had diverted his ambitions and by any standard wrecked his life, and told himself he was in deep trouble. He had already run the gamut of emotions from outrage to self-loathing and had taken out his frustration on his father, his friends, and even his confessor. Poor Graham had the misfortune to confront him and demand to know how he could have betrayed their friendship so foully, and had ended up with a cut lip and an eye nearly swollen shut. Not that Graham hadn’t managed to land a few well-placed blows, also; Hugh was sporting a smashed mouth and few bruises himself.

It was just as well. They both worked their anger out and afterward were able to think more clearly. And all of
his
thoughts kept circling back to one thing: he had no one to blame for his predicament but himself. He had made the choice to intervene, and now had to live with the consequences. Literally.

Why in Heaven’s name had he inserted himself into a situation that was well on its way to resolving the prime conflict in his life without his help?

“You’re right,” he declared, folding his arms and widening his stance. “Foolish me. All I had to do was stand there and watch you sacrifice yourself to your sisters’ happiness and marry decrepit old Ketchum, and I could have gotten on with my life.”

“Why didn’t you?” she said.

“Because …”

In order to do that he would have had to ignore the misery evident in her face and the overwhelming urges of protection and possession roiling inside him. He would have had to somehow forget the feel of her, the taste of her, and the longing in her eyes the previous night when she confessed that in her darkest moment her thought was of him. He would have had to somehow lock away the memory of her naked body, and the feelings she stirred in him every time those azure-sky eyes drifted over him.

Flawed and errant creature that he was, he didn’t want to forget any of it. He wanted to rescue her from an intolerable fate and claim her for himself. The highest and noblest of his impulses had bonded inextricably with his lowest and basest ones. Together they overwhelmed his better judgment, and he found himself striding into the fray.

“Because … I was charged by the king to administer the wife test to you. And it was clear as rainwater that old Ketchum was not suitable for you.”

“I would have married him,” she protested.

“No doubt you would have.”

“And I would have made him a proper wife.”

“You wouldn’t make anybody a
proper
wife,” he countered. “Proper wives are biddable and demure and helpful and respectful and diligent.”

“And I am not?” She stalked closer to him, unwittingly putting herself between him and the candles.

“Hell, no.” He stalked closer to her, his blood heating at the way the light filtered through her shift, outlining her body. “You’re overeducated and arrogant … outspoken to the point of brazenness … stubborn and willful … and without the slightest shred of modesty or deference for your betters.”

Her nostrils flared.

“While you, on the other hand, are the very pinnacle of husbandly virtue,” she charged. “Learned and wise beyond your years, uncompromising in both inner virtue and outward rectitude … patient as Job … enduring as the blessed saints … with the stamina of a warhorse, and no doubt the heart of a lion …”

“The king has declared that I am,” he said archly. “It must be so.”

Her mouth opened and closed without releasing a sound.

“You know, of all your shortcomings, my lady, the most unappealing is ingratitude. The least you could do is thank me.”

“Thank you? For making me a laughingstock? For making me sound like an intolerable, unnatural shrew?”

“For rescuing you,” he said, edging closer and breathing deeply, inhaling her lavender scent. “For sacrificing my future for yours.”

Sacrifice, she thought. So that was what he called it. He rescued her out of the great “nobility” of his heart and now insisted she eternally laud and honor his selflessness. With no hint that he might have had other motives, like caring about her. Or less than altruistic aims, like taking pleasure in her. Even after going to astonishing lengths to keep her from marrying someone else, he still wouldn’t admit that he wanted her.

“I am not ungrateful for your help,” she said, reining her emotions, making herself think. “In truth, I am so mindful of it and so inspired by your example that I am now willing to make a sacrifice of my own. In honor of your selflessness, I intend to renounce my wifely rights to you.”

“What?”

“Is that not clear? I intend to see that these vows go unconsummated. That will constitute grounds, in the clerical courts, for annulling the marriage.”

“Don’t tell me there is a lawyer inside that devious little head as well.” He fell back a step, looking genuinely astonished. She could see him struggling to make the wheels turn in his mind. “Church law, important as it may be, is not the final authority here. The king himself has decreed we are to be wedded, and”—his eyes darted back and forth as if searching for a plausible objection—“refusing to comply, especially in nuptials related to a treaty, would be tantamount to treason. Kings take a rather dim view of treason.”

“The king needn’t know anything about it,” she said, shrugging and sending her shift sliding off one shoulder. She saw light flare in his eyes as they fixed on her bared skin. “We can pledge ourselves to a ‘spiritual marriage’ … agree to live as brother and sister … and after a time you can petition to enter the monastery, as you’ve always wanted.”

“There are more obstacles to my entering the monastery than just this marriage. My father and his accomplice, the king, will not be content until I produce an heir.” He forced his gaze up to her face and dropped his arms to his sides. “Spiritual marriages do not produce heirs.”

“True. But there are instances of married persons being admitted to monasteries once their duty to their line is done. It shouldn’t take too—”

He seized her by the shoulders.

“Why this sudden desire to escape the vows you took today?”

“I don’t want to escape them,
you
do.” Her voice thickened as the heat and scent of him filled her head and began to curl through her veins. “I am merely accommodating you. Out of
gratitude.”
She saw the conflict in his eyes and watched him realize that she had just met his stroke and effectively parried it. His hands tightened on her arms.

“I don’t want your gratitude,” he ground out, his breath coming faster, his eyes beginning to shimmer in a way that made her heart beat faster.

“Then what do you want, Hugh of Sennet?” Her body migrated a provocative fraction of an inch toward his. With her next question she drove her point straight to the center of his heart. “What are
your
preferences?”

She watched his eyes darkening, saw him lick his lower lip as he stared at hers, and sensed the primal pull her body exerted on his. She waited, praying that his desire for her could overcome the years of arid, loveless doctrine and give her a foothold in his heart.

“This. I want this.”

He lowered his lips to hers and elation surged through her as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her fully against him.

This was what she had desired, craved, and literally prayed for. His lips were warm and wine-sweet, and his body was hard and indelibly male against hers. She wrapped her arms around him and ran her hands up his broad back, finding an anchor for her new life in the thick columns of muscle running up the center of his back and the sinew fanning up and over his shoulders. More than once his powerful frame had been shelter and safety to her in perilous times. At that tactile reminder of what he already had been to her, she relaxed and entrusted herself to the hope of all he could someday be.

His hands slid down her back and along her sides, claiming every line and curve, every responsive shift and quiver of her body. She began to anticipate the flow of his hands and moved to meet his touch, then to coax and direct it with her responses. He slipped his hands beneath her shift to touch her skin directly, and the heat of his big, callused hands seemed to melt her very bones. She sagged against him, clinging to his broad shoulders for support, and suddenly he was lifting her, carrying her to the bed.

As he discarded his garments, she lay on the feather-filled ticking feeling warm and supple and lush with sensual possibility. Knowing that he watched her, she experienced a new and heady sense of power emanating from the deepest core of her woman’s nature … the power to create desire, to evoke need and longing … and the power to fulfill that need and slake that desire.

He sank onto the bed beside her and lay propped on one elbow, running his fingers through her hair, tracing her profile with his fingertips, then dragging his knuckles down the smooth skin of her chest. When he untied her shift and opened it, she blushed and would have covered herself, but he held her hand away and smiled down into her eyes. To reassure her, he leaned over and kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, her lips, her chin … and worked his way down the center of her body, kissing and nuzzling, adding licks and nibbles, pausing only to nudge away fabric and bare another small part of her to his adoration.

By the time he returned to her lips, she caught his heated face between her hands and held him there for a moment, searching him, searching herself.

“I don’t want you to feel trapped,” she said, her voice low and urgent.

“I am trapped,” he responded with complete honesty.

“I don’t want you to be angry and resentful.”

“I’ve been angry and resentful. I’m … getting over it.”

She swallowed hard, and he could see her bracing, deciding.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” she whispered.

There it was. The truth that, once released, could never be put back into the box. She cared how he felt about her. She cared about
him.

“I could never hate you,” he said, tracing her lips with his thumb. “Any more than I could stand by and watch you marry a man nearly three times your age. You deserve better, Chloe of Guibray.” He grew more serious. “I’m just not sure you’ve gotten it.”

She smiled. It was as close to an admission of caring as she was likely to get just now. And it was enough.

“Let me be the judge of that.”

She laced her fingers around the back of his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers, offering him a chance to convince her in a more direct way. Their kisses deepened, growing steadily more intimate and venturesome. Soon she was kissing his ears and nipping his chin, and he was kissing the hollow at the base of her throat and trailing hot kisses down her breast to her burning nipples.

He stroked and caressed her and slowly slid his body over hers. Pleasure collected in her breasts and the hollow between her legs, making her burn for his touch on those sensation-rich parts of her. When he caressed and nuzzled her breasts, she felt her body drawing taut beneath him. As she parted her thighs and he settled between them, she felt herself being shaped, molded by his lavish heat to match his unique shape and weight, his distinctive frame. Then as they kissed and explored, he began to move, fitted intimately against her, initiating her into what would follow.

By the time he began the joining, she was fully naked and trembling with need. He tried to go slowly, to give her a chance to adjust, but she arched her body into his and wrapped her legs around him, urging him further, deeper inside her, and gasping when he breached her maiden barrier. And when at last he lay imbedded fully within her, he paused to look at her and found her face glowing with pleasure.

Then he began to move within her, over her, around her, filling her senses as he filled her body. The pleasure seemed to lift her on an ever-tightening spiral while paradoxically expanding the borders of her being. The distinction between her and him began to blur; her flesh seemed to merge with his, their heartbeats settled into a synchronous rhythm, and the breath that bathed their hot faces mingled as if coming from the same breast. They were joined and with each motion creating something entirely new, a new flesh, a new spirit, a new bond of heart and mind. When he finally took his release, she was so attuned to his response that she seemed to feel its tumult in her own tautly stretched nerves.

Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, well before dawn began to gray the sky, she awakened to find him propped up on a cushion beside her, watching her sleep. She felt a growing coolness and realized she was lying naked … the bed linen pushed aside … bared to his gaze.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Looking,” he said softly, feathering a touch up the center of her body and smiling at the way she held her breath and closed her eyes to savor it. “You are so beautiful. I never …”

When she opened her eyes, he looked away as if embarrassed to have her see her effect on him.

“You never what?” She smiled and turned his hot face back to her.

“Never imagined it would be so …” He halted and avoided her eyes, searching for the right word. “So easy to look at you.”

“It’s not like you haven’t seen my body before,” she said, puzzled.

“I may have seen, but I didn’t
look.
There is a difference.”