Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
Christine’s eyes shone. “Thank you.”
“Thank me by eating,” Mother Hobb retorted, already repacking her basket, “and by not marrying a fool.”
Tristan said, too smoothly, “She is in luck.”
He looked to Christine, his mind full of Mother Hobb’s words about pregnancy. He saw his own thoughts reflected in Christine’s brightness.
I do not need to consider her as the mother of my children. Or the act which would put her into that state.
But once imagined, it could not be dismissed. He knew her body, had sampled it, tasted it. The roundness of her bottom and her breasts, a supple and delicious softness that demanded not just to be touched but caressed, kissed, tasted.
Christine was a gourmet banquet that he had barely sampled. Looking at her now, he could see her as she would be in the moments before the joining that would make her one of those women who swore by peppermint. Body pale against the bedclothes. Perfect with skin that made satin seem hessian.
Arms languid above her head, breasts pert and crying out for the warmth of his mouth.
Stomach flat, slightly concave, and then the soft, heart of her womanhood.
The image of her pregnant with his child, glowing with maternal radiance and naked, sent such a fire through his veins that he barely suppressed the urge to take her into his arms there and then.
Christine’s lips were slightly parted, and her cheeks held spots of color.
The effect of the medicine, that is all. Then why do my cheeks feel hot?
Reeve cleared his throat and approached the table with a sheaf of papers.
“My lady, if your strength allows, I’ve put down a few notions for the ball, names of those who might supply what’s wanted. And, if I may, how the green might be dressed so as not to trip the old folk.”
“We would like the ribbon,” Christine said, smiling. She took the list, her fingers steadied over the ink. “You’ve thought of everything.”
“Your Grace thinks I think of coin,” Reeve said, not quite looking at Tristan.
“He’s not wrong. But I think of people more often.”
That was a rebuke. Tristan remembered the anger of a teenage boy confronted with this same innkeeper. His color deepened.
“Faces do not thatch roofs,” Tristan said, out of habit.
“No,” Reeve agreed. “But they stand under them.”
Silence. The old man was right; the world was full of nauseating truths today.
“True enough,” Tristan finally granted, “I thank you for the trouble you have taken, Mr. Reeve,”
Reeve puffed up like a bantam. Christine smiled, and Tristan felt glad that he had given credit where it was due. For that smile, he would do much.
Reeve slid out, shutting the door with a respect that did not feel obsequious.
The room went quiet except for the faint noise of geese somewhere below and the far bell of a hammer at the smithy.
Sunlight had eased across the floor by a foot while they talked; it touched the hem of Christine’s gown, turned the muslin pale as breath.
“You are pleased with your mayor,” Tristan said at last, standing by the window as if the distance mattered.
“I am pleased that the people of your parish feed one another,” she said, “it makes me like your house better.”
“It is not my house you need to like,” he said without turning, “it is me.”
The words landed between them. He had not meant to say them aloud. Tristan reeled, clamping his lips shut and gazing out of the window as though the Regent were parading through the green. Christine set the Reeve’s list down. They whispered against the wood.
“Then we have no problems to resolve,” she said quietly.
He faced her. She looked very much herself again now.
Color had returned to her lips. Her eyes were bright with argument, the stubborn intelligence that made him both admire and want to conquer her.
She had been nearly stolen from him within the hour.
That fact still sat in his chest like a stone.
He crossed the room in two long steps before he could think better of it.
“Do you know what it does to me,” he asked, quietly, “to imagine you in a cart with a rope on your wrists?”
She did not retreat. “I walked down a lane in the sun. A lane in England, close to the heart of civilization.”
“Better to wander the Highlands of Scotland. London’s roads are dangerous. You were hunted,” he said, and the word was a splinter in his mouth.
“By fools,” she said.
“By someone’s order,” he countered. “Which is worse. You will not take foolish chances again.”
Christine rose, chin lifting. “I did not think that I had.”
“I am telling you, you did!” Tristan snapped, stepping closer.
“No, you are shouting at me.”
“I am not!” Tristan shouted.
Her eyebrow twitched. Her lips twitched.
Tristan heard himself. He laughed, pinching the bridge of his nose, lowering his head.
Christine’s arms went about his head and shoulders, pulling him closer.
He let his forehead come to rest on her shoulders and felt her breath against his neck.
Her scent was maddening. Nothing he had ever smelled could inflame his senses like that.
She touched the side of his face. Tracing the contours with quick, dancing fingers. Teasing and ghostly. He turned his head and felt the quick flutter of her pulse under the delicate skin of her throat.
“I brought you here,” he said, the words rougher than he intended. “I should have taken you home. I did not because you asked me not to. I am discovering that this is how you win every battle.”
She does win every battle because I give in before those eyes that melt my resolve.
“It is how I win the only ones that matter,” she said.
Her mouth tipped, defiant and tender all at once. “The ones I can share.”
He did not kiss her then. He studied her as if he could memorize the arrangement of light on skin, the way the glow of lamplight caressed the curves of her face.
She had a way of meeting him without flinching from the worst of him.
It made him want to do things with his hands that had nothing to do with pens, coins, or ledgers.
“Lock the door,” he said, and the sound of his own voice raked along his spine.
I nearly lost her. I might never have seen her again. I will make the most of her when I have her. Damn it all!
Her eyes widened, not in fear, but in thrilled excitement. He did not move until he heard the clean, decisive sound of the bolt. That mundane noise had never sounded so wicked. Inside him, something stirred, a thing he had not known in years.
“You will be angry by supper,” he said, remembering Mother Hobb’s prescription, “and tired by night.”
“Then we must make profitable use of the noon,” she answered, and there the last of his good sense took a brief holiday.
He edged the table aside with his hip so it would not bruise her, slid an arm around her waist, and felt the warm give of her as she came up against him.
There was no startlement now, only the quick intake of breath that told him she wanted and dared.
He kissed her, slow enough to taste the honey on her tongue, deep enough to banish, for one suspended moment, the picture of her in that damned cart.
Her hands found his shoulders, then the line of his jaw, mapping him as if she were learning him by touch.
“You always smell of the woods,” she whispered when she surfaced. “of rain and bark. And…” she buried her face in his hair and inhaled deeply, “leather and coffee.”
“And you,” he returned, mouth at the curve of her neck, “like a garden that refuses to be pruned and tidied.”
“Good,” she said, a little breathless, “because I do.”
He laughed softly, an unfamiliar sound in his own mouth, and pressed his forehead to hers to steady himself.
He had intended to be careful, to be the man who remembered doors and the village below and the mayor who had just earned his respect.
Instead, he found himself greedy for the proof that she was here, alive, stubborn, warm.
He kissed the hollow at the base of her throat. Christine made a sound that went through him like wine. His hands slowed of their own accord, unmanning him with their sudden gentleness, thumb grazing the line of her ribs, palm flattening at her back, not to possess but to keep.
“Tristan,” she breathed.
“Say it again,” he said.
“Tristan,” she whispered.
He lifted his head and looked at her.
How can two syllables unman me more than a touch? How can the sound of my name be so utterly erotic?
He wanted very much to close the last inches that separated propriety from ruin.
The room had become a small, sunlit ship adrift in uncaring seas.
But he was not a boy; he had not forgotten the village under their feet.
He saw the wet brightness of her moist lips.
The excited gleam in her eyes, the swell of her breath against his chest, made him stop.
“I should put you in that chair and let you scold Reeve’s list,” he said, voice unsteady and almost amused by its own failure.
“You should,” she agreed, not moving away.
He dragged air into his lungs like a swimmer. Slowly, slowly, he eased his hands to a safer country. She watched him, and the triumph in her face was not cruel. It was pleased. As if the proof of his restraint delighted her as much as the proof of his hunger.
“We will be late for the vicar,” she murmured.
“I am already at confession,” he said drily, and she laughed.
He did set her in the chair then, though he kept his hand at the back of her neck for one indulgent beat longer than necessary.
He fetched the bread and tore it, trying not to notice the way her mouth looked when she bit.
When he stood, he did it as if he had never been anything but a duke with his boots on and a ledger in his head.
“Eat,” he ordered, “then we will see Reeve’s suggestions for ribbon excess and prevent the green from strangling itself.”
“Bossy,” she said lightly, and obeyed.
He took the list from the table and scanned it, forcing his brain back to practical things. Names, trades, and a neat sketch of the green. He had not been asked for coin, not once. He had been asked for permission and for trust.
“We will send the tent,” he said, and realized he had spoken aloud.
Christine’s smile was small and warm and victorious in a way that felt like being unhelmed by a friend during a game. “Thank you.”
“Do not thank me,” he said, because habit demanded deflection. “Thank the weevils I am determined to thwart.”
A rap sounded at the door, three careful knocks.
Tristan looked to Christine, saw that she had set her cup down and smoothed her skirt, saw, too, the ghost of heat still on her face.
He went to the door and drew the bolt, schooling his mouth to a line that would not betray them to any eye that thought itself clever.
Reeve stood there, cap in hand. Behind him, Reverend Potter. He was tall, grave, with the watery eyes of a man who thought well of everyone and had therefore suffered for it. They stepped into the room.
“Your Grace,” the vicar said, “my lady. I hear we had some trouble on the lane.”
“We had,” Tristan said, “and we will have answers before dusk.”
“Meanwhile,” he said, brightening at the sight of the paper in Christine’s hand, “we have joy to plan.”
“We have orders to arrange,” Tristan corrected, because the word joy sat oddly upon his tongue and because he could not entirely bear to let the afternoon’s earlier admission stand unchallenged.
But when he looked down at Christine and saw the quick answering spark in her eyes, stubborn, clever, and thoroughly alive, he thought perhaps the two things were not so far apart as he had always insisted.
They sat. Reeve cleared his throat and began with barrels and lanterns and lanes.
The vicar spoke of the old and the very young.
Christine asked questions. Tristan, against his former nature, listened.
Outside, a cart rattled harmlessly past. The chalkboard downstairs gathered more names under its heading.
And somewhere beyond the hedges and the easy brightness of noon, a rope lay in a ditch where a pair of men had dropped it in a hurry.
Someone had sent them. That thread persisted. He would find it and pull until the whole ugly garment came apart. But for now, in a room above a village that had surprised him, he sat beside the woman who had insisted upon light, and he admired her for it.
That and many other things. Things I cannot say aloud. Will not say aloud.
Not yet. But that was an improvement on never.