Christmas At The Castle: Tarnished Rose of the Court / The Laird's Captive Wife

She rolled away from him, her face feeling embarrassingly warm.

“You would not,” she whispered.

“Why don’t you try me and see, fairy queen?” he said.

When she crossed her arms over her chest, he laughed. He drew her feet onto his lap and started to rub them gently, bringing heat into her frozen toes.

Celia slowly relaxed under his soothing touch. She let herself lean back into the pillows and closed her eyes. His gentle touch moved in slow, soothing circles over her ankles and her calves, tracing a light pattern over her skin that felt delicious.

She knew she should pull away from his touch, hold herself back from him, but she was so tired, so horribly weak. It felt too good to feel his touch, not to be alone just for a moment. To remember all the good things about when they had first met.

“You said we are at a hunting box of the Queen’s?” she asked.

“Aye, though not one that’s been used since her father’s day, I would wager. This is the only chamber that has any furniture. Everything else is covered with dust.”

“But there is food?” she said, remembering the tray he brought in.

“They left us provisions. There is broth and bread there, and I’m going to make sure you eat every bite.”

“You are a terrible bully, Sir John.” But she smiled as she said it. She could feel her whole body relaxing under his touch.

“Of course I am. A man has to be to get the best of a minx like you.”

Celia rubbed her toes over his thigh, feeling the shift of his powerful muscles under the leather breeches. “Just wait until I have my strength back.”

She felt him bend down, and his lips touched the inside of her ankle. The tip of his tongue flicked over the sensitive skin there, then was gone.

“I’m shaking with anticipation of that day, Celia,” he said quietly. “But come and have your supper now. Or you will never have that fiery spirit again.”

After she had taken as much of the broth as she could, and hastily washed in a basin of warmed water, John tucked her under the blankets again and blew out the candles. Once the chamber was dark, with nothing but the flickering shadows from the fire in the grate, he climbed back onto the bed beside her.

She felt him hesitate, felt the tension of his body, but then he drew her against him again, her back to his chest and his arm light over her hip. His palm flattened on her abdomen, and to her surprise she followed her instinct and traced her fingertips over the bare, hair-roughened skin of his forearm.

He went very still, his body taut against hers, yet he didn’t draw away. Celia closed her eyes and just let herself feel him under her fingers, his chest curved around her protectively. The ice pattering at the window, the crackle of the fire, seemed to enclose them in their own little world. Their own special moment. The anger had drained away, and there was only the warm tenderness of old memories she hadn’t let herself think about for so long. It was one moment out of real time.

Maybe that feeling of deceptive security was what made her open her mouth and ask, “Where did you go? When you left your uncle’s house in the country?”

His hand tightened, and she closed her fingers over his arm to keep him from moving away. She didn’t want to lose the good feelings with him. Not just yet.

“I went to Paris,” he said brusquely.

“Paris?” She wasn’t quite sure what answer she’d expected, but it hadn’t been that. He’d gone to France? So very far away? To get away from her, from their flirtation that had burned so out of control? Was that why he had left so suddenly?

And what had he found in Paris?

“I was given a position in the ambassador’s household,” he said.

“How long were you there?”

“Above two years,” he answered.

Two years—at the most sophisticated, licentious Court in Europe. No wonder he had forgotten his country dalliance. Celia turned her face into the pillow and tried to force away the old pain that was trying so hard to rise up in her again. She didn’t want that again. Not yet.

“I was told I had to return to London for a new task,” he said. “But I had other work to perform on the journey.”

Celia gave a laugh. “Perhaps you would have stayed in France if you’d known the task was minding Lord Darnley and the Scottish Queen.”

John laughed too, and his warm breath stirred the loose hair at her temple over her skin. It made her shiver despite the warm room, and that tenderness she had always felt towards him returned. So dangerous.

“Perhaps I would have. But then perhaps I would have returned much sooner if I’d known you were here, Celia.”

He brushed aside her hair and kissed her just beside her ear. At the touch of his lips she closed her eyes tightly, and thoughts of French ladies and what John might have done with them flew out of her mind. Only this moment mattered.

John kissed her cheek, and the corner of her mouth. The tip of his tongue touched her, but when she opened her mouth to make him kiss her properly, he drew back.

His arm tightened around her and pulled her closer against his chest. He tucked his legs along hers, their bodies perfectly aligned. She could feel his erection on her backside, but he just pressed his mouth to her ear and whispered to her.

“Sleep now, Celia,” he said. “You need your strength. Especially if you still think you can give me that whipping you promised.”

Celia laughed and closed her eyes. She was tired. Her whole body was sore from fighting off her illness. Yet she feared that when she slept her dreams would be filled with images of John, stripped naked and stretched out on his stomach across the bed as he waited for her pleasure, his blue eyes aglow with tenderness …

John held Celia against him closely as she slept, listening to the soft, even sound of her breath, feeling the movement of her, the wondrous life of her. For a few moments there, in the depths of her fever, he had feared to lose her. He had already lost her once. He wasn’t sure he could bear it again—not when death was such a great severing and he’d never been able to make things right for her again.

And all he wanted to do now was make things right for Celia, as he should have done so long ago. If only he knew how.

Celia sighed in her sleep and curled into him, trusting him in her dreams as she could not when awake. He smoothed tendrils of her dark hair back from her brow and thought of the first time he’d seen her. It was a moment he had never been expecting—a moment like something in a sonnet or a madrigal—something he would have scoffed at before he knew Celia.

His youth had been a mostly wasted one, his years at Cambridge a tangle of drink and women and brawls, until one particularly vivid fight had caught his uncle’s attention and he’d been forced to find a new direction in his life. Forced to take the chance to redeem himself by serving the Queen. He’d been sent to the country to ferret out the participants in a rumuored Catholic plot to unseat Elizabeth and put Queen Mary on the throne—the sort of plot that came up like weeds every year and had to be chopped down. It had seemed a simple enough task. An easy way to get back in his family’s good graces and make a name for himself with Elizabeth.

But then he’d seen Celia standing across the room at a banquet, dressed in a simple white gown and with her hair loose over her shoulders in midnight-coloured waves. It had seemed as if all the light in the chamber gathered only on her, on her shy smile, the pale, serene cast of her face. Everything had gone so still in that moment.

Everything had changed, and he had never forgotten it. He had always liked women—their voices, their laughter, their soft, perfumed bodies. He’d liked them too much to think of settling with only one, but Celia was different. She’d made him imagine a new life, new ways of thinking and being. Until it all had exploded—as he’d known it would from that first moment.

Yet he still couldn’t stay away from her. It seemed he never could.

Celia sighed again, and a frown drifted over her brow as if she saw something in her dreams that disturbed her.

“Shh,” John whispered, and she settled in his arms. In her sleep she trusted him.

And in that moment, in the silent, cold darkness of the night, enveloped in their own small world of firelight and snow, they were together. He held her safe. He only wanted to make that moment last.

Chapter Nine (#ulink_4a73ca97-55c2-50f2-9214-e724ff451535)

When Celia woke again, she could tell it was day by the pale grey light beyond her closed eyes. Yet she didn’t quite want to relinquish her dreams. Not yet. She wanted to hold onto that fantasy world, and to those fleeting moments when she and John were not enemies.

She slowly stretched against the rumpled sheets and realised most of the ache was gone. She only felt a new, fresh energy flowing through her, the brush of warm air over her bare arms.

She turned her head on the pillow and opened her eyes to find herself alone on the bed. No snow fell outside the window; there was just that hard grey light.