At The King's Command

“What the devil are you doing?” snapped a furious voice from the doorway.

Juliana froze. To her mortification, she discovered that she had pressed her fingers to her lips and closed her eyes, lost in the fantasy of a magic kiss. With as much dignity as she could muster, she jumped up and shook out her skirts.

Stephen stood there in the same trunk hose and jerkin he had worn the day before. A light golden stubble softened the hard lines of his cheeks and jaw. His pale hair looked mussed, as if long fingers had run through it. The disarray gave him a certain rakish charm that made her breath quicken and her cheeks grow warm.

It struck Juliana, disturbingly, that he had not yet been to bed—unless it was with one of the wenches he had so pointedly mentioned last night.

She silenced the jangle of alarm in her mind. If it was his habit to carouse each night away, that was his affair. She’d be a fool to let herself be hurt by it.

“My dear,” he said in a gravelly voice, “you’ve not answered my question.”

“A carter arrived with goods from London. I received them and sent the carter round to the kitchen for a meal. My lo—Stephen,” she corrected, boldly using his familiar name. She took an ivory whistle from a box and blew a high note. “What is this? For a shepherd, perhaps?” Before he could answer, she drew a light shroud from a dome-shaped cage to reveal a bright yellow canary perched inside. “And this…an addition to your dovecote?” She flipped through the stiff pages of a small, fat book, noting a few block-printed illustrations. “I do not read English well. Perhaps you could tell me what this says. And this—” She reached for a wooden box made of interlocking pieces.

A large male hand snatched the box away. “Are you quite finished?” Stephen demanded in a low, lethal whisper.

“These are children’s playthings,” she said, refusing to flinch. “I just wondered—”

He paced the length of the solar, his booted feet kicking up dust from the rushes. “I’ve a fondness for invention. My own, and those created by others. You need not read any further meaning into it.”

Perhaps the toys were gifts for the children of the nearby village. Perhaps Stephen de Lacey concealed a heart of gold behind a facade of stone.

Prodded by a devil of mischief, she picked up a tiny reed pipe and blew, her fingers covering the holes to vary the pitch.

“Stop that.” He stood inches away, glaring down at her.

Juliana continued to play. She would rather suffer the heat of his anger than the chill of his indifference. She picked out the first few notes of an old Russian song about a cherry tree. There was something compelling about his nearness.

“Damn it, Juliana!” He took her wrist, bringing her hand up between their bodies.

Never had she stood so close to her new husband—close enough to hear the labored rasp of his breathing and feel it warm on her cheek. Close enough to catch his scent of leather and lye. Close enough to study the faint lines that fanned out from his exquisite pale eyes.

She stood riveted, staring up at him, feeling her pulse leap wildly beneath the firm grip of his fingers. And suddenly she knew. He, too, had felt the shock, the heat, the awareness. The recognition.

Of what? she wondered crazily.

Of desire.

The answer came to her like an arrow shot out of the dark, hitting home with stinging accuracy.

“Stephen?” she whispered.

For a moment, he seemed to waver, caught up in the same unbearable tension that held her breathless. His sculpted, unsmiling mouth twitched and he bent his head, golden hair falling forward, almost brushing her brow.

Closer and closer, until a mere whisper of distance separated their hungry lips, until anticipation thundered in her blood.

And, just as suddenly, Stephen plucked the reed pipe from her hand and stepped back.

“I’ll see to the parcels,” he snapped. “You need not trouble yourself with them. And in the future, Baroness, I shall receive all goods and dispatches.”

He withdrew quickly, his footsteps ringing on the flagged floor outside, then stopping.

Juliana hurried to the solar door and peeked out.

He stood in the narrow, dim passageway, his big hands pressed against the stone wall. His head was thrown back to reveal a taut brown throat. His teeth were clenched, his eyes tightly shut. It was a posture of such anguished frustration that Juliana felt like an intruder.

She slipped back into the solar. She had learned something about her husband this morning. He wanted her. That was one secret he could not keep from her.

Faintly, through a thick blanket of sleep, the sounds came to Stephen. A cry in the dark. A ragged sob of terror and depthless despair.

His awareness weighted by the quantity of sack he had drunk the previous evening to forget the startled hurt in Juliana’s eyes, he barely acknowledged the sounds. And then, slowly, like a stalking sneak thief, realization crept over him.

The moment had come. For years, he had dreaded this night. And yet a small dark part of him had craved it. This was the end of the waiting, the uncertainty. At last, he would be free—

“No!” Denial broke from him, loud and fierce and anguished. He leaped from his bed, tearing back the covers, bare feet slapping the chilly flagged floor.

No, please God, no…With jerky movements he groped for his leather leggings, his billowy cambric shirt, and in seconds he flew out the door of his chamber and into the night-black passageway.

He expected to find Nance Harbutt, come to impart the long-dreaded tidings, but no one waited in the gloom.

Still the weeping sound that had awakened him reached out, drew him along the passageway….

To his wife’s room.

The fog of sleep and wine blew away on a cold, knife-sharp wind.

Juliana. It was his gypsy wife, with her weeping and strange mutterings, who had roused him.

Both relief and annoyance eddied through him as he stepped into her chamber.

A low, throaty growl greeted him. Her lethal weapon of a dog stood stiff-legged in the middle of the room, glaring with malevolent eyes.

Stephen glared back.

The dog looked away first and crouched down, warily letting him pass.

For a moment Stephen stood still, uncertain. Watery moonlight, faint as fairy’s breath, streamed through the open window and fell upon the imposing draped bed.

Juliana had been at Lynacre Hall only a week, yet already her presence pervaded what had once been Meg’s domain. The fragrance of lavender haunted the air; gowns and shifts made a cheerful disarray on the stools and chests; an old lute stood propped in a corner.

Stephen noticed this only in passing. He stood spellbound by the soft, terrible sounds coming from the figure on the bed.

Though she spoke in a foreign tongue, his heart constricted, for he knew the meaning well. In her sleep, she uttered the words of a soul that knew the icy black depths of despair and hopelessness, the supplication of a heart yearning to be healed.

Praying the dog would behave, he swiftly crossed the room to the bed. He of all people knew not how to comfort an unquiet soul, yet he could not stand to watch her suffer.

He sat on the edge of the bed, the heavy frame creaking under his weight. His large hands came to rest on the one shoulder that protruded from the twisted bedclothes.

She held herself curled up like a child shivering from cold. Her arms were hugged tightly around her torso. The trembling that emanated from her tore at Stephen. With a low, helpless curse, he pulled her against him. He felt her warmth, the wild tattoo of her racing heart, the hot dampness of her tears seeping into his shirt.

“Hush,” he whispered into her hair. His lips brushed the silky strands. He breathed in the faint herbal fragrance. “Hush, Juliana, please. ’Tis a night fright, no more. You are safe.”

She came awake with a loud, air-swallowing gasp. “Stephen?”

Feeling awkward and ungainly, he held her away from him and peered at her face. Her eyes were wide and staring, her cheeks wet.

“I heard you cry out,” he explained, gruff-voiced and struggling to sound matter-of-fact. “I thought to quiet you before you awakened the whole household.”

“Oh.” She scrubbed the voluminous sleeve of her nightrail over her face. “Didn’t Pavlo try to stop you?”

“He understands I mean you no harm.”

She nodded. “I—I am sorry I awakened you.”

“Are you all right now?” It was too dangerous to be alone with her like this—in the darkened bed, with her all warm and soft and tumbled from sleep. And vulnerable.

“Yes,” she said. But her voice was hoarse, her eyes tearful.

He knew he should make haste away, but it was contrary to his nature to leave a creature in pain. “It’s over, Juliana. You’re safe. ’Twas only a nightmare.”

“But the nightmare is real,” she whispered. “I see things that happened to my family, hear things—”

“What things?”

“Fire,” she said, starting to tremble again. “Hoofbeats and screaming, flames shooting from the windows—”

“The windows?”

“The house at Novgorod. My father’s house.” She tipped up her head, for a moment looking almost haughty. “It was a place that makes Lynacre Hall look like a peasant’s dwelling.”

Stephen felt a sinking sense of disappointment. This was yet another part of the fiction she had created to support her wild pretenses. Another thread in the web of lies.

“In the dream, I am looking at the snow,” she went on, oblivious to his skeptical thoughts and seemingly immune to his touch, to the hand that moved from her chin to her shoulder, his thumb tracing whorls in the hollow of her throat.

“The fire casts bloody shadows on the snow. And then I see my family gathered in front of the steps. The blades of the attackers flash. Alexei, my betrothed, is fighting.”

Her betrothed? Stephen opened his mouth to ask her about this Alexei, but she gave him no chance.

“The steel blades are red in the firelight. My brother shrieks in pain. They do not cut him cleanly but—”

Her voice broke. She buried her face in her hands. “They have to hack and hack, and his cries become gurgles, and I can hear no more. And then, at the last, while Laszlo is holding me back…” She swallowed, seemed to force herself to go on. “I see Alexei fall. The leader is about to order his men to search for me. And Pavlo leaps out of nowhere.”

“Pavlo?”

She nodded. “He had gotten free from the kennels. He is a very protective dog.”

Stephen lifted a strand of hair from the nape of her neck. How soft it was, how fragrant. “I noticed.”

“The rest, in my dream, is confusion. I see Pavlo leap, I hear muffled words. A curse. I cannot make it out over the roar of the fire, the sound of horses blowing, the other dogs baying. Pavlo yelps, and the man turns. He cannot see me, but the fire flares suddenly, and I wait, knowing I will see the face of a murderer.”

Stephen held his breath. In spite of himself, he had gotten caught up in her tale of horror. Dream or not, it had an immediacy that seized him.

“And?” he prompted.

She sighed and pressed her brow to his shoulder. “And nothing. It always ends the same. A flash, as if a firearm is being discharged. And then I awaken.”

“Without seeing the villain’s face?”

“Villain?”

He almost smiled, half enjoying the light pressure of her head against his shoulder. “The murderer.”

“I always awaken before I see his face.”

“You have this dream often?”

“At first, just after the massacre that forced me to flee Novgorod, I had this dream every night. Now, not so often. But it is like opening a wound. I feel it all again. The grief, the rage. The helplessness. The loss of everything.” Her hand closed around his. Her palm was cool and damp with sweat. “The terror.”

“Ah, Juliana.” He smoothed his free hand over her head, tucking it more securely against his shoulder. He did not know what to believe.

“I’m frightened, Stephen. Always, Laszlo has been nearby to quiet my fears. Now I am alone. So alone.”

“No, you’re not,” he heard himself say. “I’m here, Juliana.”

The tension flowed out of her at his words, and for a moment he was struck by the wonder of it. That mere words and a soothing touch could bring comfort was a foreign notion to him.

“Stay with me,” she whispered. “Stay with me and hold me while I sleep.”

He was so stunned by her request that he forgot to be cautious. Before he knew what was happening, he stretched out beside her. He pulled the coverlet over her and held her tightly, her cheek against his chest, his chin resting lightly on her head.

He told himself this was only for a moment, only until she was calm and able to sleep again.

But an hour later he was still there.

Juliana slept peacefully, her breath soft against his throat, her small hand resting in the curve of his waist. Her slim leg draped over his thigh.

Stephen tried not to think about the fact that he was in bed with a beautiful woman. His wife. He had every right to kiss her, to touch her, to slide his hands beneath her nightrail and—He cut the fantasy short, and the effort made him ache. It had been so long since he had felt the softness of a woman’s breasts loose beneath thin lawn fabric. So long since he had listened to the breathing of someone slumbering nearby. So long since desire had stirred within him and then, lancelike, had stricken him with sharp arousal.

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