Margaret Moore - [Warrior 13] Read online

  Mercifully Damon and Benedict were not at the high table, nor were any of Sir Reece’s relatives and friends. Piers was seated between Damon and Benedict, but for once, that did not disturb her. Soon, he would be away from them, and in better company.

  Despite the magnificent array of dishes—had there ever been so many sauces or roasted fowl at a meal?—she really could not eat.

  Instead she surreptitiously watched the groom. His long, slender fingers curled around his goblet and lifted it to his incredible lips. There was a fluidity to his every movement that she found fascinating. He did not wolf down his food like Benedict, or pick at it like Damon.

  When Reece reached for a small loaf of fine white bread set before him, he slowly began to tear it into smaller pieces, every action deliberate, and with a sort of masculine grace.

  She began to imagine those hands on her body. Touching. Caressing. Exploring. Arousing…

  “Anne!”

  She started and found Reece giving her a puzzled look. “The queen is talking to you, Anne,” he said quietly.

  “Oh.”

  Very good, Anne, she inwardly chided. She sounded like a fool. And once she had dared to imagine herself the queen of clever banter!

  Eleanor regarded her with an indulgent expression, as if Anne were a child. “I was saying, my dear, that you must take Lisette with you to your new home.”

  Anne forgot her annoyance. “Majesty?”

  “She is quite attached to you. I think it would be a great pity not to take her with you. You have no objections, I trust, Sir Reece?”

  Her husband’s face was stoic in the extreme as he shook his head. “Of course not, Your Majesty.”

  Eleanor leaned back. “I thought not.”

  Anne glanced at Reece uneasily. Forced to marry, forced to accept her brother into his household, now forced to have a servant he probably didn’t need. What was the queen doing? Trying to enrage him? To make their married life even more difficult? Or did she think she was doing Anne a favor? To be sure, she liked Lisette, and could find no fault with the girl’s work, and yet Anne found it easy to think Eleanor had an ulterior motive. She had seen the way the queen seemed to dominate Henry.

  Perhaps she enjoyed exerting control over people’s lives. Perhaps it suited Eleanor to see an English noble miserably wed. Perhaps it even amused her.

  Anne bristled anew at that thought. It was one thing to be made to do something by an overpowering brother or a king for political reasons; it was quite another to be forced to do something for another person’s amusement.

  She waited until the queen was talking to the king, then she leaned closer to Reece. “I like Lisette,” she whispered, “but if you do not wish to have her in your household—”

  He regarded her steadily with his cool gray eyes. “I have no more choice in this than I do in my bride. As the queen commands, so will Henry, and so I must obey.”

  He did not sound angry, and she took some comfort from that. Indeed, the prospect of having the cheerful Lisette for a companion was growing more appealing by the moment, now she knew that didn’t upset Reece.

  The servants arrived to clear away what remained of the food, and the minstrels struck up a louder, brighter tune for dancing.

  “Sir Reece, you and your bride must join us in a dance,” the king declared as he got to his feet and held out his hand to Eleanor.

  Reece clenched his jaw, then forced a companionable smile onto his face. As the king commanded in this, so, too, they must do, yet he would truly rather face a screaming horde of Saracens than touch Anne again.

  When they were formally joined in matrimony and he had merely brushed his lips across hers to seal the joining, he had felt a jolt of raw desire so strong, he had nearly lost himself, powerless to stop.

  Indeed, the moment his lips met hers, if was as if his mind and body were taken over by the very spirit of desire and need. He forgot that she was a Delasaine and their marriage forced; he forgot about the necessary annulment and his vow not to make love with her.

  But only for an instant, before his resolve reasserted itself. He must be free of her, for she was a Delasaine, when all was said and done, and no passionate, incredible kiss was going to change that.

  With grim determination to do what he must and be done, he rose and held out his hand to escort her to the center of the hall, where the tables were rapidly being taken down to clear a space for dancing. Her face expressionless, Anne silently and obediently let him lead her forth and he forced himself to pay no heed to the pleasurable feeling of her warm, slender hand in his.

  He was no green youth, after all. When his marriage was ended, he would hold other hands. None might be as graceful, or so fascinating. None might be so easy to imagine brushing over his aroused body—

  He must stop this!

  As those who were to dance formed a circle, he became acutely conscious of the scrutiny of everyone else in the hall, especially that of the Delasaines and his own companions. Clenching his jaw, he ignored them as his beautiful, serene wife glided around the circle as if she always danced and never walked like mere mortals.

  He could and would restrain this wayward, foolish, impossible excitement singing through his body, encouraging him to seek a different, more primitive dance as old as mankind itself.

  He would disregard the throbbing drumbeat of the tabor that seemed to set his own heart pounding with passion. He would pay as little heed as possible to Anne.

  As the dance required, he clapped and turned, and found the queen his partner for the next few steps. He gave her his very best smile and wondered how she felt when she was betrothed to Henry. Did she know she was not Henry’s first choice?

  In his youth the king had fallen in love with the sister of the king of the Scots, but that match had been deemed politically unsuitable. Did Eleanor care, since she had gotten him at last? Either way, it was very clear to him that she was determined to rule Henry, if not the entire kingdom. As recent events had so forcefully demonstrated, she had already succeeded to a certain extent.

  The barons of the kingdom would not be pleased. They had achieved much because of the weakness of Henry’s father, John, and then during Henry’s subsequent minority. They would not be anxious to give up their influence, especially to a French woman.

  Another hand clap and turn, and he was once more facing Anne—a much pleasanter prospect, although perhaps one no less fraught with political consequences, at least until he could get the annulment.

  The dance required them to touch, palms together, as they circled. He couldn’t avoid watching her profile as they moved. The straight nose. The full and sensual lips. Her shapely, delicately arched brows that seemed to be always asking a question of him. The curve of her jaw. Her slender neck and the pulse beating there.

  This beautiful woman was his wife, to look at but not love.

  He realized he was perspiring like a youth dancing with a pretty girl for the first time and like a youth, he hoped she didn’t notice.

  Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.

  At last, the music ended. With a relieved sigh, he bowed stiffly to Anne, then turned to bow to the queen.

  When he faced Anne again, he discovered Blaidd Morgan standing beside his wife.

  “Sit down, boy,” Blaidd genially commanded. “You look like you’re about to swoon. The side aching, is it?”

  “No, my side is not aching.” Much. Genial or not, Blaidd Morgan had no right to order him about and certainly no right to call him “boy,” as if he were ten years old. “I’m fine, lad.”

  Blaidd grinned and ran a skeptical gaze over him. “Are you, indeed? Well, well, then I shall simply have to confess that I want to dance with the most beautiful woman at court—saving the queen, of course,” he added as Eleanor and the king strolled past.

  Short of ordering his friend not to dance with his wife, there wasn’t much Reece could do.

  He looked at Anne. Her expression was…well, there wasn’t much of an expr
ession on her face at all. There wasn’t pleasure, anyway and so, he decided, subduing his completely unnecessary and foolish jealousy, he would go and sit down.

  As for what Blaidd was up to, he could guess. It was as he had said. He wanted to dance with the most beautiful woman at court.

  He was surprised that Blaidd hadn’t already noticed her and tried for more, like following Anne into a secluded corridor. He wondered how Anne would have reacted if Blaidd the merry and charming had followed her instead.

  He doubted the Delasaines would have behaved any differently, for Blaidd Morgan’s father had been a shepherd before the Welsh-Norman lord Reece was named after had taken him under his wing. While Baron Emryss DeLanyea was well liked and respected, the Delasaines would only care that Hu Morgan was but his foster son, and therefore had no noble blood in his veins. Like his own father, Hu Morgan had achieved his rank by merit, not by birth.

  These were the sort of excellent men Reece intended to represent at court, once he rid himself of his unsuitable wife, and this was what should be foremost in his thoughts.

  As a disgruntled Reece neared Gervais and the others, they motioned him to join them. He did not want to sit at the high table with the king and queen any more than he had to, and they were talking with other nobility anyway, so he did.

  “How do you like our plan?” Kynan demanded in a conspiratorial whisper the moment Reece sat on the bench between Gervais and the Welshman.

  “What plan is that?” Reece replied, his voice likewise hushed.

  “Why, to keep her away from you this evening,” Kynan replied. “Or, despite what you said, you away from her.”

  “Yes,” Gervais grimly agreed. “I thought you wanted an annulment.”

  “I do.”

  “Didn’t look like it to us. You could hardly keep from staring at her during the feast and the dancing.”

  “I only looked at her once or twice,” Reece protested, certain that was so.

  “Her face, maybe. Not the rest of her.”

  Reece silently cursed as he felt the heat of a telltale blush. He was only a mortal man, though. What man wouldn’t look at a woman sitting next to him who was as graceful and lovely as Anne, even if she wasn’t also that man’s wife?

  “Not that we’re blaming you,” Kynan said, his gaze darting between the brothers, obviously trying to defuse the tension. “She’s got the finest—”

  “That’s my wife you’re talking about,” Reece growled, not willing to hear Kynan, or anybody else, discuss his wife’s personal attributes. “For now, at any rate.”

  Blaidd danced blithely past, his arm about Anne’s slender waist. He was grinning like an idiot and, God help him, she was laughing. A beautiful laugh she had, too, like water tumbling over the rocks of a brook in the spring thaw, merry and welcome after a long, cold winter.

  “So we decided you needed some help,” Trev offered. “Blaidd and Kynan and Gervais and I are going to take turns dancing with her.”

  Reece eyed his little brother. “You? I thought you hated dancing.”

  Looking away, Trev blushed bright red and mumbled something.

  “What was that?”

  “He said, that was before he got here,” Kynan answered. He grinned, the very image of his handsome elder brother. “And saw all the lovely young ladies, and they saw him.” The Welshman clouted Trev lightly on the shoulder. “Mind you don’t follow any of them out of the hall, my lad. Trouble that is, and no mistake.”

  “I think we all realize that,” Reece muttered. “You don’t need to keep harping on the subject like a minstrel who knows only one tune.”

  The dance ended at last and Gervais got to his feet. “My turn now.”

  He looked as though he was being led to his death, and Reece was fiendishly pleased. Anne wouldn’t be laughing when she danced with Gervais. He had the feet of an ox.

  But then, as Blaidd made his way back to his place on the bench, it seemed the king or his queen had decided a ballad was in order, and thus there was a lull in the dancing.

  So now Reece had to watch Gervais sit across the hall beside a panting Anne. As Gervais handed her a goblet of wine, some skinny, spotty-faced youth began to warble a silly song about love everlasting and devotion divine.

  “She’s some dancer, your bride,” Blaidd offered after he had downed a gulp of wine himself. “Graceful as a willow in the breeze.”

  “Is that why you were grinning like a jester?”

  “Aye, and the fact that I had my arm about the prettiest woman in the hall.”

  “What a pity you weren’t the one forced to marry her, then.”

  “Well, if it were just the woman alone, I could think of worse fates,” Blaidd admitted without hesitation.

  Reece’s hand itched to punch him. Not to damage. No, never that. Merely to make him reconsider his words.

  “But unfortunately, there are her half brothers in the mix,” Blaidd finished, his words resuscitating their friendship.

  “She seemed to find you most amusing,” Reece noted, his tone somewhat less sarcastic.

  “Easy enough to get a woman to laugh,” Blaidd replied with an airy wave of his powerful hand that could knock out teeth. “Tell her you’re afraid to talk to her.”

  “You said that? To Anne? That you were afraid?”

  Blaidd’s grin grew even wider and he shrugged. “Got her to laugh, didn’t I?”

  “If all you want is a woman to laugh at you, I suppose that’s good advice,” Reece grumbled.

  “It’s a start,” the Welsh expert on female responses sagely noted.

  “I don’t need to start. She’s my wife, remember?”

  “And not destined to stay that way, aye, I do.” Blaidd grew serious. “But there’s no harm in making her a bit happy, is there? You’re not the only one suffering, you know.”

  Reece’s breath caught in his throat. Was Anne suffering? “No need to look devastated, boy. She’s not enduring the torments of hell. But you might spare a thought or two for her. Not easy for a woman after what her idiot relatives claimed.”

  “You’re right,” Reece admitted, determined to be kinder to Anne. She was as much a pawn in all this as he was.

  No, more, for she had done nothing save attract his attention. She had not enticed him openly in the hall that night, or teased him, or asked him to a clandestine rendezvous, yet she had been forced to marry, too. As she had said, she couldn’t help it if she was beautiful. Even now, she had no way of knowing that her clear green eyes, her soft skin and wondrous lips made his heart race, or that the simple brush of his lips across hers inflamed him so much he could scarce draw breath.

  The skinny, spotty minstrel finally stopped cater-wauling and the other musicians picked up their instruments. Without a word, Kynan jumped up and darted across the hall. In the next few moments, he was leading Anne in a round dance.

  Reece sat on a hard wooden bench, telling himself his torment would not last and trying not to scowl.

  Chapter Seven

  Attempting to calm her racing heart, Anne sat motionless on the stool before the dressing table as Lisette combed her hair. Worries and questions about what was going to happen tonight kept careening about her anxious mind.

  She clasped her hands in her lap and tried to enjoy the rasp of the comb, the gentle tug on her scalp, the relief of being free of Damon and the others…

  It seemed but moments ago that she had retired from the wedding feast amidst whispers and smirks, knowing smiles and jealous scowls. Before that, it felt as if she had danced for an eternity, although never again with Reece after the first.

  She should not have been surprised that he didn’t want to dance with her, given his feelings about their marriage, but it was distressing nonetheless, especially after that mind-numbing kiss.

  But Reece couldn’t very well stay away from her chamber tonight, or the king would hear of it and perhaps guess what he planned to do. That would anger the king even more, and since Reece was wisely caut
ious in that regard, she doubted he would take that chance.

  So, he would come to the chamber…and then what? Sleep on the floor? If they were alone for any length of time in the night—or indeed, for more than a few minutes, she supposed—people would assume the marriage had been consummated.

  Reece would not want that.

  What, then, was he going to do to imply to the king that he was doing his husbandly duty, while leaving it possible for people to believe that he had not?

  “Mon Dieu, such a sigh,” Lisette said with a giggle. “And no wonder, my lady, with such a husband. Many young ladies are in despair this day! I tell you, several of them had hopes that Henry would change his mind and call off the wedding. I heard more than one thought of visiting Sir Reece last night for a last chance with him before he wed.”

  Although Lisette spoke merrily and surely only in jest, a sharp stab of jealousy pricked Anne nonetheless.

  “But then they did not dare. They did not wish to ruin their chances with his brothers or his friends.”

  Anne pushed aside her foolish jealousy. “Despite the lowly birth of Sir Urien Fitzroy?”

  “What is that when his sons are such fine, noble fellows? I assure you, their looks and their wealth make up for their father’s low birth, do they not? Why, the Morgans’ father was basely born, too, and there is not a woman here who would not consider herself fortunate to catch their handsome eyes.”

  Perhaps not, Anne reflected, but whether their families would approve such a marriage was another thing entirely.

  Lisette smiled wistfully and Anne studied her reflection in her mirror. “Would you count yourself fortunate to catch a Fitzroy’s eye?”

  Lisette giggled and her cheeks reddened as if Anne had boldly offered her husband to her. “Mon Dieu, non!”

  “But you think they are handsome men, do you not? Does not every woman at court?”

  Lisette set down the comb and returned her mistress’s steadfast gaze. “Handsome, yes. But for me, they are too much the warriors, the leaders of men. I want a man to be like clay in my hands, my lady. Soft and yielding. I would have a lover, not a warrior.”