Begging? He stopped abruptly and faced her again. He was not begging, he thought in a puff of pride. He did not beg.
With one word she had put his manhood at stake. The silence between them drew out for a long time and the rain picked up, pounding on the ground beyond and starting to slip through the thick crowns of the wide and ancient trees.
Why would he expect her to act like other women, to be meek or practiced?
Why would he expect her to know of men and morals and the rules of courtly love?
She was truly innocent,--as innocent as a thief could be--he thought with irony—and had been raised outside of the world he knew and lived in—a world that taught him not to have faith in much of anything. Faith only made betrayal all that much easier and more devastating.
But Glenna had nothing to do with his past, but his guilt was not done eating at him. Perhaps he should have been begging.
Standing before him as she was, without fear or modesty, bare to her waist and facing him as if they were on equal ground was startling. Truth was: she was high on a hill and he was already deep in a dark pit. There was nothing equal about the two of them. Hell was his future. The day he found her, he had secured his damnation.
His gaze went to her breasts and his body tensed even more, his head ached. He could taste her… “Pull up your tunic!”
She was startled and frowned at him. “Why?” She stood there so proudly naked, her shoulders back, hands on her hips, without a bit of modesty, and she strolled casually in front of him, then stopped barely a foot away and she looked right at him, her gaze narrowed when she said, “You do not like my breasts, my lord?”
“God’s blood, Glenna, cover yourself!” Then he did the only thing he could do to save her innocence: he stalked away, walking deeper into the forest and away from her before he lost control and took her completely.
His whole body was on the verge of betraying him. There was the constant rhythmic crunch of leaves beneath his boots,and the crack of a twig sounded like thunder to his raw ears. He stepped over a felled log and moved even faster into the darkness of the trees, with long strides, his breath coming hard and harder. His hand was already inside his hose, moving and seeking the release he needed.
When he was well out of sight and hearing distance, he stood with his back to a tree and facing away from her, his jaw clenched and his teeth locked tight, head thrown back against the rough bark of a tree, and he closed his eyes closed until his seed spilt far away from her warm and submissive body. But in his mind’s eye he saw her face as clearly as if she were carved on the back of his eyelids, and he imagined her beneath him, her soft pale skin the color of ivory, her lithe legs along his, him looking down into her face and those dark, dark eyes—the ones that had some kind of strange and powerful draw, like a lance that pierced straight through his heart.
10
Glenna stood watching the spot where Montrose disappeared into the woods. Above the thick crowns of the trees, dark clouds hovered over her. In the distance, they crawled over the low hills. The air grew thick, and misty, and suddenly cold. Rain slipped through the leaves and pelted her still flushed face. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then fixed her clothing and stalked over to pick up her hat, slapping it against her trouse to shake off the water. She crammed it on her head and moved toward the horses, both Skye and the black, abandoned and standing some distance away, completely forgotten in all that had just happened.
What had just happened? She wiped the rain from her face.
Something wonderful, she thought when she still had been light-headed and dreamy.
Until Montrose made her feel as if she should be ashamed. What she felt was not wonderful. Apparently, it was something terrible.
Surely their touches were not a sin…a thought she chewed over for a moment, before it struck her that some sins felt good, like cursing loudly.
To discover she was not who she thought she was: a youngwoman who could never feel a man in her heart, or joy between her legs like men did, was a huge revelation to her. Truthfully, when she had opened her eyes and looked up at him, it was all she could not to throw her arms around his neck and say, “Thank you!”
Lyall Robertson, the Baron Montrose, of all men had made her feel like a woman, and then crushingly apologized for his mistake.
Sadly her shoulders dropped, her heart sinking down to her toes. Try as she might she would never forget what she felt, her whole body and mind flying to the heavens, floating with the stars....
Tears choked her throat and stung her eyes, and she wiped them with her sleeve and told herself not to cry. He could not see her like this, though he had hurt her deeply, making her feel unclean and stupid for loving what they had done.
Her mind ran over things, searching for answers, and as she turned to walk back, she decided she might have a clue as to what he was doing in the woods, considering the size of the knot in his hose when he had stalked away…she did have two brothers. One quick look when he returned and she would know.
Once, when Elgin was ten and three, and she was still a brat, she had followed him down the stables, intending to pester him into letting her ride as she usually did, and instead, his furtive movements and secretive manner made her quickly duck into the next stall and quietly hide. But the sounds he was making were curious and odd and made her peek over at him. He sat in a corner holding himself, his hand moving till his seed was gone and he had grown small and lay limp and soft.
She wondered at what she had seen him do, and the memory of it had haunted her. For days she watched him curiously, some days thinking he could grow horns—because of something Alastair once said when he thought she wasn’t within earshot. El seemed unchanged…no different…no horns. She understood whathad happened--they did breed horses—but she had not understood why.
Finally, she could keep quiet no more, and in the middle of supper one night she plainly asked her brothers about what she had seen. Elgin stood so quickly he almost knocked the table over, sputtering at her, his face as red as the sunset, and then Alastair became angry—not at her, but at Elgin.
The two of them fought, almost to blows before, finally, frustrated, Alastair had sat down, running a hand through his long red hair, and he had gently told her how a man’s body worked, using their horses and breeding as examples. When she asked him about what he had said once--that men could grow horns--he had laughed and explained it was not true, but merely an old tale. Then he explained to her the way he had always done about life and death and heaven and hell, about people and animals---he told her through stories—told her all he could about the sin of Onan, of a man growing horns, and the old Saxon prophesies of men going blind.
Until today, she had still not been able to completely piece together what she had seen in the stables with what Alastair had tried to explain to her about men and their bodies. She was not a man, and had no woman in their home to ask about her body. Women had fluxes. Men did not.
Naturally she assumed women’s bodies were as different from men as their nether parts, and that women could never have the same reactions—that Alastair was talking about something only men could do and feel.
For most of her life there had been only Al, El and her, and they often thought in different ways, saw dilemmas from different sides of the paddock fence. She was convinced even more by her reaction to Montrose, that she did not understand men.
