Desire burned through Sebastian, his flesh throbbing as steadily as a voice murmuring, Want, want, want. Where could they go where no one would see them? If they remained in the open, they would surely be interrupted by the gardeners and, as surely, Beatrice would flee him. He had to touch her, kiss her; he had not spent a sleepless night in a fever of lust to be denied now. Somehow, she had failed to rebuild her walls; he must take advantage of her weakened defenses before she had a chance to strengthen them.
He glanced at the house with its irregular roof line, the old tower bulky and graceless beside the soaring roof of the hall and his mouth quirked. So few people ever entered the tower that when John had stolen the mead on Twelfth Night, he and Sebastian and Beatrice had known there was only one safe place to drink it. How fitting would it be to go there now and woo Beatrice into yielding to him? Wordlessly, Sebastian walked to the old tower, pulling Beatrice in his wake.
The door opened on half-lit gloom and the unexpected smell of newly sawn wood. Sebastian pulled Beatrice inside the tower and shut the door. Early sunlight drifted through windows that were hardly more than slits in the thick walls, providing just enough light to see the stairs that led to the floor above.
He drew Beatrice close, pressing her against him with her hand, still clasped in his, against the small of her back. With his free hand, he caught her neck, drawing her mouth near enough to kiss.
She yielded as soon as his mouth touched hers, her lips opening hot and sweet underneath his. Red shimmered beneath his eyelids, burning through his bones and sinews and dropping heavy and powerful into his loins. His arms tightened, drawing her still closer as if he might absorb her. He wanted to throw her down, feed and douse this fire in the curves of her body—. He wrenched his mouth away and rested his forehead against hers, dragging air into his body as if he could not get enough. The pulse of his flesh crying, Want, want, want, had grown fiercer, driving him to the limits of his control over himself. He held himself still; if he moved, he feared he could not contain this lust, excessive, outsized and inexplicable. How could it have grown to such monstrous proportions in so short a time, fed only by a few kisses? He was no green boy, he was not controlled by his appetites.
With an effort of will, he put aside the thought of breasts and thighs and the pleasure he would find in them, at least until he could think clearly, and then he considered Beatrice. He did not want to overmaster her into compliance.
He took a deep breath and tried to think of something unpleasant, something that would distract him and so cool his fever. London. Stinking streets, stinking river, noise and dirt...Loathing rose up in him, enough to calm him. He drew her deeper into the room, looking for blankets, straw, anything that would soften the floor. There was nothing, the flagstones swept clean as they had not been in his memory. Perhaps on the next floor...
“Come,” he said and led her to the stairs, hoping that the light would enable them to see the worn and damaged places in the rise.
But the stairs had been repaired, broken treads fixed, holes filled. The smell of newly sawn wood grew stronger as they ascended, sweet and dry in his nose as they emerged through the opening in the floor. It was not as dim up here as it was below, the light sufficient to see details, such as they were.
The floor had been mended, the new wood bright against the old. There were no furnishings, not even the broken and worm-eaten benches that they had used in the past. The room was empty but for a stack of lumber against the far wall and stones for repairing the stairs piled beside it.
It is enough, his body said, lunging against restraint like a dog maddened by the scent of a hart. If they had been lovers of long standing, it would have been enough, the chance to snatch private pleasure outweighing the rude accommodation. But they had never lain together and whatever her past, he did not want to treat Beatrice like a common doxy.
Yet he could not stop touching her. As if she heard his thought, Beatrice turned to him, a question in her eyes. He caught her free hand and pulled her against him. She came willingly, slipping her hands free of his and placing them on his chest.
“We are private now,” she murmured.
He looked down at her. Did she seduce him? His kisses had swollen and reddened her mouth, and her breasts, soft and white against the darkness of her gown, rose with the force of her breath. Yet she did not eye him with a wanton’s boldness and her fingertips plucked at the facing of his doublet as if she were nervous.
Almost without his volition, his hand lifted and his fingers came to rest against her exposed skin. It was soft, softer than anything he had ever felt, smooth under his palm. As he touched her, her eyes half-closed and her lips parted, the look invitation. He bent his head and kissed the cleft between her breasts. Her breath caught, her sigh skimming across his hair like a caress. His other hand lifted and cupped her breast, full and round without the restraint of her pair-of-bodies. In answer, her hands clutched his doublet, her eyes half-closed. His mouth went dry, his thoughts blurring.
He kissed the tops of her breasts, her skin silky and cool against his tongue. His mouth wandered to her throat and her head fell back, giving him easier access. She was sweet in his arms, all that he had dreamed she would be. His hands wandered, as well, spanning her waist, brushing her breasts, before lifting to remove the coif concealing her hair. He combed his fingers through her plaits, loosening their weave. Catching fistfuls of soft hair, he drew her mouth to his and kissed her, breaking open her mouth. Burn for me.
She released his doublet, insinuating her arms around his neck and arching against him. He lifted his head to glance at her and gauge her response. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, veiled by her long straight lashes. She licked her lips and his groin tightened painfully, the red weight of it heavier. He released her hair and dropped his hands to her hips, half-lifting her to where his need raged.
It was not enough; he did not have the strength to both hold her and press her close, not with this fire burning his flesh. The lumber would have to do; there was nothing else. Touching her, caressing her, kissing whatever inch of sweet flesh came under his mouth, he half-carried her to the stack of lumber and lifted her atop it so that she sat hip-high. He put his hands on her knees and parted them. Running his hands along the outsides of her thighs to her hips, he stepped between her legs and fit himself to her, groin to groin. She sighed and pressed her face into his shoulder, acquiescing. His fingers fumbled at the knot in her bodice lacing, suddenly too thick to do the work. Break the laces, he thought, struggling. The knot gave and the front of the bodice parted, exposing white skin to fingers, lips and eyes.
Heat and hunger washed through him, dissolving the remnants of thought, leaving only the sharp, greedy awareness that to find surcease in her heat, all he need do was push up her skirt and free himself from the confines of his codpiece. Doing it would take no more time than it took to draw two breaths. Her breath coming in gasps and sighs and the way she moved under his hands encouraged him. He bent and grasped her hem, straightening to kiss her protests away before they formed. His palm skimmed over her knee to the warm skin of her thigh. Her skirt bunched over his arm, rustling like the wind in leaves; moist heat spilling from the apex of her thighs flowed over his thumb. His mouth went dry and his groin tightened unbearably. He closed his eyes.
Go! his flesh cried.
Pleasure Beatrice, another voice said and his thumb moved, following the heat to its source, to the place where experience had taught him touch led to joy.
Through her skirt, Beatrice’s hand clamped on his wrist. “No,” she whispered.
Do not deny me. His arousal, in the stiffened confines of his codpiece, was so intense it hurt. He pushed against her hand, reaching for her.
Her grip tightened on his wrist, insisting. “No.”
He looked down at her. Tears rimmed her lower lids, gleaming in the half-light.
“Why?” he asked harshly. He did not know if he asked why she denied him or why she wept. The tears made him ache; the ache was not desire.
“I cannot do this,” she said. “I cannot let you use me so.”
He brushed his thumb over the skin of her thigh. She swallowed and closed her eyes, as if sensation drove out sight. When she opened her eyes, there was shame and a spark of something else in their depths.
“You have reason enough to doubt me as it is. I will not give you more.”
“Do you think I will doubt you if we lie together now?” he asked. Desire was a lead weight in his belly, drawing him down; he was within inches of ease, if only he could persuade her to yield.
She searched his eyes, looking for something. When she shoved at his wrist, trying to move his hand from her thigh, he knew she had found it.
“Do you think I have not learned a man will say anything to get a woman into his bed?”
“You are my wife. There is no sin.”
“When you have had your fill of me, will you remember that I yielded to my husband, or will you not think that if I yielded to you easily, I will yield to others easily?”
“I would not think that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do not lie to me.” She pushed against his wrist with both hands.
He put his free hand over both of hers to still her. “I want you and you want me. I am willing to risk anything to have you. Will you not do the same?”
Her anger dissolved, washed away by bleakness. “No, I will not,” she said. “The worst thing I have ever suffered is your contempt. There is nothing I would do to risk that. I cannot.”
He pulled his hand from underneath her skirt and seized her hand. He pressed it against his codpiece, letting her feel by his hardness the force of his desire.
“I want you,” he said through clenched teeth, desire and pity and frustration fusing together, forged into anger. “Does that mean nothing to you?”
She stared into his eyes, her lips parted, until the bleakness in her gaze dried to desolation. Her lids dropped and she turned her head away, her hair shielding her face like a golden veil. “If your desire so overmasters you, take me and have done,” she whispered.
His hand tightened on hers, and he pulsed in response. A treacherous voice whispered, Take her. She is yours. He wanted her so much he hurt with it; there was nothing to stop him from possessing her here and now. As his wife, she could not refuse him. If he pushed up her skirts now and pushed into her, she would not fight him, lying obediently beneath him while he found relief.
And when he was done, would he not have destroyed all hope of binding her heart to his, and all for a tumble he had not fully enjoyed?
After a long moment, while he fought his hunger for release, he lifted her hand from him and kissed it, holding it against his mouth. “Forgive me,” he said, his voice rough. “I have been unkind.”
She turned to look at him, her face wet. Desire howled in his belly, straining against the leash of his will, but he would not yield to its demand when the cost was so high. Drawing her skirt down, he stepped from between her legs and closed her thighs. He took her hands and held them loosely; if she wished, she could pull them free. She let them rest where they were. He looked down at them, small and white between his own, veins tracing pale blue beneath the skin of her wrists.
“You are angry with me,” she said.
He rubbed his thumbs across the veins. “No.” What he felt was not anger. “I should not have pressed you.”
“I tempted—”
“I am not a puling boy to be led by my codpiece.” He looked up, meeting her doubtful, tear-drowned eyes, and cursed himself for frightening her. “I want you, you know how much, but the first time I lie with you, it should not be atop a stack of lumber. You were right to say me nay.”
She eased one hand free of his grip and wiped her wet eyes with her fingers. He had a sudden, vivid memory of her doing the same at fourteen, when her brother John teased her about her vanity. That day she had seemed curiously untouched, despite the tears and rage blotching her face, as if nothing could pierce the armor of her pleasure in herself and her prettiness. He was surprised to recognize that her sleek self-satisfaction was gone. How long ago had it faded? A year? Two? Or had it begun to erode the day she married Manners?
“I am yours to do with you as you please,” she said, her voice flat, as if she had learned the words by rote.
“It does not please me to touch you when it gives you no pleasure.”
She lowered her head, shielding herself from his gaze. “But it does give me pleasure.” She looked at him, the wariness in her eyes at odds with the trustful way her hand rested in his. “That surely makes me the wanton you have said I am.”
“If you are wanton, what am I?” he asked. “I would not have said no to you, yet you denied me for your honor’s sake.”
“You said you despised me.”
“I was a fool and liar when I said it.”
She swallowed. “Do not lie to me now, Sebastian.”
Here was a lesson if he had the wit to learn it: she was not as easily cozened as he might wish. The only thing that would do now was a piece of the truth.
“You were right when you said that I have wondered if you would yield to another man as easily as you yield to me.”
“Though I have not yielded to you,” she said quietly, braced as if for a blow.
A blow he must deliver. To ease it, he spoke as gently as he could. “No. But you did yield to Conyers.”
“So I must surely be lewd and unchaste all the days of my life.” She tried to pull her hand out of his.
He would not let it go. “Will you be?”
“No!” she cried, jerking her hand free. She clambered down from the lumber, shoving him out of the way. “I had little enough joy from Sir George. Why should I risk my name and destroy what remains of my honor for any man? Even you, Sebastian. What do you offer that makes it worth the price?”
No joy of Conyers? If she had had no joy, why had she lain with him? He knew what Conyers had felt—how not? Standing before him with her hair tumbled like a river of gold around her naked shoulders, her eyes blue as flame with anger as she refused him for honor’s sake, she was so fair that desire knotted hard in his belly, harder still in the midst of his chest. If she had been any other woman but Conyers’s leman, he would have admired her for the courage with which she disdained his effort at seduction. As it was, she was worth any price it might cost to have her, body and heart.
“I promise you pleasure. You will have joy of me, I swear it.” And if I give you something he did not, so much the better.
“I have heard that before and it was worth less than the breath that spoke it.” She pulled the laces of her bodice tight and knotted them.
“You were nigh to swooning not so long ago and you said I pleased you. Did you lie?”
“No. I will not lie to you. There was pleasure.” Her voice broke. “But after pleasure, what then? Pain and scorn and contempt. Can you promise me, on your honor and your immortal soul, that you will not despise me after giving me this pleasure? I care nothing for pleasure. All I desire is to be free of pain.”
“Do you think I will hurt you?”
“You have!” she cried and burst into tears. She turned away and stumbled to the other side of the room, colliding with the curving wall. Like a sapling caught in a summer storm, she shook under the force of her weeping, her sobs echoing in the hollow space.
Sebastian crossed the room to her and laid his hands on her heaving shoulders. She jerked her shoulders free and moved away from him, sliding along the wall, her distress hardly checked by her transit. The harsh sound of her weeping made his throat ache and he wondered if he should stay or go, if he did more harm than good to his cause by remaining. The question was bootless; he could not leave her like this. Slowly, warily, he rested his hands on her shoulders once again. Minutes passed, her grief in full flood, until at last her sobs began to slow, interrupted by hiccuping sighs. He might not have been there for all the heed she seemed to pay.
“What did I do to hurt you, Bea?” he asked. “Tell me.”
She shook her head. “I cannot,” she said, her voice muffled.
“Cannot or will not?” he asked quietly. Anger drove her into silence and oblique answers. Perhaps mildness would coax her into speaking the truth.
She turned. The tears had swollen her eyelids, rimming them in pink; her nose was red and shining. “Does it matter?” she said. “Whatever my reason, you do not like my silence.”
“No, I do not. Can you not trust me? Must we continue to play these games of doubt and suspicion?”
“But I am not the only one who plays, Sebastian. Do you not doubt and suspect me?”
How could he not have some doubt, when she had betrayed him, betrayed Manners?
“You cannot answer me, can you?” she said. “You cannot deny it either. What is to become of us, always staring at each other out of the corners of our eyes?”
What indeed? Somehow they must find their way out of this. “Did we not agree we want peace?”
“We did.”
“Can you not trust me enough for it?”
“You are not the only one I distrust.”
He frowned, unsure of her meaning. “I do not understand.”
“I do not trust myself,” she said. “How should I when I let George Conyers handle me like a woman from the stews because my pride was hurt? I am a fool, Sebastian—I have no more wit than a hen. I thought I need not follow the rules of conduct my mother laid down as befitting her daughters. I knew I was beautiful—how could I not?—and for that, I thought no harm could come to me. But I was wrong, wrong.” She caught her breath, curling hair floating about her pale face in a cloud of gold. “I was wrong about everything. How can there be peace between us when I am afraid you will hurt me?”
He could not follow the erratic leaps of her mind, but this last he could answer. “I would never strike you unless you needed lessoning,” he said.
“I know that. But, Sebastian, do you not know that fists are not the only things that hurt?”
“Have I ever hurt you?”
“Yes!”
“How? When?”
“You broke my heart.”
“And you broke mine. What of it?”
She stared at him. “When? When did I break your heart?”
“When you broke your word to me and married Manners.” He took a deep breath to calm his anger, surging as fiercely as if the old hurt were new made. “Did you ever intend to keep your promise to me?”
“I?” she cried, tears and sadness burned away, her voice low and furious. “What of you? If you had honored your promise and claimed me, I would not have married Thomas. But you did not claim me. You let me go without so much as a farewell. Do not blame me if that broke your heart.”
“Was it for me to cry you nay when you told me you were going to marry him?”
“I told you he had asked, not that I would marry him. I had returned no answer to him when I spoke to you. If you had betrayed by so much as a breath that you honored our promise, I would have refused him.”
“You should have refused him as soon as he asked!”
“And waited another year or five or ten for you to speak to your father? Is that what you think I ought to have done?”
“Why would you not wait for me?” he cried, the question echoing in the round room.
“You did not ask me to,” she said.
He could not have; pride would have stopped up his mouth before he had the chance. Yet... “If I had asked it of you, would you have waited?”
She took a quick breath, ready to launch a furious assent, and then the expression in her eyes changed, as if she had caught a glimpse of something unexpected. Her eyes widened and then she sighed. “No,” she said sadly. “No, I would not have. I told you I was a fool.”
What had he expected? That she would have waited? Yet he was disappointed, old hurt mingling with old anger, both of them bootless. The past was done. “You cannot undo your mistakes.”
She flushed and lowered her eyes.
“No,” she said, her voice choked, “we can neither of us undo what has been done. Can you not accept that I know what a fool I have been? I do not think you know how much I want to live in peace with you.”
“I do not doubt you,” he said.
“When I was with Lord Manners—” she began.
“Bea—” It will avail us nothing to do this.
“Hear me out, Sebastian.” She folded and unfolded her hands as if taking a fresh grip on her courage. The fear in her gesture silenced him. “When I was with Lord Manners, there was neither peace nor kindness between us. I do not think I could endure to live like that again. I will do anything you ask, try to be anything you wish, if it means we will have peace at Benbury.”
If you make me listen to part, you must tell me all. He would not be satisfied with less than everything. Ignorance only made a fool of a man.
“Is that why you lay with Conyers, because Lord Manners was less than kind to you?”
Her hands tightened, the knuckles white. “No.”
Everything, Bea.
“Why did you lie with Conyers?”
She raised her eyes and for a moment, she looked like her fierce, fearless mother. “Do you truly wish to know?”
No, I do not. He had started this for pride, continued it for hurt pride, when he did not want to know what she had done with Conyers, or why she had done it. Anything she told him could only fuel the images he had never been able to cast out of his mind, of Beatrice shivering with delight in another man’s arms. Anger in a dark wave flooded him once more. He still wanted to kill Conyers for taking what was his.
She belongs to me.
He went still.
It should have been me.
The truth broke over him like sunlight.
He was not, had never been angry with Beatrice for betraying Lord Manners. He was angry because she had betrayed him.
“No,” he said. “I want to know why you did not lie with me.”