Chapter Nineteen
Jehan sat by a dying hearth in the upper room of the donjon, his armor scattered across the floor. He thrust his bloody hands through his hair, settled his elbows on his knees, and bowed his head. He heard the thick oak door squeal open.
“Get out.”
He had already thrown out his squire twice. What must he do to let these fools know he wanted to be alone? He wanted no help removing his blood-splattered doublet, no servant bringing him food or wine, no better tending to his wound than the linens he’d tied around his thigh to stop the bleeding. He wanted to sit in the cold and dark and dirt and blood and figure out how he could have done everything differently.
As the door shut, he reimagined the fight on the field for the hundredth time, wondering if he could have made a better choice. What if he had chosen to make a lightning-swift attack on Laurent’s whole contingent instead of allowing a one-on-one challenge? He imagined himself in the thick of that battle, blood pumping hard and battle lust raging in his head, striking hard at the pike men and the faceless men-at-arms. He imagined, in the midst of the madness, someone striking him from behind, hard enough to drive chain-mail links into his neck. He wouldn’t think for long, he would simply react, twisting with his sword high, seeing a cap of dark hair, but not soon enough to deflect his blow or stop the momentum of his swing as it tore through a layer of plated doublet and something else, something soft. In his mind, he watched Laurent claw his chest and fall to his knees as Aliénor’s scream came from on high.
He clutched his head as that scream shattered inside his skull. Every scenario he imagined ended in Laurent’s death or his own—except the one option he’d chosen. Yet mutual survival didn’t feel like victory.
The door swung open again. He shot up off the stool with a curse on his lips and then froze in place.
Aliénor stood in the doorway like a stone angel, bathed in the dusky light streaming in through the arrow-slit window. From the very first moment he’d opened his eyes to gaze upon this woman, back in the dimness of his cell, he’d been struck by her beauty. But now, after all their time together, he noticed so much more. His gaze traced the curve of her neck and shoulder but what he remembered was her kindness, her husky laugh, the swift work of her hands, the way she danced back and forth from the buttery, slipped her hand over the backs of her hunting hounds, tossed a fetching look over her shoulder, ran her cool fingers over the fever of his brow.
The air rushed out of his lungs.
She whispered, “It’s so cold in here.”
He turned his face away and reached for another log. He set it upon the fire as if the fate of the world hung on how well it balanced upon the crumbling embers.
She said, “Your wounds have not been fully tended.”
He shrugged. In his blind fury to be left alone, he must have sent a woman scurrying.
“It’s been hours,” she said. “Shall I—?”
“No.” The word came out harsher than he intended. “The wounds aren’t deep.” He planted a hand on the mantel and forced his voice calm. “How is your brother?”
“Changed.”
The word was spoken with such ruefulness that he hazarded a glance at her. She stood with a knot between her brows, stroking the clean linens hanging over her forearm. Her steady calm unnerved him more than weeping. He wished she would weep, wail aloud, or strike him with fists and angry words.
He deserved that.
He said, “You’ve come to plead his case?”
“No.”
He raised a brow.
“He will speak his own mind,” she said. “Laurent will not pay a moment’s attention to what I advise, I assure you.”
Frustration surged in him. She had to know what he must do now, as the protector of this castle. Her brother had marched here with an army, calling himself the one true heir. If Jehan didn’t act swiftly to stanch that claim, the question as to who ruled would linger. The villagers might choose the boy they knew, taking up arms against Jehan as the holder of the prince’s claim. If Jehan didn’t act, he’d be leaving himself and all who depended upon him vulnerable to endless conflict.
“You won’t kill him,” she said softly. “You had a chance, and you didn’t.”
He turned his face away from her.
“You won’t kill him,” she repeated, “because you love me.”
A knight wore layers of armor to avoid injury. A padded doublet beneath a shirt of mail, pounded metal buckled to his elbows, his forearms, his calves, and molded to his feet. But a heart had no armor, and no weapon had ever plunged deeper than her words.
He turned away from her and allowed himself to imagine another scenario. He saw sunlight shining on her golden hair, crowned with flowers, as they stood together outside the door of the chapel. He saw Father Dubose wrapping a cloth around their clasped hands. He imagined villagers gathering in a happy cluster around them, crying out as the final words were spoken and the blessing placed upon them. He dreamed of Aliénor’s bright, wide smile as she lifted her face for the marriage kiss.
Then still another scenario rushed through the scene like a storm. The clatter and roar of a hundred men-at-arms gathered outside the castle, striking their swords against their shields. Perhaps they were English, detouring from the next scouring of Gascony to fetch Jehan back to Bordeaux to be executed, his lands and castle and unsanctioned wife taken away. Or perhaps they were French knights, arriving in force to win back what was stolen, now that the knight who held it had fallen so out of favor that the English prince would no longer raise a finger in defense.
He shook the images from his head. Swiveling on a foot, he crossed the short distance separating them and took her face between the palms of his hands. Her cheeks were flushed but cold. He held them until they grew warm from his touch.
“I do love you,” he said, his voice gruff.
Her mouth trembled. He remembered too well how it felt pillowed under his own.
He added, “I think I’ve loved you from the first moment I laid eyes upon you.”
“That’s not true.” Her voice, husky and low. “You were all but dead then.”
“You brought my body back to life,” he said. “And my heart.”
She grasped his hands, flexing her own over his, but he couldn’t allow hope to bloom so he tightened his grip. “I have to send you away, Aliénor.”
“I know.”
She didn’t know. She couldn’t possibly. But her steady gaze, growing misty with tears, proved him wrong.
“Everything has changed,” she whispered, with a hitch in her throat. “I feel it in the way everyone looks at me, or avoids looking at me. I don’t understand why, not completely, except Laurent’s foolish actions are the cause of it. If I stayed, I’d be making a mockery of him and of what the world would consider good and…”
“Honorable,” he said, whispering the word she could not.
“Yes,” she conceded. “I think I understand that now.”
He wished she’d never had to.
“If I stayed,” she continued, working her way through what he’d known the moment Laurent had brought a small army to the gates, “then I’d be the enemy. I’d be the traitor choosing an English conqueror, even in the face of my brother’s better judgment. They’d take up his cause, Jehan. They’d turn against us. All of them.”
He leaned forward and pressed his lips against her forehead, breathing in the scent of spring in her hair. She had ever been like this, never one to turn away from the hardest truths.
Then her fingers crept up to cup his jaw, forcing him to look at her, to see what she wanted him to see, those expressive eyes gone moist with emotion while her body softened against his.
He could no more resist that oh-so-familiar invitation than he could stop his heart from beating. He plunged one hand into her thick hair and captured her mouth with his. She stumbled back as he pressed closer until the cold stones of the wall scraped the back of his hand. Everything was movement and moans, the tug of cloth and jangle of buckles, captured breath and sudden gasps, no moment to think of anything but the blinding hunger between them, the sore pounding of his heart, the hollow of his hands aching for the feel of her until finally, finally, the weight of a breast filled his palm.
She made those sweet little noises in the back of her throat. His cock hardened, pressing against his loosened linens, throbbing. Setting his member free to press against her thigh, he shifted his grip to burrow his other hand between them, probing through folds of linen as she widened her stance for his touch, until he felt the wet welcome of her.
With a groan he lifted her up by the buttocks so she could straddle his hips. He yanked cloth aside so his cock, tight and hard, would find its home. To the music of her gasp, she sheathed him like a sword. He pulled back and plunged deeper, and then did it again, feeling her hot insides gripping him. He wanted to penetrate much more than her body as they found a rhythm. He wanted to leave his imprint on her so she wouldn’t forget what they had, wouldn’t forget him.
Because, in his heart, he knew this lovemaking would change nothing. They would still have to separate. He felt her desperation as strongly as he felt his own. This would be the last time he would taste the skin of her throat, run his chin across the heave of her chest, feel her fists gripping his shoulders as her body closed ever more tightly around him.
Her inner muscles throbbed as she threw her head back with a cry. She convulsed against him in a pleasure he made more intense by reaching between them to circle with a fingertip the most sensitive part of her. He would make her shudder again before he took his own measure of release, if only to look upon the lovely face he’d made soft with desire grow even more flushed with the pleasure he could give her.
He shifted his position, continuing to thrust—short, shallow little thrusts, so he could continue to slide his fingertip along the folds of her cleft, spreading the moisture of her sex around the root of his cock and across the nub of her pleasure. He breathed hard against the rise of her breast as she threaded her fingers through his hair. Their eyes met and held and he never wanted to look away.
“Aliénor,” he gasped, as her inner muscles clenched him hard.
She called out his name—a cry of surprise. A wave stronger than before shuddered through her body. Her cleft gripped him at the root, all but milking him before his time. Feeling her succumb again threatened to destroy the last shred of his control. He held back a single moment longer, long enough to pull himself out of her before he spilled his seed.
He couldn’t restore her innocence—that he’d taken, a thief still—but he could protect her this way, at least.
He stood for a long time, pressing her body against the wall with her thighs wrapped around his waist, while they both breathed hard. He kept her until he could no longer bear the burning of the wound on his thigh. By degrees, he released her, feeling every curve of her body as she slid to her feet. Holding her languid gaze, he finally peeled their bodies apart.
Cold air rushed between them. She leaned back against the wall, her hair disheveled, the neckline of her kirtle askew, her skirts bunched around her waist, seductive and beautiful and strong and his. With a soft smile, she tugged at the cloth of her kirtle until the skirt fell over her naked thighs. He rearranged his clothing as well, retreating to the hearth as if to give her privacy, but really so he wouldn’t continue to stare at her as if she were water and he a man dying of thirst.
“Wherever you want to go,” he murmured, casting a glance over his shoulder to soften his words, “I’ll see it done, Aliénor.”
Fussing to fix the neckline of her kirtle, she nodded. “Tomorrow, I’ll leave for Paris.”
Her gentle determination cut a new wound in his heart. King Jean, his court, and maybe her father were in Paris. A Gascon heiress, even a dispossessed one, could be married off to some ambitious knight in the hope that the French king would help the groom recapture his new wife’s lost inheritance.
Every time he cast his thoughts to the future, he saw Aliénor standing by another man’s side.
He tightened his jaw as he laid a steadying hand on the mantel. “I will escort you.”
“No, no,” she said, arranging her skirt straight across her hips. “It’s too deep into French territory.”
“I will not send you unguarded.”
“Thibaud would be a better escort, along with some of my father’s remaining men-at-arms.”
“With no offense to your uncle, he’s not the spryest knight in this castle.”
“But he has influence in the French court, if his stories are to be believed.”
“In the court of the king’s father, perhaps, but—”
“Jehan, certainly you understand it would better that I arrive in Paris with my uncle rather than my lover.”
A blush glazed her cheeks. He could see it from clear across the room. She was ashamed, he thought. Laurent and his grand, reckless, thoughtless gesture had made her ashamed of what they had shared between them.
That might be the worst wound of all.
“And my brother,” she ventured, clasping her hands before her. “What are you to do with him?”
Indeed, what was he to do with the brother who’d convinced brigands to fight for his cause? A boy who’d ridden to this castle in the colors of his father and fought for his sister’s honor? A crippled boy warrior who claimed to be heir?
“Go and tell your brother,” he said, “that I will send you away to your king—but only under the condition that he join the monastery and publicly cede his claim to the title for good.”
“You know he has never wanted the title.”
“Yet just by making the claim, he may have started something he can no longer control.”
She raised her shoulders in frustration. “He’s so changed, Jehan. I can’t promise he’ll concede.”
“He’ll concede because it’s what he truly wants.”
She looked overlong at her clasped hands, the silence broken only by the crackling of the hearth flames.
“I can’t help but wonder,” she ventured. “Wouldn’t it be…unwise…for us to travel so long and far together?”
His heart constricted. Already he longed to run kisses along the side of her face to where a pulse now beat against her temple.
“Not with your brother as chaperone,” he said. “I can escort him to the monastery on the return journey.”
She nodded in silence, her chest rising and falling, her throat flexing, her gaze slipping away from his.
“I can’t leave him here in my absence, in any case,” he added, “for sell-swords or the villagers to rally to his misguided cause. Now go.” It hurt to look at her so he turned to gaze sightlessly at the fire. “Make your brother the offer, and then make the arrangements for the journey. We leave tomorrow.”
A bird flew close to the arrow-slit window, coming up against the barrier of the stretched leather covering. The sound of battering wings filled the room. By the time the noise stopped, Aliénor had already slipped out the door.
He laid his head upon his hand where it gripped the mantle.
The fight was over.
Her brother had won.