Part 22 (2/2)

She melted into his kiss, savouring the devouring heat of his lips. When she could bear no more without the threat of a faint, she pressed her cheek into the crook of his neck and surrendered herself to the comfort of his arms.

”Take me away from here, Lucien,” she begged. ”Take me away ... now! Tonight! I am so afraid!”

”There is nothing to fear,” he a.s.sured her, smoothing the blonde wisps of her hair.

”As long as it is your intention to fight tomorrow, I will know nothing but fear.”

This time his mouth could win no response and he sighed. ”Servanne, I cannot simply walk away from the evil here at Bloodmoor Keep. Perhaps ... if it were just my own name and honour demanding vengeance, I could happily and willingly forsake it in order to take you away from this place forever. But it was my father who died a traitor's death, starved in his cell like a mongrel, his name spat upon by men who believed Etienne's lies. I can no more walk away from my responsibilities to the memory of Robert Wardieu, than I could turn my back on my most solemn pledge to the queen to see the Princess Eleanor brought back to safety.”

Servanne bowed her head and pressed her face against the thickness of his quilted doublet. He was right, of course, and it was unfair of her to think only of her own wants and needs, but it was also suddenly, shamelessly impossible to think of anything else.

Lucien drew his hands away, reluctantly forcing a s.p.a.ce between their bodies. He reached up to disengage her arms from around his neck, but she only clung to him more determinedly and raised huge, glistening blue eyes to his.

”You must go back,” he urged gently. ”You have already been absent from the keep too long.”

”Lucien-”

He shook his head and placed a finger lightly over her lips. ”And you must not call me Lucien. Not yet. Not while there are a thousand things to betray us.”

”Betray us? How?”

”A loose tongue, an unguarded look. The Dragon is keen and clever; his suspicions must not be roused so near the end.”

She tightened her arms still further and drew herself up so that their mouths were only a breath apart and elsewhere, their bodies were not even that.

”Promise me,” she pleaded. ”Promise me this will not be the end for us.”

”Has your confidence in La Seyne's abilities gone the way of your expectations for the Black Wolf's success?”

”Promise me,” she insisted, ignoring his feeble attempt at humour. ”Give me your most solemn pledge, then I know it will be so.”

Lucien's gray eyes studied her intently, his body responded to hers despite the armoured strength of his will.

”My pledge, madam,” he said softly, ”is that when this matter is settled, we will bathe together, and often, in the grotto by the Silent Pool. Moreover, we will discuss this stubborn streak of yours. We will discuss it until you are too exhausted to plague me with it ever again.”

Servanne's eyes shone as they drifted down to his lips. ”Your word is your honour, monseigneur, and I do not question it ... but ... is there no other means of sealing a most solemn vow?”

Lucien was still as a statue; Servanne's cheeks flamed as hot as fire.

”You will be missed-”

”I have spent these past few nights alone, feeling missed by no one,” she countered poignantly. ”Aching for something ... I knew not what until tonight.”

”Servanne-”

”For you, my lord. I ache for you. I ache with the loneliness and emptiness I feel when you are not near me. I know I dishonour myself in asking, but ... but I would feel you inside me once more,” she whispered haltingly. ”I would feel you banish the emptiness, and fill it with some small part of your courage and strength that I might carry it with me through whatever may come on the morrow.”

Neither Lucien the man, the outlaw Wolf, nor the vaunted Randwulf de la Seyne Sur Mer knew what to say or do to counter the powerful intoxicant of her eyes. His hands were less than steady as he cradled her face between them; the sight of her tears, flowing in wet s.h.i.+ny streaks to her chin made them even less so.

”There is ... no time,” he said raggedly. ”The risk-” ”The risk is that we might neither of us have this chance again. You said yourself, a thousand things might betray us -a slipped tongue, an unguarded look ...”

His thumbs came tenderly together over her lips to silence her. They parted again, brus.h.i.+ng reverently over the damp tearfall, and when they failed to staunch the liquid flow, his mouth took up the challenge, moving over her lashes, her cheeks, trailing lower to collect the salty sweetness that eluded him. A groan sent his tongue plunging helplessly into the velvety recesses of her mouth, and she tasted the curse that brought his lips slanting more forcefully over hers. She felt the tremors in his arms as he gathered her close again, and she felt his desire, rising bold and insistent between them.

”Love me,” she pleaded. ”Love me, Lucien, that I might know what we shared was not just a dream.”

He swore again as the s.h.i.+vered plea rippled through his body. There was no use denying the hunger that raged within him, no use resisting the lithe and supple body that clung to his with a feverish desire. Their mouths came apart and met again, broke apart and met, and he knew he was lost. His fingers searched after the ribbands and fasteners that bound her clothes in place, and the woolen cloak was flung aside, billowing away like a dark sail in the shadows. Layers fell rapidly to the impatience of lips and hands, and when there was only the slippery thin sheath of her linen undergarment between them, he stood back, his eyes burning with pa.s.sion, growing darker with promise as he pulled and tugged aside his own bulky clothes.

s.h.i.+vering with the remembered power of all that flesh being laid bare before her, Servanne stepped up when he had completed but half the task. She ran her hands across the hard breadth of his chest, her fingers combing through the storm of crisp, curling hairs. She found the darker islands of his nipples and a smothered gasp sent her leaning into his heat. Her lips closed around one of the sensitive aureoles, caressing his flesh with a hunger that prompted a m.u.f.fled hiss of a breath from between his teeth.

He was still flinging aside points, belts, and hose when he dropped down onto his knees in front of her. His hands skimmed up her thighs, raising the sheath to her waist, then her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The last of his patience was expended as he tore the flimsy garment in two, barely troubling to cast it aside before his hands were cupped around her flesh and his lips were feasting on the bared bounty.

Servanne curled her arms around his neck and staggered against his warm, wet manipulations. She shuddered at each swirling turn of his tongue and cried out as his lips kneaded and suckled and wors.h.i.+pped the firm white pillows of flesh until they were blus.h.i.+ng as pinkly as the rest of her heated body.

He drew her down onto his bended knees and she did not resist. He guided a snowy white thigh to either side of his waist and his hands cradled the softness of her hips holding her against him with an apologetic urgency.

”Yes,” she gasped. ”Oh yes-!” And the gasp became a husked cry as he lowered her smooth, yielding flesh over his straining heat. Groans were wrung from both shocked throats. She was hot and sleek and moulded to his flesh like a second, tight skin, and he paused every other heartbeat as he lowered her, knowing he had never, in all his l.u.s.ty years of manhood, wanted or needed a woman with so vast a pa.s.sion as he felt now.

One woman, he reflected savagely. This This woman. Fill me, she had said; love me, banish the emptiness ... woman. Fill me, she had said; love me, banish the emptiness ...

He groaned and bent his head to her shoulder, his body quaking with a fever he feared he would not be able to control. He was all too aware of the subtle, rippling contractions that pulled his flesh still deeper, and of her cries and whispers drenching him in a heat that was almost too much to bear. He s.h.i.+fted his hands to her waist, his fingers rigid with the force of his need. He clenched his teeth against the growing, spreading rings of pleasure that spiraled through him, but he feared it was no use. His arms circled her waist and he groaned aloud, the sound catching like a sob in his throat as he fought valiantly to weather the unholy torment. Servanne shuddered and writhed and he heard her gasped plea, acknowledging it with an even hoa.r.s.er groan as he gave her hips their freedom to plunder his flesh with their own merciless ingenuity.

Servanne's upper body arched back and her hands clawed into his shoulders. She moved blindly against the hard fullness of him, the rapture engulfing her in waves of heat so intense she continued to quake with shock and pleasure long after she had lost the ability to govern her actions. She had to rely upon Lucien's hands to reclaim their authority, Lucien's arms to bring her to a dazed, quivering halt against him.

Limp and drained, she collapsed into the welcoming comfort of his embrace. Stunned by the depths of her own pa.s.sions, she panted lightly against the curve of his shoulder and was thankful for his solid presence supporting her. His skin was hot beneath her cheek, and, with the slow return of sensation to her body, she became aware of the pounding beat of his heart against hers, and the fiercely possessive way he held her.

She dared to look up and their eyes met. Incredulously, she felt the wolfish fur at his groin chafing her and the deep, moist pulsations of his flesh sliding, stroking between her thighs.

”I am still there,” he murmured tersely. ”How, by G.o.d's splendour, I shall never know, but I am still there.”

He bowed his dark head, his words sounding like oaths where he pressed them against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Servanne squeezed her eyes closed and a glistening, fat tear splashed onto the back of the hand she curled around his neck and shoulders. Beneath her fingers were the welts of raised scar tissue; beneath her lips the taste of salt, musk, and leather. Deep inside her was the aching heat she had so shamelessly longed for, and she half-laughed, half-cried at her own foolish innocence. He had wanted her as much as she had wanted him and she wept for the joy of it, the wildness of it, the pa.s.sion that coursed through her veins like rivulets of fire.

Lucien's hands raked up into her hair, scattering the remains of the neatly plaited braid. He dragged the heavy woolen cloak closer and lowered her swiftly onto the padded folds, his body driving into hers with a hungry violence, his mouth eagerly sharing her renewed cries of awe and wonderment.

21.

Servanne opened her eyes slowly. She had been oblivious to her surroundings, oblivious to everything but the power and the pa.s.sion of the man in whose arms she lay. The tiniest s.h.i.+ver of fear chased along her spine when she recognized nothing familiar in the surrounding gloom. Could it all have been a dream again?

No. No dream had ever felt like this. No dream had cradled her body with such contented bliss. No dream had ever provided a shoulder of steely muscle for a pillow, or arms of warm marble for a blanket, or a body of such magnificent textures and essences for a mattress. No dream had ever supported her head when she could not, nor had there been hands half so bold or loving to gently draw her mouth around to his that they might savour the last ebbing shudders of spent ecstasy together. Spent, yet not spent. Drained, yet full to bursting with his life-giving strength.

Moaning softly to express her disappointment as he released her lips, she kept her pale, lovely face level with his. Her hair was spread every which way over her shoulders, with fine, damp tendrils clinging in misty curls to her temples and throat. Strands of it were tangled into the dark mat of hair on his chest. Filaments were tossed over his shoulders and curled around his arms to all but encase them in a gossamer coc.o.o.n. And, feeling safe and protected within their golden coc.o.o.n, Servanne lowered her cheek and rested it against the hard plane of muscle that breasted his chest.

”I would stay here with you, bound together like this forever, my lord,” she whispered dreamily. ”Let someone from some future time discover our bones melted together and envy us that we died of such pleasure.”

Lucien ran his hands down beneath the silky veil of her hair, but where he should have insisted they at least retrieve their clothes and restore some order to their appearance, he only held her selfishly tight to his loins.

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