Authors: Jennifer Blake
Desire clashed inside him with storm fury. It hardened his body until every muscle cramped like forged steel and the gripping in his loins took his breath. He wanted her with every last particle of his being, every frantic thud of his miserable heart.
“Put me down,” she said.
Her voice was even, but he could feel the tremors that shook her. It was a moment before it came to him that
they were not from frustrated desire, fear or weakness, but from rage as great as his own had been.
He hesitated only a moment before moving to the bed. He placed her upon it with care then stepped back. Fatalism and stubbornness layered his voice when he spoke. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“But you did.” She sat up, scooted backward on the mattress until her shoulders were against the headboard. “You also humiliated me, speaking to me as if I lacked a brain and the sense to use it. Do you honestly think I have no understanding of what could have happened on the road? Can you not conceive that just as you have a purpose that takes you away from here, I might have had one that was worth the journey?”
The quiet pitch of her voice was unsettling. He would have preferred that she scream at him, call him names, throw things. At the same time, he caught a shading of disdain in her voice that made his eyes narrow. “And what might that have been?”
“I discovered the whereabouts of a woman who was present when you were born, a woman who knew your mother. Yes, and your father.”
The hair on the back of his neck stood up, stinging with premonition. In an effort to stave off a revelation he might not like, he said the first thing that came to mind. “That was the purpose of the messages you sent.”
“What else? Did you think I was plotting treason? Or mayhap your thought was that I wrote to request a seamstress and silk merchant that I might replenish my wardrobe like some court flirt? God’s blood, David, do you not know me at all?”
To hear the oath on her lips might have amused him at another time. He was in no mood for that now.
“How was I to know what you were about when you failed to tell me? Did it never occur to you, while you were sending men here and there over half of England, to direct a message to me?”
Anger glittered in her eyes. “What, and have you send orders that my requests were not to be obeyed? That I was not to leave here? Not likely! I don’t require the guidance of a man for my actions. No, nor his permission.”
“Have you no consideration for the fact that I am responsible for your safety? That Henry would expect an explanation if you were killed while under my protection?”
“Your protection? What protection is this, since you were not here and I had no idea when you would return? You could have been dead for all I knew, killed on the road, captured and executed, tortured, maimed, left to starve in some hole of a dungeon.”
David blinked as he recognized the truth of what she said, also that she might have feared for him exactly as he had feared for her. Still, he could not leave it alone. “You didn’t have to go hieing off to wherever it was you found this woman, if that’s where you have been. You could have waited until I returned.”
“But would you have made the journey? Or would you have set it aside until Warbeck’s rebellion is over? It seemed important to know what this nun had to say. And it was important, David. It was.”
“How is this? I told you before and I tell you again, I
am not Edward V. No matter what I said when leaving Henry, I have no legal trace of royal bloodline.”
“Oh, but you do,” she answered in soft yet clear conviction. “Yes, you do.”
He stared at her while the stinging at the back of his neck moved to the brand on his shoulder where it throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Inside him rose an intolerable ache to have it be true, to be born a legitimate Plantagenet rather than a discarded by-blow, accidental result of a moment of kingly lust. It had nothing to do with crowns or thrones, but was about acceptance, about knowing where he belonged.
“Impossible,” he answered, all his tight throat would allow.
“No, it isn’t.”
She told him then. She described the nunnery, the cell, the old woman and her rambling tale. She left out nothing of the horror of the brand on a helpless babe, or of how he had been shuffled off, hidden away and finally lost.
“You don’t…” he began, then stopped, tried again. “How could something, someone as vital as a son and heir be overlooked? How could it be allowed to happen?”
“You weren’t overlooked,” she said, her face earnest as she slid off the bed and came toward him. “Rather, your birth was ignored. Your mother’s legal betrothal and consummation of the marriage were simply set aside because Edward, being young and fickle, decided he wanted Elizabeth Woodville and she would not succumb to him without marriage. He was ever a man easily controlled by his desires. But you were kept
close at the convent near Westminster in case his illegal queen failed him. His first three children by her were girls, if you remember. He hid you away in case no sons ever appeared, hidden yet marked to be certain who you were. Oh, but then he had Edward and Richard by the Woodville woman, and so…”
“And so I was discarded,” David said in hollow certainty.
“Lady Eleanor, your mother, had died by then. Convenient, was it not? And the nun who had tended her when you were born was shut away at her country convent, left to fade from memory as so many women have been within such walls. Only they forgot that women talk among themselves even in nunneries, that they keep each other and their stories alive in memory.”
“No,” David said in stubborn refusal of belief. “It has to be a mistake, some fancy told by an old woman wandering in her mind. My mother was, must have been, just another of Edward’s women, one sent to a convent to hide her shame.”
Marguerite caught his cuirass, shaking him. “What of the brand then? Why would Edward do something like that to a bastard child? It makes no sense, not unless he wanted to know you, know a child called Edward for his father, when the time came.”
“You don’t know he did, being there’s naught but an old woman’s word for it. The mark might be from an accident, as I said before, and nothing to do with Edward IV at all.”
“You have the look of him, David,” she said, meeting his gaze with determination, as if willing him to believe her.
He wanted to do that. Oh, yes. Never had he wanted anything more. But that small act of credence, innocent as it sounded, opened up such dire possibilities and dread decisions that his head spun with them.
The question that plagued him most was whether anyone else knew this story, and if they accepted it as true. Was it, for instance, at the bottom of the attacks against him? And if so, who was behind them? Was it the leader of the Yorkist rebellion, Perkin Warbeck? Or could it be Henry, after all?
“Before God, my lady,” he said in a bellicose whisper, “I wish you had left well enough alone.”
Her smile was strained around the edges. “Do you really think things would be different?”
An excellent question. It would be helpful if he knew the answer.
“David, David,” she said, shaking him again, “you are the king. You must accept it. You must, and then decide what you will do next.”
“Henry is the king, Marguerite. He won his crown by right of arms at Bosworth Field.”
“He is a usurper.”
“Is he, when this bloody crown has been fought over for decades, tossed back and forth so many times that no man alive can tell who has the truest right to wear it? Even if I am who you say, what good is it? Nothing can be done when there is no proof.”
The look she gave him was wondering. “But there is proof. Did I not say? I brought it back with me.”
“Impossible,” he declared, his voice hoarse, though it was as much a protest against fate as it was a denial.
She paid him no heed, but stepped back and unfas
tened her cloak. Throwing it aside, she loosened a velvet drawstring bag from the girdle at her waist. She drew it open and took from it a rolled parchment tied with ribbon and affixed with seals. With this resting on the palms of her hands, she held it out to him.
“These are the marriage lines of Lady Eleanor Talbot Butler who gave birth to a child branded at birth with the mark of the Plantagenets,” she said softly. “These pages are your mother’s legal contract of betrothal, and therefore of marriage, with Edward IV of England.”
M
arguerite watched with care as David hesitated then reached to take the parchment she offered. He unrolled it, scanned the Latin phrases with swift comprehension. She saw the instant when belief finally came to him, saw his eyes widen while dark color rose in his face and receded again. Though she looked closely for triumph, for pride or greedy anticipation, these things did not appear. Swinging away with the marriage contract clenched in one fist, he moved to the window and stood staring out.
“What did you intend doing with this proof?” he asked without turning.
“Beyond handing it to you? What would you have me do?” She waited, her heart tumbling in her chest, for his answer.
Breath left him in a wry laugh. “Destroy it, if I would consult my wish alone.”
She saw his point. If his life was in danger before, it would be ten times worse if he were revealed as the rightful king. “And if I don’t?”
“It seems clear it should be placed in Henry’s hands.”
“Henry’s,” she said in faltering comprehension.
He inclined his head. “It makes Warbeck’s claim to the throne as nothing, since it proves Richard III was right, and Elizabeth Woodville was Edward’s concubine rather than his queen.”
He meant, of course, that Warbeck, claiming to be Edward’s second son, Richard, had no legal claim whatever to the throne. “But will Henry use it, since it makes his own queen illegitimate, as well?”
“Under ordinary circumstances, no. But if it means saving his crown…”
“Yes, I see,” she said, keeping her voice even with an effort. “But…but that isn’t the real reason, is it?”
“Not entirely.”
She stared at his profile from which all emotion had been banished, leaving his expression remote, cold, not quite focused. “It’s a matter of honor. That’s it?”
“I can’t leave him in ignorance of something so vital to his welfare.”
“What of your welfare?” she demanded, clenching her fists at her sides. “What if Henry is so incensed, or so threatened by your rise to royalty, that he has you dragged out and beheaded at once?”
“It’s a chance that must be taken,” he answered, his face grim. “I will ride in the morning to deliver the evidence into his hands.”
“We will ride, if it must be done.”
He shook his head. “This is something I need to do alone.”
She recognized the finality in his voice. He would not be moved from what he thought was right, even if it meant his death. He would not allow her to go with him because he didn’t want her to see him die.
She had thought she would be forced to choose between her love for David and her loyalty to Henry. She should have known better. David had made the choice for her. All she had to do was accept the inevitable as she had with so much else in her life.
And why not? It was, as David had said, the right thing to do. That it was also the easiest did not make it less true. She would have that consolation if worse came to worst and David was seized for the king’s justice.
“No!”
That defiance came to her tongue unbidden. She followed it up at once, moving to David’s side to place her hand on his arm. “Send the marriage contract to Henry if you must. When it is on its way, let us ride for France. If you would not be king, then this coming battle between Henry’s forces and those of Warbeck have nothing to do with you. Let them kill each other over a piece of metal set with a few jewels. Only let them do it when we are far away.”
He eased his stance, turned slowly to face her. “You would go with me?”
“Yes, if you would have me.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “Oh, I would have you, if it would serve. But you know it will not. You would miss your sisters, miss Braesford and the Scotsman Cate married and all your nephews and nieces that have been born and are to come. You would miss England’s narrow little shores that hold so much of heart and home.”
“You…you are saying that because you missed them while away on the continent.” An ache pierced her chest at the idea of it.
“Oh, aye, and I left not half so much behind as you would be leaving. Still, it was all I’d ever known.”
“We…we could make our own family.”
His smile took on a rueful edge. “We could. Charles of France gave me lands, you know, with a fair castle of stone as pale as cream, and sundry villages to go with them. We could make a home there, rear our children, grow fat and lazy and old together in the fullness of our years. We could, but for one small thing.”
“Charles could well seize you for use as a pawn, might trade you to Henry for sundry concessions.”
“There is that possibility, though it is not the whole.”
What else could it be? She searched her mind, found the inevitable answer. “Your vow.”
He inclined his head. “My vow, made when I thought you far above me as the stars, and just as out of my reach. When I was young and innocent and full of high ideals.”
“And when you feared you might die in battle for the sake of Henry VII.”
“That, as well.”
“But you didn’t die,” she said, her voice tight in her throat. “You left me instead, just as you intend to leave me now.”
“Not by choice.”
“It comes to the same thing.”
He stared down at her, and she could see the longing that darkened his eyes. His gaze moved over her face, rested on her lips. She felt them tingle, swelling, and felt, too, the tightening of her nipples under the binding she had used for comfort while riding. His heat reached out to her, surrounding her with the scent of horse and
hot man. Her eyelids felt heavy, so heavy. She could not look away from the beautiful molding of his mouth, the smooth surfaces of his lips, the small pulse that throbbed in the bottom one.
He wanted her and she wanted him, and what odds that she might yet seduce him from the strict path of duty that he had chosen, might find some place in the wide world where they could be safe, could be together?
It was her only hope.
She stepped closer, caught his cuirass again and urged him toward her. He came in a swift move that brought his hard body up against her, pressed her against the stone of the window embrasure. She could feel the hard muscles of his thighs, the hot metal of his cuirass against her breasts, the corded strength of his arms that held her. He reached up to sweep her veil from her head, to spear his fingers under her thick braid where it had loosened. Then he lowered his head and took her mouth.
This was no tentative meeting of the lips but his full possession. He swooped in with his tongue in hot domination, commanding the ultimate surrender. She gave it to him, twining her tongue with his, moaning a little with the slick friction, the advance and retreat like a maddeningly intimate test of wills. She wanted to entice him, to incite his greater possession, yet could not hold the intention in mind as her excitement flared.
His arms locked ever tighter around her. Awareness receded as her senses whirled. She melted against him, sliding her arms upward to clasp his neck, threading her fingers into his hair and clutching it to bring his mouth even harder against hers. She wanted more of his sweet
ness, his heat, his tongue, more of him deeper inside her. She ached with emptiness and ratcheting need. She was desperate for the feel of his bare skin, the heft of his weight upon her.
His hands molded her hips, lifting her closer against him. She could feel the hot length of him against her belly, the way he shifted against her in yearning. Desire and despair flavored his kiss as he suckled her bottom lip, set his teeth gently upon it. Heat mounted to her head in a red mist. Blindly, she followed where he led, offering everything, taking everything.
Stone was at her back and metal pressed against her. She could breathe only in panting gasps. A small sound of distress escaped in her throat.
He inhaled, his every muscle hardening to steel in revolt against his will. An instant later, he pushed away from her.
Air rushed into her lungs in a gasp so deep she turned dizzy with it. Before she could recover, he caught her up, carried her to the bed and dropped her upon it. He stepped back then, twisting to unbuckle his cuirass and fling it from him so it clanged against a bedpost. As he stripped off the mail he wore underneath, and the shirt under that, his gaze returned to her. His eyes burned as they roved over her, as if searing every detail into his memory, the softness of her breasts, the scoop of her waist and flare of her hips, every curve and hollow. He tore the points of his hose from his shirt, stripped off boots and hose until he was rampantly, magnificently naked.
She watched him, noting with avid attention the masculine grace of his every move, the width of his chest
and the muscles that glided under the skin, the stalwart strength of his thighs, the glint of light on the curls that spread over his chest and tapered downward to the rigid length of him. She should look away, pretend to modesty, but she wanted to see him, to remember every inch of his skin, his power and beauty, if this was the only time she would have him.
He came toward her in a soundless and powerful glide, bounding up to land beside her on the jouncing mattress. Before she could move, he rolled her toward him, his fingers busy at the back of her gown. She allowed him access while spreading her hands over his chest, absorbing his heat and scent of metal and male energy.
He wanted her, she knew. How much of her did he want? How much would he take if she offered everything she had to give? Was his control as strong as his body, his will equal to his desire? And what could she do to tip the scales?
He drew her gown off her shoulder and down, easing the sleeves from her arms. Her girdle was next, slithering away over the edge of the bed. He exclaimed in impatience at the binding that flattened her breasts, but unwound it with care, saluting the curves as they appeared, licking at the red marks left by the cloth, tasting a nipple as it peeped between the layers of wrapping. He cupped the mounds when they were free, molding them in his hands. And when he bent his head to take a hard and beaded tip into the heated suction of his mouth, it was so sensitized that she shuddered, keening in the back of her throat.
The sound seemed to rake him like a spur. He jerked,
shuddered, even as he suckled. With a hard, competent hand, he shoved at her gown while being careful of her injured arm. He pushed the fabric down over her hips, dragging it from under her and slinging it away. Her braies that had prevented saddle sores were stripped off next. When they were gone he splayed his hand over the flat surface of her abdomen and then slid it down, down until his long, hard fingers delved into her soft folds, spreading them while his thumb stroked over the tender bud at their apex.
Marguerite shifted, opening her legs at his nudge. It felt so erotic, so freeing, especially as he slipped a finger inside her. She spread her thighs wide, and wider still. She wanted him deeper, needed more of him.
He gave it to her, a second finger thrusting with care, with concentrated intent and masterful precision. Fire ran from her breasts to where he probed and back again. Her breathing grew shallow, ceased altogether as her very being burst in silent brilliance that sent tiny shooting stars across the backs of her eyelids. She turned, arching against him with her eyes squeezed shut while internal muscles pulsed in frantic rhythm.
“Please,” she whispered against his shoulder. “Please come into me. Please love me….”
He stroked her back, her hips, ran his palm up her spine and pushed his fingers into her hair. She could feel the throb of his heart, hear his ragged breathing. “Do you know what you’re saying, sweet Marguerite?” he asked in hoarse demand. “Are you releasing me from my vow?”
“Yes, yes,” she gasped, while amazement for what he had asked flitted through her mind.
It was banished as he surged up, pressing her to her back again as he covered her. He supported himself above her, hovering with a hand sinking into the mattress on either side of her face. “It is your will and not mine?”
His arms were trembling with the effort of his control, the muscles like stone. His thighs were firm between her legs, though not as hard as the iron rod that prodded her. She pressed her palms to his chest, reveling in the silken crispness of his chest hair against them, before she skimmed them down his abdomen and lower, until she held his power and pulsing heat between her two hands.
“Mine, yes,” she answered in near incoherence, and could not have said whether she was answering his question or claiming possession. “Now, David. Now!”
“As you will, my lady,” he said in echo of the words he’d spoken so often long ago. “And when you will.”
She met his eyes then, saw them ablaze with bright azure triumph and something more that stopped her heart for an instant before sending it into a harder beat. Holding his gaze, she eased upward a little and positioned the tip of his male member against her wet, moist center. Greatly daring, she lifted her hips to take him in, parting her folds for easier access with one hand as he rocked against her. Releasing him, she grasped his waist and drew him down.
His groan sounded strangled as he eased deeper, retreated, and went deeper still. She shivered with the exquisite joy of it, the fulfillment. He stretched her, sent pleasure spiraling through her in a thousand small lightning strikes of sensation. She spread her legs wider,
pulled him deeper, pressed against him with small shifts of her hips.
A deep burning promised pain. She stifled a low moan, but would not stop. She pressed up against him again, and again, but could not breach that last fastness protected by her maidenhead.
“Forgive me, sweetling,” he murmured.
With a powerful thrust and twist of his hips, he plunged deep. He was perfectly still, holding her pinioned to the bed.
She cried out, but found beatitude before the cry ended. With a sob, she wrapped her arms around him and held him close while tears leaked from under her lashes. She was stretched to the fullest extent, encompassing, holding as she relaxed by degrees, adjusting to the length and thickness of him as if made for him alone. David was hers for this moment, if for no other.