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

She definitely did not know why she had to be involved in the messy quagmire. But beggars could not be choosers.

“Good evening to you, cousin.” She heard a deep, quiet voice, lightly touched with a Scandinavian accent, behind her.

She turned to face the very man she had once blamed for that beggaring: her cousin Anton Gustavson. They had never known each other; his mother—her father’s sister—had married a Swedish nobleman and disappeared to the frozen north before Celia was born. Then he’d appeared here at Court, with a party sent to woo the Queen on behalf of the Swedish King—and to claim a family estate Celia had hoped to have for her own. The last remnant of her family’s lost fortune.

She had blamed Anton bitterly for this final disappointment. But now, as she looked into his wary dark eyes, she could no longer blame him. He sought his own redemption here in England, and perhaps he had found it with his new estate and his Lady Rosamund.

Celia still had to find hers.

“And good evening to you, too—cousin,” she said. “Where is Lady Rosamund? Everyone says you two are quite inseparable of late.”

“Not entirely so,” Anton said. He gestured towards the dance floor, now a whirling stained-glass mosaic of brilliant jewels and silks. “She is dancing with Lord Marcus Stanville.”

Celia saw that Rosamund did indeed dance with Lord Marcus, their two golden heads close together as he whirled her up into the air.

“Lord Marcus Stanville—one of the greatest flirts at Court,” Celia said as she finished her wine and exchanged the empty goblet for a full one. “I’m surprised.”

Anton laughed. “Rosamund is immune to his blandishments.”

“But not to yours?”

He arched his dark brow at her. “Nay. Not to mine. We are soon to be married.”

Celia swallowed hard on her sip of wine and carefully studied the dancers. A cold, hard knot pressed inside her, low and aching. Once she’d had the foolish hope she could marry someone she loved too.

“My felicitations to you, cousin,” she said. “Surely you did not expect quite so much here when you left Sweden?”

“I had hoped to find family here,” Anton said. “And you and I are all that is left. Can we not cry pax and be friends?”

Celia studied him over the silver rim of her goblet. Aye, he was her family. All she had. For an instant she thought she glimpsed a resemblance to her father in his eyes, and that hard knot inside her tightened. How she missed her family sometimes. She was so alone without them.

“Pax, cousin,” she said, and slowly held out her hand to him.

Anton gave a relieved laugh and bowed over her hand. “You are most welcome at our home at any time, Celia.”

Celia shook her head. “You needn’t worry, Anton. I shall not be the dark fairy at the feast. The Queen is sending me on an errand, and I probably shan’t be back for some time.”

A frown flickered over his face. “What sort of errand?”

Celia opened her mouth to give some vague answer, but she stopped at a sudden sensation of heat on the back of her neck. She pressed her fingers over the spot, just below the tight twist of her hair, and shivered.

She glanced over her shoulder and met John Brandon’s bright blue eyes staring right at her. Burning. His head tilted slightly to one side, as if he was considering her, as if she was a puzzle, then he moved towards her.

Celia reacted entirely on instinct. She shoved her empty goblet into Anton’s hand and said, “Excuse me. I must go now.”

“Celia, what …?” Anton said, his voice startled, but Celia was gone.

She only knew she had to run, to get away, before John could catch her and strip her soul bare with those eyes as he had come so close to doing earlier.

The hall was even more crowded and noisy than before, and Celia had to elbow her way past knots of people. She was a small woman, though, and slid past the worst of the crowds and into the corridor. She could still hear the high-pitched hum of voices, but it seemed muted and blurred, as sounds heard underwater. The air pressed in on her, hot and close.

Yet she could still vow she heard the soft, inexorable fall of his boots on the floor, coming closer.

“I am going mad,” she whispered. She lifted the heavy hem of her skirts and hurried to the end of the corridor, where it turned onto another and then another. Whitehall was a great maze. It was quieter here, darker, the narrow, dim length lit at intervals by flickering torches set high in their sconces. She heard a soft giggle from behind one of the tapestries, a low male groan.

She didn’t know which way to go, and that moment’s hesitation cost her. She felt hard fingers close over her arm and spin her around.

She lost her footing and fell against a velvet-covered chest. Her hands automatically braced against that warm, solid wall and a diamond button pressed into her soft palm. It was John. She could smell him, knew his touch. The hawk had swooped down and caught its prey.

She forced herself to freeze, to go perfectly still and not panic and run again.

“Do you have an urgent appointment somewhere, Celia?” he asked quietly. “You certainly seem in a great hurry.”

Celia tried carefully to move away from him, slide out of his hold on her arms, but it seemed she was not unobtrusive enough. His other arm came around her, a steel bar at her back.

She eased her hands down his chest, and that hold tightened and kept her where she was. Her head was tucked under his chin, and she could feel the strong, steady beat of his heart under her palm.

Her own heart was racing. She couldn’t breathe too deeply because his scent was all around her. She closed her eyes and sought out the icy centre that had held her together all these years. The distance that had saved her. It was not there now. He had torn it away.

“I am tired,” she said. “I merely sought to retire. There was no need to chase me down like this.”

John gave a low, rough chuckle. “Usually when a woman runs like that she wants to be chased.”

“Like a doomed deer on the Queen’s hunt?” Celia choked out. She had been on such hunts, had seen Queen Elizabeth cut the fallen deer’s heart out. Celia had thought she herself had no heart left to be ripped out. It seemed she was wrong. There was still one small, hidden part of it, bleeding, and he was dangerously close to touching it again.

John had surely chased scores of eager women since they had last met, and held them thus. Kissed them in the darkness until they happily bled for him too.

“I am not most women,” she said, and tried once more to wrench out of his arms.

He only held her closer, until she felt her feet actually leave the floor. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her backwards until she felt the cold stone wall at her back, chilly through her brocade bodice.

Her eyes flew open to find he had carried her into a small window embrasure, where they were surrounded by darkness and silence.

“Nay,” he said. “You, Celia Sutton, are quite unlike any other woman in all England.” His voice held the strangest, most unreadable tone—bemused, angry.

“And you know all of them, I am sure,” she muttered.

John laughed and eased her back another step. He braced his palms to the wall on either side of her head, holding her trapped by his body as he had earlier. “Your faith in my stamina is quite heartening, my fairy queen. But I have only had twenty-eight years on this earth. Alas, not long enough to find all the women out there.”

Hearing his old name for her—fairy queen—once whispered in her ear as they embraced in a forest grove, snapped something inside Celia. He had no right to call her that. Not any longer.

Before she could think, her hand shot out and her fingers curled hard around his manhood.

He froze, and she heard the hiss of his indrawn breath. His eyes narrowed as he stared down at her, and the very air around them seemed to crackle with a new tension. This strange game, whatever it was, was shifting and changing.

The codpiece of his breeches was not a fashionably elaborate one, and she could feel the outline of him through the fine velvet. He was already semi-erect, and as her fingers tightened he stirred and lengthened. Oh, yes, she did remember this—how he liked to be touched. Caressed. She felt her hard-won sense of control steal back over her.

She twisted her wrist to cradle the underside of his penis on her palm and slowly, slowly traced her way up. She remembered how it felt naked, hot satin over steel, the vein just there throbbing with his life force. She reached its base, and with another twist of her fingers she held his testicles.

“Is this what happens when you catch your prey, John?” she whispered. She stroked a soft caress, lightly scraping the edge of her thumbnail over him.

She could feel the burn of his eyes on her as he held himself rigid around her. For once she had caught him unbalanced. He didn’t know which way she would jump. And neither did she. Not any longer. He did that to her.

She had acted on instinct, reaching out to bring her control back. But it seemed to be slipping even further away.

“Usually they get down on their knees to me and take me in their mouths about now,” John said crudely.

One hand left the wall by her head and she felt his finger press lightly to her lower lip. He traced the soft skin there. The merest whisper of a touch.

Celia gasped, and he used that small movement to slide his finger into her mouth, over her tongue. She jerked her head back, but she could still taste him—salt and wine. She wished she could pull away from him and snatch her dagger from its sheath on her thigh, plunge it into his heart so he could not touch her heart again.

“That will never happen,” she said.

“Nay? I think it will in my dreams tonight,” John answered. “But perhaps you want me on my knees to you instead?”

Before she knew what he was doing, he’d deftly twisted out of her grasp and arched his body back from hers. The hand that had been at her mouth slid all the way down to her skirts and drew up the heavy fabric until her legs were bare. The white stockings glowed in the darkness.

As Celia watched in frozen shock he fell to his knees before her and let those skirts fall back over him. She tried to kick him away, but his strong hands closed over the soft, bare skin of her thighs above those stockings. He caressed her there, on the tender inner curve of her leg, and pressed her legs further apart.

Then she felt his hot breath soft on the vulnerable curve of her, light as a sigh, just before his tongue plunged inside.

God’s blood. Her eyes slammed shut and her palms pressed hard to the wall at the trembling, burning rush of sensation that shot through her body. Oh, dear heaven, but she had forgotten how it felt when he did that!

Just as she had remembered how he liked to be touched, he remembered how she liked to be kissed there. He licked up—one languorous stroke, then another—before flicking at that tiny, hidden spot with the tip of his tongue. She felt herself contract at the pleasure, felt a rush of moisture trickle onto her inner thigh, and he groaned.

How she wanted him. How she had missed him, missed this, the feeling of being so wondrously, vitally alive. It had been so long. She had been dead inside for so long …

For just an instant she let herself feel it, let him pleasure her. This was John. The only man who had ever touched her heart. But then his hand closed hard on her thigh, just above the dagger, stroking her there so tenderly. So deceptively—just like before.

Before he’d destroyed her.

With a ragged sob she jerked herself away from him. She pulled her skirts from above his head and sent him toppling to the floor. But she also lost her own balance, and fell heavily on her hip against the wall. She leaned onto the cold stone for support and tried not to cry. Not to feel.

But his heat was still around her, and the musky scent of their arousal, the heated swirl of her feelings for him. She had to escape from it all.

John found his balance on his knees again, lithe as a cat. In the shadows she saw the frown on his face, the darkness of his eyes. He started towards her. “Celia …” he began.

But she stopped him with the sole of her shoe planted on his chest. She knew he could easily sweep any of her barriers away, yet he stayed where he was, watching her. She dug the heel of her shoe in, just enough to hold him there as she had with his balls in her hand.

“Celia, what has happened to you?” he said quietly.

She gave a hoarse, humourless laugh. How could she even begin to answer such a question? She gave him a slight push with her foot, and when he sat back on his heels she lurched upright to her feet. She ducked out of the hidden embrasure, and this time when she ran he did not follow.

Curse it all! Every instinct within John shouted at him to run after Celia, to catch her in his arms and hold her to him until she broke open and gave him all she had. All those dark secrets in her eyes. He wanted to strip away her clothes until she was naked before him, every pale, beautiful inch of her, and drive into her.

But he was too angry, and she was too brittle and fragile. She would surely shatter if he pushed her too hard, and the way he was feeling now he could not hold back. He braced his palms against the cold stone floor and let his head drop down, his eyes close as he struggled for control.

It was that damnable nickname. Fairy queen. His fairy queen. He could see her as she had been that day, her midnight-black hair loose over her bare shoulders, her grey-sky eyes gleaming an otherworldly silver as she looked up at him. She’d lain on a grassy, sunny spot in the woods, the light dappled over her skin, and John had never seen anyone so beautiful and free, so much a part of the nature around them. A fairy queen who had cast her magical spell over him. His wild youth had been forgotten when he saw her—the first time he’d felt such a rush of tenderness, dreamed of what he couldn’t have. All because of her.

There seemed nothing of the fairy left in her now. She seemed instead an ice queen, encased in snow. But when she’d touched his manhood, when he’d tasted her, his Celia had flashed behind her cold eyes.

And, z’wounds, but she tasted the same as he remembered—of honey and dew. She had become wet when he’d kissed her there, the silken folds of her contracting over his tongue. Not so frozen after all. Did she remember too?

But still so far away from him. He remembered the panic in her eyes when she shoved him away, the way those walls in her eyes had slammed up again. It hurt to know she was so wary of him, even as he knew he so richly deserved it.

It was good she had run, for he obviously had no control at all when it came to her. Had he not resolved that very afternoon to stay away from her? To forget their past? Not to hurt her again, and not to torture himself with what he could no longer have? Only hours later he’d been on his knees under her skirt.

John pushed himself to his feet and automatically reached down to adjust his codpiece. He felt again her slender fingers on him, caressing him just where it was calculated to drive him insane. Pleasure and pain all mixed up in a blurred tangle.

When he emerged into the corridor Celia was long gone. The music from the ball floated back to him, echoing off the walls, mocking him with its merriment. He could feel someone watching him, and spun around to find Marcus leaning against a marble pillar with his arms crossed over his chest. He arched his brow at John.

“Are your balls frozen off, then?” Marcus asked with a grin.

John shot him an obscene gesture and turned to stride away down the corridor. His friend’s laughter followed him.

It was certainly going to be a long and wretched journey to Edinburgh. Or were they all headed into hell instead?

Chapter Four

“Is this all of it, Mistress Sutton?” the maidservant asked as she fastened shut the travel chest.

Celia glanced around the small chamber. All of her black garments and his meagre personal possessions had been packed and carried away, and the box containing her few jewels and Queen Elizabeth’s documents was tucked under her arm. She had no more excuses to linger.

“Yes, I think that is all,” she said. She glanced in the looking glass. She wore a plain black wool skirt and velvet doublet for travel. Her hair was pinned up and held by a net caul and tall-crowned hat. She looked calm enough, composed and quiet, but part of her wanted to hide under the bed and not face the inevitable.

The past few days had passed in a blur of meetings with the Queen and Lord Burghley to learn more of her tasks in Scotland. She was to befriend Queen Mary, who was said to chatter freely with her favourite maids, and try to gauge her marital inclinations and report back to Elizabeth. To try and persuade Mary that an English marriage of her cousin’s choosing would be best for her. To watch and listen, which Celia had become very good at. A wary nature was always cautious of what would happen next.

But Elizabeth said Mary should wed Lord Leicester, and Burghley said Darnley. Celia wasn’t sure whom to incline Queen Mary towards—if the Scottish Queen could be “inclined” at all.

There had also been banquets and balls, tennis games to watch, and garden strolls, which she had tiptoed into as if they were the flames of hell. But the chief demon, John Brandon, had never appeared there to torment her. To draw her into quiet corners and reveal parts of her she had long ago encased in ice and buried. To watch her with those eyes of his that saw too much.

She wasn’t sure if she was grateful or angry he’d stayed away.

No doubt he has much to occupy him, she thought as she jerked on her leather riding gauntlets. Like saying farewell to all his amours.

Lord Burghley had said John would be her conduit in Scotland for any messages, so she knew she would have to face him eventually. Face what he had made her feel.

Celia stared down at the black leather over her palm and remembered the hard heat of him in her hand. The power and, yes, the pleasure she had felt in that one instant as he grew hard for her. The way she’d longed to pull away his clothes and feel him against her again. Part of her in every way.

She convulsed her hand into a fist. Maybe if she had crushed him, hurt him, she would be done with him now—as he had once been done with her.

But the feeling of his mouth on her, driving her to a mad frenzy, told her they were not done with each other. Not at all.

She spun around and snatched up her riding crop, cutting it through the air with a sharp whistle. She imagined it was John’s tight backside under the leather’s touch, but pushed away that thought when a disturbing spasm of desire caught at her. The less she thought of John Brandon and his handsome body and sweet words the better!

Celia hurried downstairs and out through the doors into the courtyard, where the travelling party was assembling. It was chaos, the long line of horses and carts struggling into place as servants loaded last-minute bundles and trunks.

Lord Darnley and his mother stood slightly apart from the others as Lady Lennox whispered intently into his ear. He nodded sulkily, his gaze straying to where his chosen companions played at dice on the steps. Though it was early in the day, and long hours of travel awaited them, they were all obviously inebriated.

Celia was thankful that at least her tasks did not include being nursemaid to them. She would just as soon they fell off their horses and froze in a snow bank somewhere.

She studied the rest of the people. Servants piling onto the carts and courtiers unlucky enough to be chosen for this journey finding their horses. Lady Allison Parker, another of Elizabeth’s ladies sent to cozen Queen Mary, was letting one of Darnley’s friends lift her into her saddle. She laughed as she settled her bright green skirts around her, flirtatiously letting the poor lad glimpse her long legs as her red hair gleamed in the greyish light.

Celia had the feeling she and Lady Allison would not become bosom bows on this journey.

Then she saw John, the merest flash of his light brown hair from the corner of her eye, and she stiffened. Every sense suddenly seemed heightened, the wind colder on her skin, the light brighter in her eyes.

She half turned to find that he stood near the front of the procession, holding the reins of a restless jet-black horse. He softly stroked the horse’s nose, crooning in its ear, but his eyes were on Celia, intently focused. His body was held very still, as if he waited to see what she would do. Which way she would jump.

Celia remembered her fantasy of her riding crop on his backside, and she felt a smile tug at her lips. Her gaze flickered down to his long legs encased in leather riding breeches and tall black boots.

When she looked back to his face some unspoken promise seemed to burn in his eyes. As if he could see her thoughts, her fantasies, and he was only waiting to get her alone to make them come true.

Celia spun away from him, only to find that Lord Marcus Stanville watched her from the doorway. She had seen him talking with John a few times. Obviously they were friends. Celia was inclined to like Lord Marcus, with his golden good looks and light-hearted demeanour, but she did not like the way he watched her now. Like John, it was almost as if he could see what she was thinking and it amused him.

“An excellent day for a journey, wouldn’t you say so, Mistress Sutton?” he said.

“If one enjoys freezing off one’s vital appendages, mayhap,” she answered tartly. “I would prefer staying by a warm fire, but perhaps you have different inclinations, Lord Marcus?”

He laughed, and Celia sensed John watching them. To her shock, Lord Marcus took her hand and raised it to his lips.

“I hope I am as adventurous as the next man, Mistress Sutton,” he said, “but I confess some of the finest adventures of all can be had by a fire. Still, we must all do the Queen’s bidding.”

“Indeed we must,” Celia said. “Whether we like it or not.”

“I admit I was not overly enthusiastic about this task at first,” Lord Marcus said. “But with you and my friend Brandon along it’s looking more promising than an afternoon at the theatre.”

Before Celia could demand he tell her what that meant, he took her elbow in his clasp and led her towards a waiting horse. He lifted her into the saddle and grinned up at her.

“Let the games begin, Mistress Sutton,” he said.

Celia glanced at John, where he still stood several paces ahead of her. He watched her and Marcus with narrowed eyes, and Celia was sure the games had begun long ago.

And she had the terrible certainty that she was losing.

Celia stared out at the passing landscape as her horse plodded along, and tried not to rub at her numb thigh. They had been riding for several hours now, and the cold and boredom had conspired to put her in a sort of dream state. There was nothing before or after this steady forward movement, only the moment she was in.

And it gave her far too much time to think.

She wrapped the reins loosely around her gloved hands and watched the bare grey trees on either side of the road. The wind moaned through the skeletal branches, almost like low voices carrying her back into the past.

She tried not to look back at where she knew John was riding, but she was always very aware of him there. In the quiet that had fallen since the cold had driven everyone into silence, she fancied she could almost hear him as he shifted in his saddle or spoke in a low voice to Marcus.

Celia shook her head. It was going to be a very long journey. She needed to keep her focus on the task that awaited her in Edinburgh. And on the reward Queen Elizabeth would give her if she performed the task well—a rich marriage where she would never have to beg for her bread again.