AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I am a maiden,” she murmured, shuffling around the tub until she stood directly behind him.
Fresh cuts and burn marks covered his back. Tentatively, shyly, she reached out and tracked her fingers over his left shoulder. The muscle grew taut beneath her delicate touch, then she felt the tension ebb away.
She brought her index finger to its point… slowly, ever so slowly, she tracked it over the firm ridge of his shoulder… across his upper back, at the apex of his neck. She heard his sharp intake of air as her finger lazily slid across his moist skin and traced the scar on his forearm. It’d healed well.
She felt his shoulders flex beneath her fingers. Blanchette swallowed deeply, hardly thinking, her body moving on its own accord. She knelt behind the tub and ran the band of her thumb across the nape of his neck and to his other shoulder, where another scar awaited.
“How did you get this one?” she asked, her voice a tender whisper. It followed the line of his shoulder and led almost to the base of his neck.
Rowan glanced over his shoulder. He met her eyes with his, and the emotion she found there shook her to her very core. “The night my Beatrice died. The night she was murdered...” He glanced away, seeming to watch something unfold inside his mind. “As I said, I found Mary inside the wardrobe. Wrapped her in a bedsheet and fought our way out of the castle. I took her on Sunbeam and nearly rode that horse until he fell into the dirt. I stayed at Edrick’s castle with her for the better part of the year.”
She ran her fingertip across his nape… the strong ridge of his shoulder… the peak of his biceps as either arm grasped the sides of the tub…
“You didn’t return on him,” she said. Her voice sounded airy, inflated with a note of desire. “Today, I mean. On Sunbeam. I… I didn’t recognize the horse.”
Rowan paused and seemed to weigh his words. Blanchette stepped out from behind him, one hand still on the curve of his bicep, to better gauge his state. His eyes gave little away.
“An arrow took him. Few things are worse than the sound of a horse in pain.” Rowan shook his head. “Nay, he was more than a horse. He was my friend. One of my last friends, I suppose.”
She recalled the first time she met Sunbeam and how he’d tried to nip her fingers off. She’d never seen more insolence or loyalty in a horse before.
Blanchette sighed and knelt beside the tub so their faces were the same height. She reached down and stirred the water with her fingertip. “I thought I am your friend now?”
His lip quirked at that. “I suppose you are, machérie. And there’s Smoke, of course.”
“Yes... I want to know more about you, Rowan,” she said, placing her palm on his chest. Her hand was wet from the bathwater, and she felt the wild beat of his heart under her palm. “Tell me about you. About your life before you became a soldier. Tell me more about Mary.”
“I’ve been a soldier for so long, it’s hard to remember who I was before that. My father flew a gray wolf and commanded a small army.”
“Yes… I’ve heard the stories,” she said. “My father had quite admired him.”
“They had a lot in common,” Rowan murmured.
They were both cruel, he meant to say.
Blanchette bit her tongue.
She removed her hand from his heart and picked up a cloth beside the tub. “Go on,” she pressed, dipping it in the water. Rowan watched as she swirled it around, distorting the water. Carefully, gently, she ran the cloth over the burns and cuts. He flinched slightly, but whether from pain or something else, she couldn’t say.
She dipped the cloth in the water again, her movements slow and deliberate. The flickering candlelight cast shadows that danced across Rowan’s sculpted chest.
She felt wicked… daring… and her most intimate part was aching and wet. Fighting off her blush, she lifted the cloth to Rowan’s muscular shoulders. She watched in awe as his skin glistened from the bathwater. Then she looped her hand in front of his body, sliding the cloth over his abdomen. His stomach as hard as a rock. She could see the outline of each muscle. She felt him suck in a breath as the cloth moved across that taut, glistening flesh.
As he spoke and his voice swelled the chamber, the area between her thighs grew hotter, more sensitive… tingled every time she shifted her weight. A pleasant sensation zapped through her, starting in her tummy and pouring down into that sensitive area between her legs.
“My father never allowed me to be a child. He put a sword in my hand shortly after I could walk. I always lived as a soldier—a mindless, sword-wielding… beast… who killed at a command and without rational thought. Never more so than the day I became a knight.” He hesitated, causing her hand to still in midair.
“Tell me, Rowan.”
“Keep doing that…” He sighed, signaling to her hand. “And I shall keep talking.”
She resumed, her eyes riveted on him. She stared at his lips, their shape and movement.
What would I do if he kissed me? If he wrapped his arms around me and dragged me into the tub’s warm water? If he stripped away my dress and smallclothes and filled his hands with my breasts?
Rowan groaned as she returned the cloth to his back and ran it over his shoulders. The confession seemed to pour out of him with little effort. “It was a small village. Two scores, but they had become a problem. Leaders had risen among them. Priests. They made their own weapons, forged in blood and tears. ‘A plague, they are,’ the king had told me. ‘A disease in my kingdom, who’ve turned away from God and the law. We must cut it out, lest it spread and damn us all.’”
Blanchette paused and listened to the sounds of the castle. The clanging of swords and laughter wafted from the window.
