He remembered the sharp pinch on his scalp when he yanked one of the curling vines from his hair. His thighs tensed. “One small mercy,” he said.
And it was a clemency. During his first lucid minutes of recovery from the flux, he’d done as any man would and checked between his legs. The thundering heartbeat he refused to acknowledge as terror had calmed once he ascertained that while a great deal of him had changed, one very important part was still human.
Louvaen tied her braids to the top of her head, securing them with a complicated knot. The style accentuated her elegant neck. She took his hand and led him to the tub, affording him a fine view of her graceful back and curved backside as she stepped into the water first. Ballard couldn’t resist and cupped one buttock, careful not to dig his claws into her smooth skin. She paused with one leg in the tub and glanced over her shoulder with a half smile. “Such a gallant knight to help a lady into her bath.”
She climbed in and sat down. Steamy water rose to submerge her to her shoulders. She emitted a low moan that sent heat flooding his body and made him hard as stone. No eunuch here. Louvaen motioned to him with a languid hand. “Are you just going to stand there?”
He joined her, positioning himself so that his back reclined against her front, and he sat cradled between her legs. Louvaen slid an arm under one of his and the other over his opposite shoulder, linking her fingers together just above his heart. He sank low in the tub and laid his head on her shoulder, savoring the feel of her surrounding him. The aches and pains plaguing him lessened, eased by the water’s heat and buoyancy. They’d return full-force once he left the bath, but he’d deal with them later.
Louvaen didn’t immediately set to scrubbing him. Instead, she occupied herself with dropping kisses along his neck, across his cheek and against his temple. Ballard closed his eyes, content to bask in her affections. He’d happily prune up in the tub for hours and let the water go cold if she did this to him the entire time. His peace lasted only a few minutes.
“Did you instruct Ambrose to lock me in my room once the flux was finished?”
His eyes snapped open. Suddenly, the sensuous bath became an avenue for a possible drowning. Had he possessed charm, wit and a less honed sense of survival, he might have attempted to pacify her with false platitudes. He chose to answer her in a way she herself would have done—with straightforward honesty.
“No. I wasn’t capable of speech at the time. Ambrose knows me well enough though. Had I been able to talk, I would have ordered it.”
She twitched against him as if suppressing the urge to shove his head underwater. “Why?” A wealth of annoyance weighted that single word.
Ambrose told him she’d been like a wild thing in a trap, screeching her rage and insistence to be let out. The sorcerer had unspelled the locked door from a safe distance down the hall. Louvaen had burst out of her room and raced to the stairs. “Looked like a crazed ell-woman seeking her next victim,” he said.
With Cinnia’s upcoming marriage to Gavin, Ballard’s time with Louvaen was over. She hadn’t changed her mind and asked to stay; he hadn’t repeated the request he’d made in the stables. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t. None of the women could stay at Ketach Tor. In a few days time, only he, Ambrose and Gavin would remain, and in the end only Ambrose. He didn’t want Louvaen to leave his home with her strongest memory of him being that of a gibbering wreck convulsed with agony and too dangerous to help.
“You’re returning to your father,” he said. “I don’t much care for the idea that this is how you’ll remember me, and I’m handsome now compared to the foul thing Ambrose and Gavin pull out of that cell after every flux.”
Silence settled between them, and Louvaen took up the task of untangling the vines matted with his hair.
“Do you know what I remember best about Thomas?” Her lips grazed his temple. “It was the way he laughed. His eyes would crinkle first and then the skin at the top of his nose between his eyebrows. His shoulders would roll, and he’d tuck his chin into his chest.” Ballard envied Thomas the fondness in his widow’s voice. “He’d not uttered a sound until all of a sudden he’d let out this great roaring laugh. I swear he made the windows rattle. Even his hair and beard seemed to laugh.” She tugged on a knot of bittersweet vine resting against Ballard’s neck. “This is nothing compared to Thomas’s mop, and he wasn’t cursed.”
She paused and her voice grew thick with unshed tears. “His laugh was a gift because even in your bleakest mood you couldn’t help but laugh with him when you heard it.” Her arms tightened across Ballard’s chest. “He died of the plague, but it’s his laughter I remember—and will always remember most—about Thomas Duenda.”
Four hundred years earlier he would have paupered himself, defied a king and single-handedly conquered an empire if that’s what it took to win this woman. The irony that all too soon he’d willingly let her ride out of Ketach Tor for the very same reason he once would have fought so fiercely to possess her made him want to howl his fury. He took one of her hands instead and kissed her healing fingertips. He’d learned of her strange magic and how her spinning wheel spun out her grief. “How will you remember me?” he said.
Her soft laughter tickled his ear. “I’ll think of the man, so grave and dignified, who gave me a queen’s dagger. Or maybe the lusty lord who figured out the way to lure me to his bed was to warm the sheets.”
She wiggled from behind him, slippery thighs sliding across his as she changed positions. Water sloshed over the rim of the tub, and Ballard held her hips as she settled into his lap facing him. She curved her palms around his face, her expression teasing and pensive by turns. “From castle lord to forest king. I never thought I’d fall in love with a Green Man.”
She leaned into him, breasts pressed to his chest, as she opened his mouth with hers and swept her tongue inside to entwine with his. She tasted of sorrow sweetened by the cyser Magda brewed. He hoped she’d remember him. He would recall nothing of her, and that knowledge made his own kiss as bitter as the poisonous vine entangled in his hair.
Louvaen ended the kiss first. Her thumbs caressed the ridges of his cheekbones below his eyes. “If I’d known you’d suffer so much for it, I would never have said I loved you. I’m sorry, Ballard.”
Ballard wanted to castigate her for telling him something so profound after he’d fallen asleep. He’d nearly gone to his knees when the sorcerer recounted the events leading up to Gavin’s harsh and sudden transformation. Afterwards, he’d locked Louvaen out of the solar, dreading the moment when he’d reveal himself to her and watch as the love she declared for him turned to revulsion.
His fears had been for naught, but he still wished mightily he had heard those longed-for words from her himself.
He caressed her back from shoulder to hip, tracing the indentation of her spine and the matched pair of dimples just above her buttocks. Her nipples tightened beneath his gaze, the areolas pebbling in anticipation of his touch. He didn’t disappoint her.
She moaned his name and arched into him as he took one breast into his mouth and suckled the tip. Her hands kneaded his shoulders, and her hips rocked back and forth, sending waves of water splashing onto the floor.
Ballard moved to her other breast, kissing an ever diminishing circle around the swell until he caught her nipple and worried it gently between his teeth. Louvaen’s moans turned to growls, and she squeezed his hips between her thighs, the rocking rhythm she’d set picking up speed.
He stroked her sides, descending lower until his hands rode her hips. He pulled away, leaving her panting and wide-eyed. “Tell me, my beautiful Louvaen,” he said in a voice made raspy with days of agonized screaming. “I have no more time and soon no more memory. Give me the words when I’m awake.”
She stilled in his embrace except for her hands. They slid from his shoulders, up his neck and returned to his face. Her gaze, more black than gray now, bore into him. “I love you,” she said softly. They both tensed, but no snapping noise burst in their ears, no floor boards heaved, and no thorny roses broke through the window to attack them.
Ballard lifted Louvaen enough to sit up straighter. “Again,” he said and lowered her slowly onto his lap.
“I love you.” Her hands returned to his shoulders, bracing her weight as the tip of his cock nudged between her thighs, seeking.
