Fifteen
The wedding feast lasted the rest of the day, but Nicholas did not feel like celebrating. He was thinking, with regret, it seemed, for the first time, that he would walk away from this wedding alone.
With nothing but the memory of a kiss.
From across the hall, he watched Anne, wondering.
Was she thinking she would never have a husband? She looked over at him and even in the uncertain firelight, he was hit by the yearning in her eyes. For him.
A look that drew him back to her side. ‘Anne...’
She looked up at him, wary.
‘Come. Show me how to look up at the stars and remember tonight.’
She smiled and rose and hobbled beside him, out of the hall and into the ward, close enough to the hall that they could see by the faint light from the windows and hear the muted music of the minstrels. Surrounded by half-timbered buildings backed against the stone walls of the Round Tower, they had only a glimpse of the waxing moon hovering overhead.
Nicholas opened his mouth, uncertain what he wanted to say. ‘I’ll be leaving soon.’ Soon. He could be no more specific.
‘Has the ransom come, then?’
He shook his head. ‘No, but I don’t need to wait.’ The Prince’s reward would be enough to get him across the Channel and his accounts would wait settlement until the French paid up. Yet he who was so eager to escape had put off doing the things needed so he could.
‘Crossing the Channel in winter?’ Even Anne knew that was dangerous.
‘There is nothing to keep me here.’
‘Of course not. You must be eager to leave.’
Was she thinking more? Things she did not say? Against his will, he worried about her, foolishly wanting to be certain she would be safe after he was gone. ‘What will happen to you?’
She tilted her head, puzzled. ‘Things will go on as they have.’ Was there doubt in her eyes? She banished it with a lifted chin. ‘Why should it be otherwise?’
She was now the lady of the woman who would be Queen. What safer life could any woman have? And yet... ‘If ever something happens. If ever you have a need...’
The laugh. The laugh he had learned was not so merry, but only part of her armour. ‘And if I do? Then what? Shall I send a falcon to fly across the Channel and find you on the field in France or Italy or the Golden Horde? Or perhaps pay a messenger to travel for six months in search of you? I doubt my need will be the same a year later, even should he find you and bring you home.’
Home. Home, a place that sounded sharply desirable. He had run from the one he had and never found another, certainly not in England. How much time had he spent on the soil of his birth since he had been knighted on the field in France? Six months? Twelve, perhaps, in ten years.
Yet leaving her alone felt, illogically, wrong. As if he had failed an unspoken obligation. An encumbrance he did not want, and yet...
It was not love. Certainly not. Yet something held him back, heavy as a dead weight on his back. The lure of a woman. Exactly the pull he had so successfully evaded all his life, reaching to trap him.
And he didn’t know how to deal with that.
* * *
If ever you have a need...
Anne could still hear the echo of his words. Empty words. Yet no one had ever said them to her before. No one except her lady had ever offered a hand of help.
She knew why. Though she asked for nothing, her needs, the needs of a cripple, were too demanding for most people. The chance was great that she would need something a man did not want to give.
And this man? What did he offer but words? Nothing solid. Nothing that would stay.
And yet his kiss....
She wanted it again, wanted that and more with a hunger stronger than that of her body. Not because no one had ever taken care of her, but because she had been fed and brushed like a horse, without feeling.
Without passion.
And when he said if you ever need, she heard passion in his voice. Probably more than he knew, more than he wanted to feel.
No, she could not, would not, ask him to stay. But, oh, just to hear that passion once in her life. To hear the timbre of his voice when he spoke of her. She could do it, just once. She could grab that moment that would not come again and then let him leave, so she would not have to see the regret in his eyes.
Tonight, her lady and the Prince would share their marriage bed. And she would sleep alone. Again and for ever, unless...
Unless...
What harm could there be? Once. Just once before she was returned to her life, never to see anything beyond the reach of her lady’s eyes.
She looked at Nicholas again, with all that hunger in her eyes. The kind of hunger she had thought never to fill—for freedom, for distant places, for love. But now, she saw the same from him.
At least, she thought she did, before the cloud trailed across the moon again.
‘There is something you can do. Now.’
Surprise in his eyes. How would he look when she told him?
‘You said if there was anything I want. There is something else I want to store in memory.’ Her fingers stroked his cheek, softly. ‘You.’
* * *
Nicholas did not waste breath to ask why she wanted it, nor thought to wonder why he wanted it, nor what would come next nor how he would walk away afterwards. He only knew he could not leave without...more. Without taking something of her with him.
So he kissed her.
He was close enough now to catch the scent of her skin. Like pepper and flowers and citron, like Anne herself, tart and sharp on the surface, with the sweetness only revealing itself later.
His lips left hers and trailed down to her throat, bared to him now, her skin smooth and warm. Her breath was short, separated from his lips only by flesh and blood. Her breasts rose and fell, pressing against his chest. For a moment, this was all. This was everything he needed. Wrapped against Anne. Nothing beyond the two of them. No time, no place, beyond this.
Dimly, he felt something surge, stirring in his loins. No, not enough. Not all he needed. He needed so much more of her...
And vaguely, as his body waxed and his mind waned, he understood, as he had not before, about Edward and Joan.
* * *
With Nicholas’s arms around her, his lips pressed to hers, Anne felt whole. As any woman might, able to give and be taken, not out of pity, but from unholy desire.
She pressed her lips to his, intending to wipe out thought, memory and consequences. She wanted only to savour sensation. The heat of his breath on her cheek. Soft lips. Rough fingers. Her fingers, roaming through his hair, to caress the curve where his neck met his shoulder.
A kiss, she thought. Perhaps more. What could be the harm?
And then, she did not think at all.
Nothing but now. But this. This she must relish. This taste, this feel, tucked away for the long days that would come after.
When she would be alone again.
She had studied stone and glass and stitches, but when she tried to summon logic, to analyse, to name, to commit his scent to memory, to learn the feel of his muscles, beneath wool and skin, she could not control her mind.
She, he, here, now. The taste of foreign lands was on his tongue, the scent so deep in his skin that to be in his arms was a journey, to be held by him was like taking wing. As if all the distant lands she had ever