Callie’s fear lasted only a breath, a breath that caught in her throat and stayed there. With a leap, she was on him, her mouth hitting exactly on the target of his, clinging to him. Her dress was about her waist, hanging on to her slender hips, nearly off of her, while above she wore only her thin linen nightdress.
Whether her attack on him knocked him to the ground or it was his own overwhelming emotion, the two of them went tumbling to the floor of the worn stones, their hands and mouths exploring each other. Hungry, eager, excited…ravenous.
Callie had no thoughts of stopping what was starting to happen between them. She had been restless for months now; she had been watching parts of Talis’s body that had held no interest for her in years past. She looked at his thighs as he walked, at the hard muscle of his buttocks as he strained to help Will get a wagon out of the mud. When he stripped to the waist to wash sweat from his back and shoulders, Callie nearly swooned with the beauty of him.
Now she was touching all the parts of him that she had seen. She had no shyness, no inhibitions, no sense that she should not do what she wanted to do. Talis was hers, more than her own body was hers, and now she needed him more than she needed all the food and drink in the world.
When her hand went between his legs and there was a groan from him, Callie felt it in her soul. It wasn’t just that her heart was pounding; her entire body was throbbing. She wanted to feel his skin next to her skin and she began to claw at his clothes.
“No,” he said. “Callie, no.”
Callie paid no attention to him as she pushed her hands under his shirt and ran them up his bare, warm skin, her mouth seeking his.
“No!” he shouted, and in one quick, strong move, he was away from her, standing with his back to the stone battlements, his chest heaving with emotion. Even in the moonlight she could see that he was flushed.
As for Callie, she could not properly breathe, much less think as she sat still on the stones and looked up at him. “Tally,” she whispered, holding out her hands to him.
He would not be able to deny her if she kept looking at him in that way. Turning his back to her, he looked out over the landscape, but his heart and mind were with her. He could feel her wanting him, her willingness. For a long time he stood there looking into the dark night, willing his body to calm down, willing her to stop beseeching him. His honor and what he wanted so very much warred within him.
In the last weeks so many things had changed. Everything had changed. On the farm he had yearned for what he had intuited was his birthright. And now that he had it all, all he seemed to want was Callie. Even to himself he did not want to admit how he had felt in this last week without her. Empty, drained, weak. How could he be a knight if she were not there beside him?
And now that he was a son of this rich house, how could he have her without the sanction of his father? How could he provide for her? Give her a home?
For a moment he was tempted to take her hand and run with her back to Meg and Will. Sometimes he thought that having been found by John Hadley was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. But that was absurd. Now he had a chance to give Callie everything. He could give her a home. He did not want to see her work-weary and worn-out by the time she was thirty. He wanted her to have the best of everything, the best the world had to offer.
Turning back to her, he smiled, but saw that she seemed to be on the verge of tears. Knowing her, she probably thought he did not want to touch her. If only she knew how much he wanted her. Until this week he had not realized that she was everything to him. He wanted to be a knight so she could be proud of him, wanted riches so she could have the best life had to offer. Everything was for her.
But he was not going to take what was not by right his to have. He knew that Callie didn’t care what happened between them. If he warned her that continuing what they had started could lead to disgrace because of her carrying his child, he knew she would not care. He also knew that Callie would look to him to solve the problem. He knew she would live in a hovel with him; money meant nothing to her. But he also knew that he would die rather than see her working as he’d seen village women work, old before she had time to live.
He had to tend to legalities and practical things before he took what he wanted so much. Otherwise, he had no right to what she offered; no right to the reward if he had not done the work. His honor would not allow him to take what he had not earned.
“Do not look at me so,” he said. He meant to sound lighthearted, but his voice was pleading, full of what he felt for her. She had no idea how beautiful she was in the moonlight, her eyes big and filled with longing, the silver of the moon making them liquid.
“You are hurting me,” he gasped out.
Callie heard the pain in his voice and, for the thousandth time in her life, damned his sense of honor. No doubt he thought that what they were doing was wrong. How could anything they did together be wrong?
Extending his hands, he held them out to her, offering to help her up but keeping her at arm’s length.
With a sigh, Callie accepted his offer, then betrayed him by trying to kiss his mouth. Laughing, Talis pulled away from her.
“Look at my hair. Has it turned gray tonight? You are aging me. Have you no sense of decency? Girls are supposed to hold themselves away from men. They shouldn’t jump on men and knock them to the floor.”
Callie laughed as he turned her around and began fastening her dress. It didn’t fit as well without the corset underneath, but it certainly felt better. “Odd that you are strong enough to break down the door but not strong enough to hold me up. Unless you think I am stronger than an oak and iron door.”
He could not keep from kissing her neck as he pulled her back laces together. “You are stronger than all the oak in the world.”
“Oh? Am I?” When she started to turn toward him, he pulled her laces so tight she gasped, her hands to her stomach.
“Callie, you must behave yourself. I am only a man.”
She laughed at his tone of weakness. “And I am glad you have at last seen that I am a woman,” she said softly.
“Yes,” he said, his voice heavy with regret. There were almost tears in his voice, as though he were in great pain. “Yes, I have seen that you are a woman.”
With his hands on her shoulders, he turned her toward him and looked into her eyes. He did not have to say that things had now changed between them. It wasn’t just that they had moved away from the farm, but tonight they had continued what had started that day they had met John Hadley. And this week they had learned how separation affected both of them.
“Come and sit with me,” he said as he climbed onto the battlements, his back to one crenelation, his long legs extending to the opposite one and past it. Holding out his arms, he welcomed her to sit on his lap, her legs on his, her back against his chest.
Callie didn’t hesitate as she climbed onto him and leaned back against him.
“Be still!” Talis commanded in a way that made Callie giggle.
“Tell me everything,” he said when she was still. “Tell me everything big and small that you have done and seen and thought since I saw you last. Have you made up any stories and told them to someone else?”
With her head leaning back against his shoulder, she delighted in the jealousy in his voice. Maybe she should taunt him, tell him she had been so happy without him, but she couldn’t do it. On the other hand, she didn’t want him to think she was miserable. That would worry him.
“You are sad,” he said, sensing what she was feeling.
“No, no, of course not. It is all wonderful. It’s so nice to have such lovely women around me. They are like sisters, so kind, teaching me many things.”
Talis buried his nose in her hair, smelling it. In the past he had often thought that Callie’s hair was a nuisance. If she didn’t keep it braided, it caught on tree branches, in briars, even on his hands. When had it become so beautiful? “You are lying,” he said easily. “Tell me the truth.?
??
She was silent.
“Come now, have you forgotten me?” he said coaxingly. “Do you know that you cannot lie to me?”
When she spoke there were tears in her voice. “You have forgotten me.”
He moved away from her to look at her profile. “How can you say this to me? There has not been a moment when I have not thought of you. Everything I looked at, every person I talked to made me think of you. I was—”
He cut himself off, not wanting to tell her more. After all, he had to preserve his manliness. It wasn’t good to tell her all of the truth.
Callie was smiling. He didn’t have to tell her more. “You were miserable without me and you wanted to impress me.”
“Ha!” he said. “Impress you! Impressing you takes nothing. Look at you. You are so tiny I could break you.” With that he clasped his arms around her waist and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe, then he relaxed his grasp.
Laughing, she leaned back against him.
After a while he said, tentatively, “I should like you to be proud of me. I’d like to show you my skill with a sword.”
Never would she tell him that she would have loved him whether he had any skill with a sword or a horse, or no skills at all for that matter. She just loved him. She loved him with or without skills, even, as Dorothy said, with or without arms and legs.
“Have you learned much?” she asked, not because she cared but because it was important to him and he was all to her.
When he was silent she knew that something was bothering him. But then she had known that for some time. She just had to find out what it was and mend it. It didn’t matter that she was bored out of her mind living with a bunch of bland women who had nothing in their heads. What mattered to her was whether Talis was happy or not.
“What is wrong?” she asked.
Talis hated to admit weakness, hated to admit that he needed her. But with each passing moment of every day, he knew he needed her more than he had ever thought possible. A triumph meant nothing, a thing learned meant nothing if she was not there to share it with him. No, more than share. If she was not there to do it for. Why bother to train to be a knight if Callie was not there to tie her sleeve about his armor?
But none of the other men seemed to need pretty girls in order to want to do anything. Other men seemed content to accomplish deeds for themselves. True, they liked having a girl watch them, but they didn’t seem to need one as Talis needed Callie.
In the past Will was sometimes annoyed at them for incomplete chores he’d assigned them separately. “You are each only half a person. It takes both of you to make one complete person,” he’d once said in exasperation.
Is that what was wrong with him? He was only half a person and Callie was the other half? Even to him it sounded ludicrous. Such a thing was not possible.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what is wrong.”
But he couldn’t bring himself to say what he thought. He wanted Callie to think he was the strongest, bravest person on earth. She must lean on him, not the other way around. “You must tell me the truth about those girls. Are you happy with them?”
She knew his pride was keeping him from telling her what was wrong. “They are hardly girls. They are old women who want a man.” My man, she almost said.
“Oh? Perhaps I should—”
She hit him sharply in the ribs before he could finish that sentence, making him laugh.
“You do not like them,” he said.
“They do not like me.”
He laughed at this. “How could they not?” he asked, saying what, to him, was absolutely honest. To him, Callie was funny and smart and entertaining; she was the best company in the world, knowing when to be quiet, when to talk.
Thinking about her while holding her made him kiss her neck, her ear, but within seconds he realized he had to stop that. Trying to return to the innocence of their childhood, he began to tickle her. But her squirming on his lap did things to his body that even the kissing could not. “Callasandra…,” he whispered in anguish.
Callie was starting to tell him about the Hadley sisters. “Actually, it is not that they do not like me; they don’t like or dislike me. Oh, Tally, they are so very, very boring.”
Talis was still absorbed with her body on his and was not listening to her, but now Callie had formed a plan. But, as always, she knew that she had to make him believe that the idea was his.
“It is your fault,” she said, and that declaration got his full attention. Like every man, he’d take responsibility for his errors only if there was no other possible path.
“Mine? What have I done to cause those women to dislike you? Callie, really, it must be something that you have done to make them think ill of you.”
“They say I have a man’s education.”
At that Talis snorted in laughter. “You? A man’s education. Do you know how to wield a sword or dagger? You are so weak you could not even lift the armor you would need to wear.”
Callie persisted. “And having your company for all these years has ruined me for being around a gaggle of girls. They talk of the most nonsensical things, such as clothing and gossip. I am used to your talk of politics and philosophy and all the really important things of life.”
For a moment Callie wasn’t sure if he was going to believe her on this. Talis just might laugh at this and point out they had never talked of politics or philosophy; more than anything else they had talked of clothing and speculated at what was going on at the queen’s court.
But right now honesty between them would ruin everything. She wanted him to take her away from the women. She wanted them to be together, and if Talis thought he was doing this because she needed it, then he’d move heaven to keep them together. If she told him the truth, that she felt as though she were dying without him, he might tell her that this was frivolous and that it would be good “discipline” for her to go back to the women.
“I am learning nothing,” she whispered. Without you, there is nothing I want to learn, is what she thought.
For a moment, Talis said nothing, but sat there frowning, thinking of this matter. At first he didn’t know what to do, then he saw a way out. If he helped Callie, he wouldn’t have to admit that he was dying without her, that his energy, his very will to live was lessening every day without her near. “You will come to me,” he said firmly. “You will stay with me. A person must learn in life.”
“I cannot,” she said gloomily. “They will not allow it.” She knew that the best way to get Talis to do something was to tell him that he could not. “You do not know how these people are. Woman are here and men are there. They are separate. They get together to make babies and that is all.”
“Oh?” he said, an eyebrow raised. “And what do you know of making babies?”
She was silent, but she was smiling in the darkness, liking this teasing. “Not much. Would you tell me all there is to know?” When she asked this, she wiggled a bit on his lap.
But Talis’s reaction was not as she’d hoped. For some reason, when he spoke, there was anger in his voice. “What has happened to make you talk of making babies? What man has spoken of this to you?”
“No one,” she said truthfully. For the last week she had lived with women and women alone. “There was a boy who said I was pretty, but that is all. Do you think I am pretty?” It was not Callie’s intention to make him jealous (not that she wouldn’t have if she’d thought of it) but right now all she wanted was to coax him into giving her a compliment.
“Who is this boy?” Talis asked fiercely, his arms tightening about her waist.
“No one,” Callie answered, exasperated, but still determined to get a compliment out of him. “He said I had nice hair. Beautiful hair. Do you think so?”
“Why did you not have on that thing that covers your hair? How could he see your hair?”
Callie was smiling. She now realized that they were at cross-purposes and she was going to get no compliment fro
m him. But then, perhaps his jealousy was a compliment. His jealousy was quite odd; it erupted when Callie least expected it, and she could never predict it. The times when she had tried to make him jealous, she had failed miserably.
“It was at night and—”
“At night!” he half shouted in her ear.
Abruptly, Callie put her hands over her face. “Oh, Tally,” she said, “it is horrible. All the boys and most of the men are in love with me. They talk of nothing but kissing my beautiful slender feet, my delicate hands. They fight to give me the most exquisite of presents. They write poems about my hair and the heavenly color of my eyes. One man said my eyes are like the sky just before a storm. And my hair! I blush to repeat what they say about it. They—”
She could feel the tension leave his body with each word she spoke, and finally, he squeezed her until she stopped talking. “You have had your fun with me. Now be still and look at the moon.”
Leaning back against him, her arms holding his, she looked up at the moon and wished the night would never end. A large part of her wished they had never left Meg and Will. “Do you think Meg and Will think of us?”
“As often as we think of them,” he answered, and she knew that part of him also wished they’d not left home. There were things happening at Hadley Hall that neither of them understood. How could a man dislike his own children as John Hadley did? The sons said they loved their mother, but Philip once said they were fearful of her.
“I am afraid,” Callie said. “I am afraid of what goes on here. It does not feel good.”
He knew what she meant and he often felt the same fear, but Talis wanted to reassure her. “It is just different here. They are rich.”
“It is more than that. It is something else. I am afraid for us.”
“For us? What could happen to us? Do you worry that beautiful women will fall in love with me and carry me off?”
“Ha! You would run after them; no woman would have to carry you.”
Talis knew that he never looked—well, maybe looked at other women—but none but Callie interested him, but it was nice for her to believe that he was so desirable. In his eyes, of the two of them, Callie was the beauty. She was the most gorgeous, most splendid creature on earth. “What do you worry about?”