Page 70 of The Captive Knight
“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, “thenI’dbe 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.Allof 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 forgethim.
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 andhis. 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.
