“What is this, Pen?” Her voice was throaty with desire.
“Whatever you want it to be,” he said.
She’d lied to him. He was deceiving her, wanting to retain the upper hand for a moment when she’d had the advantage of him for so long. They were on equal ground, both liars. Both desirous. Both adults with no promises to another. There need be nothing more beyond this room, this night. He’d lived in a blank for weeks; he wanted that blank filled with Gwen. Whatever she offered, he would take it. Even if she was simply bartering her body for his goodwill. Even if loving her made him a fool.
“Let me up,” she whispered.
He stifled a groan and closed his eyes, holding himself in as he rolled to his side and eased away from her. He wanted to shout, to rage. He was a viscount, for God’s sake! He was rich—somewhat rich—and could have anything—most anything—he wanted. What would make her want him?
He watched in despair and hunger as she moved to the door, the wrapper clinging to her delicious shape, the candlelight gleaming on her skin. She closed the door and turned to him.
Her gaze met his, steady. She was uncertain, but she wanted him. She wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t ashamed.
He held out his hand, letting his hunger, his need, and a promise show in his eyes.
She came back to the bed and finally, finally, into his arms.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
“Tell Mr. Pen to hold still, or I’ll get his hair crooked,” said Cerys, waving her shears.
Pen, sitting with a towel around his shoulders, widened his eyes at Gwen. “Tell Miss Cerys I’m here for the barbering, not the surgery.”
With a look of intense concentration, Cerys pulled Pen’s wet hair straight with her comb and, at her mother’s direction, made a few careful snips. Gwen smiled and turned back to the scullery sink, where she was washing the equipment to make a batch of small beer. Watching Pen move about St. Sefin’s like he belonged among them made her heart feel as if it were being squeezed into a bottle.
Since their first night together, her days—a week? Nearly two?—had been filled with stolen kisses, whispered promises, caresses snatched in passing when they thought no one else might see. She slipped into Pen’s room each night and woke each morning entwined with his naked body, heavy and satisfied, more alive than she’d ever felt. They orbited in a strange limbo, a dreamworld of passion in the dark, and in the daylight hours they fell into a growing rhythm of companionship, a connection deeper than anything she’d ever shared with a man. The cold truth hovered around them, waiting to snap shut its ruthless jaws, but she’d shut her eyes against it like a child safe from monsters as long as she didn’t see.
“Cyw hungry,” Tomos announced, kicking his boots against the doorframe to shed them of mud.
He entered the kitchen carrying Pen’s latest addition to their community, a chicken. Pen had engaged Gossett to improve his fighting skills, and Mrs. Gossett, who hadn’t sported a black eye in weeks because her husband had other places to spend his energies, had gifted Pen the poultry, a game fowl that Gwen suspected had been retired from Gossett’s cock-fighting brood.
Tomos took immediate charge of the creature and named it the Cymric word for chick. When the thing wasn’t clucking, scratching, or diving beneath one’s boots for a bug or worm, Cyw was content to be carried about by Tomos like a fat feathered infant or minor god. Tomos’s glee over his pet was as enormous as Gwen’s joy in her stolen time with Penrydd, and they were both, she feared, in for eventual heartbreak.
“And here’s licorice.” Mathry entered, shaking dew from her shawl and holding up a basket full of slender brown sticks.
“Licorice! How is it you have licorice?” Pen started from his seat and earned an immediate reproof from Cerys.
Mathry sauntered his way, a hand curving over the tiny bump of her belly. In the past few days she’d quickened and had settled into making infant clothes like a woman on a mission. She pitched in to help with a new zeal, was pestering Gwen to teach her herb lore, and moreover had dropped her flirtatious manner toward Pen.
Gwen wondered how much Mathry or any of the others knew of what was developing between her and Pen. Even the sound sleepers must notice how he took every opportunity to be near her. And how she melted with delight each time he did.
Whatwasdeveloping between them? She didn’t know what to call it. His kiss made her forget where she was. His touch made her body feel as if music sang through her veins. She craved him and couldn’t get enough.
“A priest brought licorice plants to St. Sefin’s from Turkey during the Crusades.” Gwen busied herself with her task so she didn’t stand there gaping at Pen with that broad, foolish smile. “Or so the legend goes. Cerys never found the treasure, but she found the old records of the priory bundled in an altar cloth and stuffed in a trunk in the abbess’s rooms. It’s been growing wild for a long time, but good enough for all that.”
Pen bit into a licorice root, and Gwen stared too long at his straight teeth, the flicker of muscle in his firm square jaw, the pleasure on his face. She was going soft in the head. Licorice was a feeble return for what she’d done to him. Was doing.
“My turn for a trim?” Ifor stepped into the kitchen with Gafr on his lead and a boy near his age behind him. “Here’s a lad from Greenfield to see you, Miss Gwen.”
“Bore da,Gareth,” Mathry said with surprise. “Is everyone well?”
“You’re all right, that’s clear,” the boy said with a bold grin. Then his eyes flickered over Pen and he ducked his head in instinctive deference. Gwen’s throat closed before she realized Pen hadn’t been to Greenfield and the servants there wouldn’t know him.
She wasn’t ready to lose him. She’d agreed to keep up the ruse, telling herself it was for Dovey’s sake, that she still needed to win him to the cause of St. Sefin’s and persuade him to let them stay. But the truth was that, like a greedy harlot, she wanted her hands on him every minute, and she didn’t want to give him up.
She’d have to. She knew that. But since he appeared to be in no hurry to reclaim his memory, even after seeing his estate, she saw no reason to rush him out the door. Not when she could spend one more night, one more day with him.
“They want you at Greenfield for dinner tonight, Miss Gwen.” The messenger boy sat at the table next to Ifor, who pulled a steaming plate of cakes their way and offered him one.
