The ensuing silence threatened to suffocate her. Louvaen clenched her teeth so hard her ears throbbed.
Ballard stared at her for an additional century until a wide grin stretched across his face. “Queen uncrowned,” he said. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She shrieked when he tried to rise and leapt across the bed, tackling him into the pillows. He fell back with an “umpf!”
“Are you mad? You can’t just jump out of bed like that.”
He trapped her against his chest with a heavy arm across her hips. “In case you didn’t notice, my lovely shrew, I’m not the one leaping about.” He eased her to his side. “I knew I could lure you back one way or another.”
He tilted her chin and kissed her. Louvaen sighed into his mouth, tasting warmth and softness and a cloying sweetness. A conversation teased the edge of her memory, and she broke the kiss with a frown. “Ambrose said only his poisons tasted sweet.”
Ballard winced. “He lied.”
She reared up. “I’ll kill him.” The memory of that foul tasting brew he gave her after she almost drowned still made her tongue curl back into her throat.
“No you won’t.” He dragged her back down. “You’ll stay here with me. If I have to be trapped in this bed, so do you.”
She tugged on the ends of his hair. “Not until you answer my question.” He’d stripped away any doubt that plagued her with his reaction to her proposal, but she still wanted to hear a definitive “yes.”
He tapped his lip with his finger as if pondering the most profound of questions. “Surely there are men in Monteblanco far more suited to you than a scarred lord of diminished lands and no recognition. What about the butcher?”
“Married, with thirteen children.”
He whistled. “Impressive. The baker?”
“Widowed. Four times in six years.”
Frown lines furrowed his brow. “That’s either suspicious or unlucky.”
“Very.” Delighted by the game but impatient for it to end, she took up where he left off. “The candlestick maker is a woman who, wisely I might add, has chosen not to marry or bear children but to only take the occasional lover. I don’t wish to be an occasional lover.”
Ballard chuckled. “You realize any children I might sire won’t look like Gavin?”
“You realize any children I bear won’t look like Cinnia?”
“If I cared about such a thing I would have married Cinnia.” He kissed her right eyelid and then the bruised left, a butterfly’s touch along her lashes. “You’re a bold one, Louvaen Duenda.”
“I’d challenge gods and queens to make you mine, Ballard. Conquer a kingdom or two if necessary.”
He didn’t smile at her declaration. His fingers followed her scalp line, passed through the locks that had come loose from her haphazard braid. “You’d find me outside the kingdom gates, my belongings at my feet and a note pinned to my cloak for you that read ‘Better you than us.’ They’d be wrong. Far better forme. The answer is yes. You didn’t even need to ask.”
Louvaen grinned, her heart pounding joyously under her breastbone. “I wasn’t planning to. I intended totellyou that you were going to marry me, but I thought I should at least be courteous considering your delicate state.”
Ballard gaped at her for a moment before chuckling. He tucked her against his side. When the laughter stopped, he bent his head to steal another kiss from her. “Kiss me, you bloodthirsty scold. And don’t bite my lip.”
She was gentle as a lamb.
EPILOGUE
From the highest window in the keep, Ballard gazed upon the forests and fields of his expanding demesne and waited for his wife to summon him. A westerly breeze blew in the green scent of clover, along with the peppery musk of pine and ash that heralded the coming summer.
Summer was Louvaen’s favorite season. She blissfully ignored the heat, the swarms of midges and the pungent scent of rotting flax that sometimes wafted across Ketach Tor from the nearby sodden fields.
“It’s the earth’s gift to a spinner,” she once told him. “I’ll take the perfume of wet flax over the stench of roses any day.”
The air hadn’t smelled of roses in almost four years. Those in the bailey had died with the curse. None had bloomed again once he and Gavin brought Isabeau’s shrouded bones out of the family crypt and buried her on her old dower lands in a field of pasque flowers. They had stood over her newly covered grave, wished her spirit a long overdue peace and walked away. Neither he nor Gavin visited the grave, though he’d heard his softhearted daughter-in-law sometimes traveled from de Lovet lands to his and laid white roses over her resting place.
The creak of an opening door behind him marked the arrival of his sorcerer and brought him out of his musings. Ambrose’s robes whispered dusty spells as they brushed against the floorboards. He paused before he reached the window. “Dominus.”
