At Your Pleasure (31 page)

It was to his advantage that she thought so—to his advantage that she did not realize how her quickening breath, and the small movements of her hips, and the feel and taste of her in his mouth, gratified that black part of him that wanted only her compliance, her duty, her loyalty, her devotion, her unswerving and unconditional and unceasing surrender. God, but this dark creature in him wanted her whether it cost him the rest of the world, or even her respect, for at moments like this, to have her, to have her any and every way he could, seemed worth any cost.

Her thighs closed around him, gripping his shoulders, urging him upward, over the wondrous terrain of her body. He permitted it, letting his mouth lead the way up her ribs to the tight peak of her nipple that he took between his lips and sucked until she writhed. But she had an aim now, and moved beneath him with purpose, inching down until her hot quim brushed his cock.

Their eyes met. She still looked too much herself, when he wanted her flushed, wild, beyond herself.

But her hand between them brought him to her entrance, and then he was pushing inside her, and it was he who was lost.

17

A
drian was not accustomed to a desire for compliments. But as he crested the hill, he discovered in himself a peculiar anticipation. Reining to a halt, he waited for Nora to reach him.

She was laughing as she approached, amused perhaps by some tomfoolery of her mare. When their eyes met, she shook her head and rolled her eyes, still smiling, inviting him to share in her pleasure. Her color was high, and beneath her wide-brimmed hat, her tight cap had not proved equal to the sharp, cool wind. A wayward lock of black hair had escaped it, lashing across her mouth, then snapping behind her when the wind turned.

She glanced beyond him and her smile faded. Gripping the pommel with one gloved hand, she leaned forward. “Beddleston?”

“Yes.”

She gave him a brief, wondering look. He did not need to ask the cause. Beddleston was not so large as Hodderby,
nor so elegant. Yet it made an imposing sight. Adrian’s forebears had dismantled the stones of the abbey that once had stood here and heaped them again into a wall that encircled the house and the moat. Because they had been Catholic, not a single generation of Ferrers had imagined there might come a time when such defenses proved unnecessary.

“It’s a castle,” Nora said.

“Something of it.”

“I had not imagined it so.”

“Did you imagine it often?”

Her eyes were serious by their very design, large but heavy-lidded, the color of smoke. They held his steadily for a silent moment. “How could I not have?” she said finally. “In those days . . . when you left, my thoughts flew after you.”

It satisfied him to hear her speak so easily now of that bygone time. With a nod of his head, he encouraged her to spur forward down the hill.

She rode well, his wife—not boldly, for there was nothing showy in her comportment. But her very ease, the grace with which she sat her mount, made for a pretty show, one which he slowed to enjoy.

My wife
.

Seven days had passed now since those words had become his to use, and he had spoken them more times than he cared to count—silently, to himself; to his men; and often to her—who, to his surprise, did not bridle or dispute the title. After their wedding night, she had not mentioned annulment again.

Perhaps, as had been his intention, he had wooed the
idea straight from her brain. Certainly he neglected no opportunities. His body increasingly seemed to him the only claim he could press on her that was able to keep her undivided attention. What progress he made in luring her nearer to forgiveness, he had begun now to chart by the number of her sighs when she lay beneath him, or by the hot looks he intercepted, so quickly averted, when he passed her in the hall.

Otherwise she excelled in keeping occupied at endeavors too feminine to allow his company. He had little care for others’ judgments, but his own pride did scruple at following her from larder to garden, slipping in bids for her attention as she supervised her house. The bed and table were where he laid siege to her. Dining in private at the end of the day, he drew her into conversations that proceeded like horses being broken: now smoothly running, now bucking to a stop.

Those moments at supper yielded, perhaps, the most valuable clues to how he must proceed. As they spoke of poems and far-flung places and dusty histories and philosophy, he glimpsed in her pauses how she battled herself—how her laughter suddenly became, to her ears, an indictment of her character.

Every time he charmed her, her smile belatedly signified to her a betrayal of her family.

Every time her smile faltered, he returned to the question of killing David Colville—who, like his father before him, now appeared to have abandoned a woman who would not permit herself to abandon him.

There was no news of the man. Yesterday, before receiving
word of the rebels’ defeat at Preston, Adrian had written to the king, speculating that Colville might have gone into battle there, or perhaps ridden north to Scottish soil.
I begin to think he never intended to return to his property here, though his sister fully expected him.
He had closed the letter with a proposal to return to London, where he might be of use in formulating a policy to handle the aftermath of the upheavals.

He had not spoken of this yet to Nora.

A boy spotted them as they neared the fortified wall. Recognizing Adrian, he ran ahead, bare feet flying, yelling for the gates to be opened.

“He is eager,” Nora said with a smile.

“He’s a scamp, off on a pretext in search of a hiding place, for I promised to wallop him if ever I caught him again without shoes.”

Her laughter sounded surprised. “But who are his parents?”

“Distant relations,” he said. “Deceased.”

“Do you take in many orphans?”

Her voice was teasing. But the answer was simple. “Any who are Ferrers, or related thereof.”

She kept smiling at him for a moment, and then a blush rose in her face, and she ducked her head and looked away, absorbing herself in a survey of the walls they now approached. New freckles showed on her cheeks and the slim bridge of her nose. Here in the country she never wore powder.

To take her to London would be a mistake. He knew what the city meant to her, and how easily old habits
were recovered. Hope might suggest that her dislike of court would draw her nearer to him, her only counsel . . . but wisdom suggested otherwise. In so many regards she remained out of his reach, and in the city, reminded of the mask she had once worn, she would find it easier to remain aloof from him.

If he could not win her in Hodderby, the place where she felt safest to be herself, then in London he would lose her—for at court, nobody was ever himself.

Perhaps
he
was never himself but with her. Or rather, with her, he was more than himself. He did not recognize this excess of emotion within him. Six years out of practice, he had yet to fathom a way to govern it.

To have her at court would pose a dangerous distraction to his composure.

Yet, he had no choice but to take her, for he could not leave her alone so long as her brother remained on the loose.

Side by side they rode across the short wooden bridge that spanned the moat. Late-blooming water violets stippled the green water. On the bank, half hidden by a profusion of wild roses, two swans loitered, their chins tucked modestly to their chests. Thence into the large, well-combed yard, where they drew up in the shade of an elder tree sprouting with scarlet berries. The passing of the wet weather had given rise to a riot of color. Stands of yellow poppy and purple foxglove hugged the walls, and the ivy was verdant where it spilled down Beddleston’s weathered face.

“But how beautiful,” Nora said as he helped her dismount. On the ground, she hesitated, encircled by his
arms, to consider the crenellated tower that topped the great hall. “That facing is new.”

She had a sharp eye. In Adrian’s childhood, the tower had collapsed, killing a man. His father had ordered the stones removed, the hall repaired and roofed. For almost two decades Beddleston had lacked a tower. But without one, its vantage, nestled in the valley, lacked a clear view to the surrounding hills.

“It was repaired this winter,” Adrian said.

She gave him an opaque look. “And the moat? Was that repaired as well?”

He smiled and offered her his arm. When she looked like to press him, he tilted his head toward the front doors. “Your curiosity does honor to your house, my lady. Come meet your people.”

Her startled look betrayed that she had not taken note, before, of the servants forming a line by the front doors to greet her.

The brief dance of her fingers on his arm revealed her disquiet. But she drew herself upright and moved forward with him, making poised courtesies to the twenty men and women there assembled before allowing Adrian to draw her into the entry hall.

The stained glass in the entresol above shed rainbow light across the tiled hall. In a puddle of scarlet they paused to be divested of their outerwear. “No luggage,” Adrian said to the porter, “only the saddlebags without.” They had ridden hard today and planned to return to Hodderby at dawn. “Have my sisters and brother readied to greet us before supper.”

Again he caught her curious, speaking look, but she made no comment as he led her onward.

Up the broad wooden stairs they went, she running a curious hand over the carved balustrade. The niches in the walls, once used to house torches, now supported brass urns overflowing with flowers. These, too, she touched gently as she passed, fingering the petals of roses and lilies, her gaze wandering. The stained window, which showed the martyrdom of St. Theresa, briefly caught her attention, but it was the oil portraits of his ancestors that most plainly intrigued her. Near the top of the staircase, she came to a halt.

“This is you,” she said.

The painting had been made in his university days in France. As he watched her study his younger self, a bittersweet feeling took him by surprise. When she glanced back to him, he bit down an impulse to ask her if she could still find that boy in him—if she could tell him where to look.

Instead he put his thoughts to what miracles time had wrought on her. Taking her by the shoulders, letting the softness of her breasts against his chest serve as answer to any questions his rotted brain might manufacture, he kissed her in full view of those who cared to look.

Another surprise: her mouth yielded to him when he had expected her to complain for privacy. A gentle hand fluttered over his back, then gripped his waist with a strength that belied its size. She stepped closer yet, fully against him, and the kiss she gave back to him grew puzzling, flavored by something that felt closer to desperation than desire.

He set his forehead to hers. “What is it?”

She shook her head, but her hands traveled down his hip to skate, provocatively, the top of his buttocks.

He almost spoke bluntly: there was a library directly behind them and its floor or furniture could be made fit for their purpose.

But the odd quality to her silence commanded his own. For a long moment they stood together, breathing, as she leaned into him.

At last, haltingly, she said, “This place . . . I did not expect it to be so lovely.”

“No?” He kept his voice soft. “Does it please you, then?”

“It feels like”—she gave an abashed tug of her lips—“an enchantment to me.” She ducked her head as though embarrassed by her admission.

He gently took her chin to lift her eyes to his. “I am glad,” he said. This was the place that gave all his efforts meaning. To have her here . . . no sweeter triumph had ever been his than to be able to say, “And now it is your home as well.”

“Yes,” she said, but some anxiety still trembled in her voice. “Yet I cannot but think, looking around . . . that this was where you thought of me.” She glanced back to his portrait. “Where you slept six years ago,” she whispered. “Where you rode from to meet me. As though it were . . . haunted by us.”

“I rode from here a month ago, too,” he said. “And how fortunate for me that I did.”

He felt, heard, the hitch of her breath. She kissed him
again, then, a short and violent kiss from which she broke suddenly, slipping past him to climb the rest of the stairs.

He showed her onward to his chambers, where he watched her walk the corners of his dressing room.
Haunted by us
: her words began to make sense as he saw this room through her eyes. Here were the most prized ornaments of his history—the astrolabe on his writing desk, collected from a Turk in Italy; the
mappa mundi
that he had found at a market in Antwerp, painted on goatskins stitched to the width of a man’s outstretched arms. Volumes of philosophy and rhetoric sat on the oak bookshelves. He was a man of few personal possessions, and until this moment, he had never considered what they might say of him. But to see her close examination of them . . . suddenly he realized that each held a story that he might wish to share with her; and that in sharing these stories with her, these objects would finally realize their value.