For My Lady's Heart by 89 Laura Kinsale - Medieval Hearts 01

Author:89 Laura Kinsale - Medieval Hearts 01
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-04T02:56:13+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

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She held him as he grieved, and lay waking long after the shudders of rough sobs had passed through him. He wept like a man who had lost child and kin and future. And then he slept profoundly, weight upon her such that she could hardly breathe, but she never ceased stroking her fingers through his hair.

She was jealous of his silly and dangerous wife, that he mourned her so. And yet Melanthe thought that it was his lost years and distorted vision that he mourned—pure and gentle nun that he had seemed to make the woman out for be. Melanthe remembered a shrieking and offensive female, full of herself and her prophecy, and a part of her longed to recall it to him in forceful detail. But she thought, with a little wonder at herself, that she did not care so much for her own discontent, if to undeceive him would cause him further pain.

Lying with him seemed enough. It was entirely new to her, so different was he from Ligurio, and from Allegreto’s lithe and constant tension that had haunted all her nights. Ligurio had been gentler, without urgency, courteous in his dealing with her. She suspected now that he had already been ill when he had consummated their marriage, coming to her bed for the first time on her sixteenth birthday, and seldom enough in the year after, until he had not come at all.

She felt now as she thought other women must, with her lover sprawled warm and heavy upon her in trusting insensibility. Where Allegreto had the supple light shape of a beardless youth, Ruadrik’s arms and shoulders were solid, hard-muscled, his cheek prickly on her bared breast and his leg a dense weight across her thigh. Even to bed, Allegreto wore hose stuffed to make him appear full intact and more; Sir Ruadrik lay with the broad expanse of his back naked to the night air, quite undeniably whole and male, having wept and gone to sleep still filling her, sliding gradually free until she felt the strange touch of his parts, heated between their bodies, a feather brush now where he had been stiff, a gentle pressure instead of invasion.

She ran her fingers down his body and then pressed her arms lightly around him. She hoped his man’s sperm engendered a child in her already; and let the king ...

God shield them, let the king and the court not know until she had time to consider. Never until this extraordinary hour had it come into her mind to make a secret marriage, and to such a man as this. It was incredible. She would have scorned to ashes the witlessness of any other woman who was so foolhardy assotted of a lover as to put her possessions in such peril.

Neither crown nor church would dispute her right to marry—but to wed without the king’s permission, to carry her vassal lands with her to a man without her liege lord’s approval—that was another offense entirely.

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