“Aye,” he said. Aye, she was correct. He hadn’t even thought of it yet what with Kestrel’s rescue being the only thing on his mind. “She brought him to the camp of his enemy.”
They both nodded. Elizabeth would not survive Richard’s victory.
“But…” He didn’t want to say it, to talk about it. He couldn’t stop his own tongue. “I still need to fight for him. She will have to stay away—” he stopped and looked into Kestrel’s eyes. He didn’t want to have this conversation.
“He saved you, my love.”
Tears filled her eyes. She let them fall. “At what cost? You? Let them burn me if it will save you.”
He stopped the horse and took her face in his hands. “No. Do not speak such things.”
He lowered his lips to hers, letting his heart pound heavy with the desire to kiss her.
He waited another moment and then turned his horse left, off the road.
“Where are we going?” she asked with her cheek pressed to his chest.
“To be alone.”
They rode around trees and bramble until they came to a small patch of grass. They’d ridden around long enough to find it and, in that time, they had seen no one.
This place was private.
He slipped out of the saddle, light on his feet. He lifted his arms to her, and she fell into them. He kissed her and then carried her to a giant tree and set her under it. “Would you have me out here in the open under the trees?”
“I’d have you anywhere,” she said, kissing his mouth. “Anywhere you want me.”
“I want you all the time.”
She giggled as he softly bit her lip, then her chin. She lay back, pulling him with her.
“No man has ever treated me the way you do, Nicholas. I’m so glad the brooch sent me back to you.”
He smiled, parting her lips with his tongue, untying the laces of her dress. He moved his body over hers, loving how she felt under him. He grew harder for her and ran his palms under her skirts…over her arse in her lacypanties.
He didn’t want to wait. He could not wait much longer. He was hard, stretching his hose to its limit.
With a flick of his wrist, he untied the laces of his hose and released himself into his hand. He held his velvet tip to the lacy barrier between them.
He wanted to tear it away. It would have taken nothing, but he pulled them down instead. Slowly, sensually, he took her full rump in his hands while she took him into her body, snugly at first and then sleeker as she molded to him.
Nicholas looked down into her eyes and his heart melted within him. He wondered how he had ever lived in a world without her before.
“I feel as if I have been surviving from one battle to the next. Then you appeared and I began to live.”
She lifted her hips beneath him and gasped softly when the full size of him filled her. She rubbed herself against him and he thrust with more conviction.
“You made the most terrifying and terrible thing in my life bearable…and then enjoyable. You saved my life and my heart right along with it. You’re a man in full splendor, and I’m never letting you go.”
She tightened her grip on him and he drove himself deeper and then withdrew. They both held their breath for an instant, until he sank within her again, this time with the evidence of his passion filling her.
She clung to him and cried out into his shoulder as her passion poured out onto him.
Nicholas held her in his arms, in the grass, beneath a giant tree. Birdsongs sounded from the branches above. A cool, refreshing breeze rustled the leaves and her hair.
A perfect day thanks to her. He smiled and swept a tendril of hair away from her eyes. But he didn’t want the king changing his mind because they’d kept him waiting.
“We should be getting back.” He kissed her and then rose up to pull his hose back on.