“Oh, you do,” she sighed as she bent her knees, the better to bring her body close to his.
“Not yet,” he cautioned. “I intend to have my way with you, and it’s a very slow way.”
“But—”
“But me no buts, my lady. I want you to be so sated and satisfied, you’ll never look at a younger man.”
“As if I’d want a younger man!” she returned, wiggling against him in a way that nearly sent him over the edge right then and there. “I want a mature man, not a boy.”
“If you keep doing that,” he warned, “I might prove to be as impetuous as the greenest lad in Christendom.”
“Impetuous? You?” she teased. “That I would like to see.”
“I can be impetuous,” he vowed, shifting slightly until she could feel his shaft against her body. “I believe I’m impetuously about to make love with my betrothed.”
His betrothed! She had only a moment to savor the words as he began to lave her breasts with his tongue and stroke between her thighs. His actions awakened an urgent, primitive need in her, one that must be satisfied, and quickly. She didn’t want to wait another moment, as she’d waited all these months, and she reached down to guide him.
He gasped as her hand encircled him. “I was supposed to be the impetuous one,” he said.
“Thenbeimpetuous,” she ordered, “for I swear, Ranulf, this anticipation might be the death of me.”
“I can’t have that, my lady,” he said, the words ending in a sound between a sigh and a groan as he pushed inside her.
Bea felt the membrane tear and his hard shaft filling her. There was pain, and likely blood, but she didn’t care. The rest was too wonderful and now they were as good as married, husband and wife. Joined in love and passion.
“Did I hurt you?”
“A little,” she confessed, trying not to think about it, to instead enjoy the feel of his skin beneath her hands, the muscles tight and powerful, to explore her beloved’s body.
“I’m sorry,” he said huskily, and she knew he was trying to hold back on her account.
“I love you, Ranulf. This pain is nothing.” She pushed her hips up to meet him, instinctively grinding them against him and being rewarded with a sensation like a different sort of kiss. “Not when I can feel this, too.”
A brief smile crossed his face and then that, too, was gone, submerged beneath the passion and the need when he began to thrust.
She threw back her head, squirming with desire and pleasure as his mouth, his hands, played upon her body, urging her to new heights of anxious expectation. Overwhelmed by the sensations, too new to this great bliss, she let herself be swept along, guided by his knowledge, his touch, his whispered endearments, the gasps when she touched him, too.
She could make him feel the same fierce need? The same excited longing? Her uncertain caresses, her hungry kisses, could arouse him as he aroused her?
Empowered, delighted by the unexpected revelation that she could be his equal in their bed, she met him thrust for thrust, his partner in this play, his match in passionate craving. She was free to be herself, unrestricted by conventions, by the role she so often had to play. Here she felt no need to explain or talk tohide her insecurity. Here she could be the woman she had always longed to be.
Yet she was a new Bea, too—one who was completely a woman, beloved of the man she loved.
With a cry, her body tightened, taut as a rope holding a ship anchored in a stormy sea. And then it was as if all the desire, all the longing, all the need met in a thunderclap. She was set loose upon that sea, tossed and tumbling in the currents of her passionate release.
As she gripped him tightly, his thrusts grew more frenzied, more powerful, as if his body was no longer under his control—and perhaps it wasn’t, as hers hadn’t been. With a groan, he stiffened, then bucked as if only the release commanded his flesh, until he collapsed, sated, his head upon her breasts.
For a long moment, neither said a word. They simply lay entwined, panting, satisfied and happy.
SURREPTITIOUSLY WATCHINGthose of his crew who’d come ashore with him, Pierre added another board from what remained of Gawan’s boat to the fire before him in the grotto. As the flames shot up, one of his men left the other fire and staggered toward him.
Barrabas’s shadow loomed to grotesque proportions on the cavern wall as the big man with the shoulders of a bull and arms like a bear splayed one hand on the side of the cavern to steady himself. In his other hand, he held a nearly empty wineskin.
“We’ve been talking,” Barrabas announced in his sailor’s patois, an amalgam of French, German and Italian that Pierre readily understood. “We all think you ought to forget this plan to take that woman and sell her in Tangier. It’s a long way to Tangier and women at sea are bad luck.”
Pierre moved his hand slowly and cautiously toward the dagger in his belt. He’d sailed with Barrabas for over ten years,but he’d no more trust him that he would his whore of a mother. “Surely the mighty Barrabas isn’t afraid of a mere woman.”
“It’s bad luck. And it’s too risky to stay here with that knight in the castle. He’s not like the other one, the fat one who fell off his horse.”
