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

She twisted her hands into her skirts, struggling not to look away from him. Not to show her weakness.

“Aye, it has been a long while,” she said, once she finally found her voice again.

The last time she’d seen him he had been kissing her beneath that tree, their secret meeting place. His body had held her against the rough wood of the trunk, just as she braced herself to the wall now. He had kissed her, his mouth and tongue claiming hers, demanding she give him all her response as he dragged her skirt up, baring her to his touch. There had been such a wild desperation between them that day, a need such as she had never known. He had made her dream of a romantic, glorious future with him.

And the next day he was gone. Vanished without a word.

“Yet not nearly long enough,” she said coldly. “I thought never to see you again.”

His glance swept down over her again, taking in her austere gown, her ringless fingers, the tight, smooth twist of her hair. For an instant another image flashed in her mind. John taking her hair down, freeing it from its pins and running his hands through its heavy length. Calling it a fairy queen’s hair as he buried his face in it …

Those all-seeing blue eyes focused on her face again, narrowing as he watched her closely, as if seeking her thoughts. Once she had gifted him with all she was, given herself to him in every way.

She hoped she was no longer such a fool. She looked back at him with a steady, cool daring. Let him try to read her, play her again. The besotted, silly, giddy Celia he’d once known was gone. John had killed her—with the able assistance of her wretched husband and foolish brother.

“I’ve thought of you, Celia,” he said.

She quickly scrambled to cover her surprise at his words. He had thought of her? Surely not. Unless it had been to chuckle at her naivety. The country girl who had fallen so easily for his charm, his dalliance to pass the time of rural exile.

Celia laughed. “I would have thought Court life would be far too busy for any idle nostalgia, John. So many tournaments to win, ladies to woo. I’m sure every moment is filled for a man of your … assets.”

She let her gaze drift down over his body—the long, lean line of his legs in his tall leather boots, the snake-like hips and powerful shoulders. The years had not softened him one bit.

Her stare slid over the bulge in his breeches and she had to turn away. She remembered that part of him all too well … hot velvet over steel, sliding against her, inside of her.

“Aye,” she said tightly. “You must be busy indeed.”

Something seemed to crack in his iron control then. As fast as the strike of a hawk diving for its prey he seized her arms in his hard hands and held her against the wall. Those blue eyes she had thought so icy burned down at her in a white-hot blaze.

Celia could feel her own carefully built walls slipping and she struggled to hold onto them. Nay, this could not be happening! Five minutes in John’s presence could not be destroying all she had built up to protect herself. She twisted away from him but he wouldn’t let her go.

“Let me go!” she cried. His hands just tightened, holding her between the wall and his body. The heat of him, the vital, fiery life that had always been a part of him, wrapped around her like velvety unbreakable bonds. She remembered the tenderness, the need she had once felt with him.

“What has happened to you, Celia?” he said roughly.

“What do you mean?” she gasped.

She went very still and stared at the hard angle of his jaw above the high collar of his doublet. A muscle flexed there and his lips were pressed in an angry line. She imagined twisting her hands in that collar, tighter and tighter, until he let her go. Until she could hurt him as he had once hurt her.

“You look like the Celia I remember,” he said. One hand slid slowly down her arm, rubbing her velvet sleeve over her skin until he touched her bare wrist. Something flared in his eyes as he felt the leap of her pulse, and he twined his fingers with hers.

Celia was too frozen to pull away. She felt like the hawk’s prey in truth, mesmerised as he swooped closer and closer.

“You’re even more beautiful than you were then,” he said, his voice softer and deeper. “But your eyes are hard.”

Celia jerked in his arms. “You mean I am not a foolish, gullible girl who can be lured by a man’s pretty words? I have learned my lesson well since we last met, John, and I’m grateful for it.”

He raised the hand he held to study her fingers. The pale skin and neat buffed nails. His thumb brushed over her bare ring finger. Celia tried to twist out of his caress, but despite his deceptive gentleness he held her fast.

“You aren’t married?” he asked.

“Not any longer,” she answered with a bitter laugh. “Thanks to God’s mercy. And I intend never to be again.”

He raised her hand, and to her shock pressed his mouth to the hollow of her palm. His lips were parted, and she could feel the moist heat of him moving slowly over her skin. It made her legs tremble, her whole treacherous body go weak, and she braced herself tighter against the wall.

That weakness, that rush of need she had thought she was finished with, made her angry. She made herself go stiff and unyielding, building her defensive walls up again stone by hard-won stone.

“I may have changed, John, but you certainly have not,” she said coldly. “You still take what you want with no thought for anyone else. A conquering warrior who discards whatever no longer amuses you.”

His mouth froze on her skin. Slowly he raised his head and his stare met hers. She almost gasped at the raw, elemental fury she saw in those depths. The blue had turned almost black, like the power of a summer storm.

“You know nothing of me,” he whispered, and it was all the more forceful for its softness. “Nothing of what I have had to do in my life.”

I know you left me! her mind cried out. Left her to the cruel hands of her husband, to a life where she had nowhere to turn for sanctuary. She bit down on her lip to keep from shouting the words aloud.

“I know I do not want to work with you on the Queen’s business,” she said.

“No more than I want to work with you,” he answered. With one more hard glance down her body, he abruptly let her go and spun away from her. His back and shoulders were rigid as he raked his hands through his hair. “But the Queen has commanded it. Would you go against her orders?”

Celia braced her palms against the wall, trying to still the primitive urge to smooth the light brown waves of his hair where he had tousled them. “Of course I would not go against the Queen.”

“Then to Edinburgh we go,” he said.

He heaved in a deep breath, and Celia could practically see his armour lowered back into place. He shot her a humourless smile over his shoulder.

“I shall see you at the ball tonight, Celia.”

She watched him leave the small closet, the door clicking shut behind him. She was surrounded by heavy silence, pressing in on her from every corner until she nearly screamed from it.

She let herself slide down the wall until she sat in the puddle of her skirts. Her head was pounding, and she let it drop down into her hands as she struggled to hold back the tears.

She had thought her life could become no worse, no more complicated. But she had been wrong. Sir John Brandon was the greatest, most terrible complication of all.

God’s blood. Celia Sutton.

John shoved the pile of documents away so violently that many of them fluttered to the floor, and slumped back in his chair. It was of vital importance that he read all of them, that he knew exactly what he would be up against in Scotland, yet all he could see, all he could think about, was Celia.

Celia. Celia.

He raked his fingers hard through his hair, but she wouldn’t be dislodged from his mind. Those cool grey eyes watching him in the shadows of that closet, sliding down his body as if she was remembering exactly what he was remembering himself.

The hot touch of bare skin to bare skin, mouths and hands exploring, tasting.

Her keening cries as he entered her, joined with her more deeply and truly than he ever had with anyone before. Or since.

But then her regard had changed in an instant, becoming hard and distant, cold as the frozen Thames outside his window. His Celia—the woman whose secret memory had sustained him for so long, despite everything—was gone.

Or maybe she was just hidden, buried behind those crossed swords he’d seen in this new, hard Celia’s eyes. It was clear she had walled herself away from something, that her soul had been deeply wounded, and no matter what they had once been to each other she wouldn’t let him reach her now. And she was quite right. One of those wounds on her soul had been placed there by him.

Once he had wanted her more than anything else in the world. She had awakened things in him he had thought he could never feel. He had even dared to dream of a future with her for one brief, bright moment. That connection was still there, after all these years. When he’d touched her it had been as if he could sense her thoughts, her fury, her passion. Hatred so close to lust he’d almost tasted it, because it had called out to the yearnings he felt just as strongly.

It had taken every ounce of his iron control not to push her to the floor, shove her skirts above her waist, raise her hips in his hands and drive his tongue into her. Taste her, feel her, until her walls fell and his Celia was with him again. The girl who had once made him smile.

He groaned as he felt the tightness in his codpiece, half-hard ever since he’d first touched her, lengthen. Just the memory of how she tasted, like summer honey, the way she would drive her fingers into his hair and pull him closer between her legs, had him aroused.

But if the murderous look in her eyes was any indication, memories were as close as he would ever get to that part of her again.

John pushed himself up from his chair and strode over to the window of his small chamber. He opened the casement to let the freezing wind rush over him, despite the fact that he had discarded his doublet and wore only a thin linen shirt. He needed the cold to remind him of his task, his duty. He had never failed in his service to the Queen. He couldn’t fail now, no matter how much Celia distracted him.

He could see the river, a frozen silver ribbon as grey and icy as Celia’s eyes. This Christmas season had been the coldest anyone could remember, so frigid the Thames had frozen solid and a frost fair was set up on the surface. It had warmed a bit in the quiet days after the Christmas revels, but chunks of ice still floated along the water and the people who dared to go outside were muffled in cloaks and scarves.

And he would have to travel to Scotland in the cold—and take Celia with him. Long days huddled together for heat, nights in secluded inns, bound together in danger and service to Queen Elizabeth. Surely there she would open to him? Surely there he could destroy all her shields, one by one, until his Celia was revealed to him again?

Nay! John cracked his palm down hard on the windowsill, splintering the cold brittle wood. This journey was meant to neutralise the constant threat of Queen Mary and her possible marriage alliances, not to be a chance for him to lose himself in Celia all over again. To dream of what he could never have. He had to remember that always.

Any chance he and Celia had ever had was long lost.

A knock sounded at the door.

“Enter!” John barked, louder than he’d intended. His temper was on edge and he had to rein it in.

But he hadn’t completely concealed his anger when his friend Lord Marcus Stanville came into the room, caught a glimpse of John’s face, and raised his dark golden brow.

“Perhaps I should come back another time,” Marcus said. “If I don’t want my nose bashed in by your fist.”

John grinned reluctantly and shook his head. He sat back down in his chair and rubbed at the back of his neck. “The ladies of the Court would never forgive me if I ruined your pretty face.”

Marcus gave an answering grin and shook back the long, tawny mane the ladies also loved. If they hadn’t been friends since childhood, fostered in the same household after their parents died, John would surely hate the popinjay.

Yet he knew that the handsome face concealed a devious mind and a quick sword arm. They had saved each other’s lives more than once.

“They do seem terribly fond of my visage just as it is,” Marcus said, carelessly sprawling out in the other chair. “But a judiciously placed wound or two might elicit some sympathy in the heart of a certain lady …”

“Lady Felicity again?”

“Aye. She’s a hard-hearted wench.”

John laughed. “You just aren’t accustomed to chasing. Usually women throw themselves under your feet for a mere smile.”

Marcus gave a snort. “Says the man who has every woman in London lining up for his bed.”

John scowled as he remembered Celia’s grey eyes, cold as the winter sky when she looked at him. “Not every woman,” he muttered.

“What? Never say a lady has refused Sir John Brandon! Have pigs been seen flying over London Bridge? Has Armageddon arrived?”

John threw a heavy book at Marcus’s laughing head. Marcus merely ducked and tossed it right back.

“I never thought to see this day,” Marcus said. “No wonder you looked so thunderstruck.”

“Enjoy it while you can,” John said. “For soon enough we will be on our way to bloody freezing Edinburgh.”

Marcus grew sombre. “Aye, so we will. ‘Tis not an assignment I relish, playing nursemaid to that drunken lordling lout Darnley. I wager the devil himself couldn’t keep him out of trouble.”

“I think there is more to this journey than that,” John said.

Marcus sat forward in his chair, his hands braced on his knees. “You’ve talked to Burghley, then?”

“Not as yet, but I’m sure we will be summoned tomorrow.”

“Will it be like our journey to Paris?”

John remembered Paris and what had happened there. The deceptions and danger. The sorrow over what had happened with Celia. “The Scottish Queen is always a thorn in Elizabeth’s side.”

“And will we have to pluck it out?”

“I fear so. One way or another.” All while John dealt with his own thorn—one with the softest, palest skin beneath her barbs. “The Queen is sending someone else to Edinburgh as well.”

Marcus groaned. “As well as Darnley and his cronies?”

“Aye. Mistress Celia Sutton.” Even saying her name, feeling it on his tongue, twisted something deep inside him. Those tender feelings he had once had for her haunted him now.

“Celia Sutton?” Marcus said, his eyes widening. “She could freeze a man’s balls off just with a look.”

John gave a harsh laugh as he remembered the erection that had only just subsided. An almost painful hardness just from her look, her touch. The smell of her skin. “She is to be the Queen’s own emissary—a representative to show Elizabeth’s affections to her cousin.”

“She might as well have sent a poisoned ring, then,” Marcus scoffed. “Though there is something about Mistress Sutton that seems …”

His voice trailed away, and his eyes sharpened with speculation as he looked at John.

John held up his hand. “Do not even say it.”

They had been friends so long that Marcus obviously saw the warning in John’s face. He shrugged and pushed himself to his feet.

“Your passions are your own business, John,” he said, “no matter how strange. Just as mine are. And now I must go and dress for the Queen’s ball. I have little time left to woo Lady Felicity before we leave for hell.”

Marcus strode from the room, leaving John alone to his brooding thoughts again. He looked back outside, to where the cold winter night was quickly closing in. Torches flickered along the banks of the river, the only light in the cloud-covered city.

It felt as if he was already in hell. He had been for three years—ever since he’d betrayed Celia and thus lost her for ever. The only woman he could have dared to envisage a future with had been her.

Chapter Three

Celia stared at her reflection in the small looking glass as the maidservant brushed and plaited her hair before pinning it up in a tightly wound knot. She was even gladder now that the Queen had given her a rare, precious private chamber, away from anyone else’s prying eyes and gossiping tongues. Anyone looking at her now would surely see the agitation in her eyes, the way she could not keep her hands still.

She twisted them harder in her lap, buried them in the fur trim of her robe. She had to go down to the ball soon, and there she would have to smile and talk as if nothing was amiss. She would have to listen and watch, to learn all she could about the hidden reasons for this sudden journey to Edinburgh. She had to be wary and cautious as always, careful of every step.

She closed her eyes, suddenly so weary. She had been cautious every day, every minute, for three years. Would the rest of her life be like this? She was very much afraid it would. Thomas Sutton was dead, but the taut wariness was still there. The certainty of pain.

In an unconscious gesture she rubbed at her shoulder. It was long healed, but sometimes she could vow she still felt it. She had fought so hard for control. She would not lose it now. Not because of him.

Behind her closed eyes she saw John Brandon’s face, half in mysterious shadow as he held her to the wall, his blue eyes piercing through her like a touch, as if he saw past her careful armour to everything she kept hidden. His hands on her had roused so much within her—things she’d thought long-dead and buried, things she’d thought she could never feel again because her marriage had killed them in her.

One look from John scared her more than any of Thomas’s blows ever could. Because Thomas had not known her, had never possessed her. Not really. She had always hidden her true self from him even as he’d tried to beat it from her. But John had once possessed all of her, everything she had to offer, and because of him it was gone now.

“Are you quite well, Mistress Sutton?” she heard the maid ask, bringing her back to the present moment.

Celia opened her eyes and gave the girl a polite smile. “Just a bit of a headache. It will soon pass.”

“Shall I loosen your hair a bit, then? A style of loose curls here and here is quite fashionable.”

Celia studied herself in the looking glass. Her hair was already dressed as it always was, the heavy black waves tightly plaited and pinned in a knot at the nape of her neck. Since it was a ball, a beaded black caul covered the knot, but that was its only decoration. It was all part of the armour.

“Nay, this will do,” she said, slipping on her jet and pearl earrings. “I will dress now.”

She eased out of her robe and let the maid help her into her gown: a bodice and overskirt of black velvet with a stomacher and petticoat of glossy purple brocade trimmed with jet beads. Her sleeves were also black, tied with purple ribbons. Even her shoes and the garters that bound her white silk stockings were black.

Thomas had been dead for many months. She could put aside mourning and wear colours again, the blues and greens she had once loved, but she liked the reminder of where she had been. Where she vowed never to be again. The half-world of mourning suited her.

Celia held up her arm for the maid to lace on the tight sleeves and pluck bits of the white chemise between the ribbons. As she stared at the fireplace she let herself drift away, just for a moment, and remember when she first met John.

She’d been just a silly girl then, who had never been to Court, never away from her family and their country gentry neighbours. John Brandon had been sent to stay with his uncle at a nearby estate, exiled from Court for some unknown scandal. He’d been meant to rusticate until he had learned his lesson and repented.

That dark hint of some roguish secret had made her cousins all afire with speculation even before they’d met him, and Celia had not been immune to it. She’d liked to sit by the fire of a winter evening and listen to romantic tales as much as any young lady, and a handsome rake from London seemed a perfect part of such stories. Then, when she had seen him at last, a glimpse across his uncle’s hall at a banquet …

It had been as if the whole world tipped upside down and everything looked completely different. His eyes, his smile, the way he strode through the crowd right to her side and kissed her hand—she’d been dazzled.

Celia shook her head hard now as she remembered. Foolish, foolish girl.

And now foolish woman. For hadn’t she almost melted all over again when he touched her today?

But the next time they met, touched, she would be the one in control. She had to be.

As soon as the maid had finished adjusting her gown she fastened a black feather fan and a silver pomander to the chain girdle at her waist. As she had no sword, they would have to do.

But when the maid turned away she bent and gathered up her skirts to tuck a small dagger in the sheath at her garter. She could not go down there completely unarmed.

As she made her way down the many staircases and along the twisting corridors of the palace the crowd grew thicker the closer she came to the great hall. After the nightly revels of Christmas Celia would have thought the courtiers would be weary of Queen Elizabeth’s glittering displays, but there was a hum of excitement in the air, in the buzz of laughter and chatter around her as she was swept along.

She could hear music—the lively strains of a galliard—and the thunderous pattern of dancing feet. All around her was the rustle of fine satins, the flash of jewels, the smell of expensive perfumes, warm skin and wine. It all made her head spin, but she was caught in the tide now and could not get away. She was swept inexorably into the hall.

She slid her way through the crowd to a spot near one of the tapestry-hung walls, a little apart from all the frantic laughter, the jostling for position. She couldn’t breathe when she was caught in the very midst of it all, buffeted by so many touches, so much desperate energy.

She took a goblet of wine from one of the servants in the Queen’s livery and sipped at the rich red French wine as she studied the gathering. She prayed John would not be there, would not see her. She had barely recovered her hard-won composure after their last meeting. His body close to hers, his heat and scent in that dark closet …

Celia took a long gulp of the wine, and then another. She usually only drank small beer, slowly, always remembering what a monster drink had made of her husband. How it had destroyed her father after what had happened to her poor brother. But tonight she needed every fortification she could find.

As the wine warmed her blood she examined the company. The Queen led the dancing with her handsome Robert Dudley, who was now the Earl of Leicester, reputedly to make him of a stature worthy to be the Queen of Scots’s consort. Queen Elizabeth’s red-gold hair shimmered brighter than her gold brocade gown as she laughed and leaped, twirling higher and lighter than everyone else. The troubles of the last few weeks, and the troubles sure to come, seemed forgotten in the music and merriment.

Celia’s gaze trailed over the Countess of Lennox, a great, large woman in black who stood near another wall and studied the revels with her lips pressed tightly together. She gave Celia a quick nod before turning to her son. Lord Darnley sulked and drank by her side, though even Celia knew he would not be there long. He could not stay away from his debauched pleasures for more than an hour.

He was handsome, Celia would admit that—very tall and lean, with golden hair and fine Tudor features. But, like his mother’s, his mouth had a cruel cast that Celia recognised all too well. She didn’t trust him, and she didn’t know what game Queen Elizabeth played with him, Leicester and Mary.