Medieval 03 - Enchanted

ecstatic
purring.
    “Is Ariane your wife in deed as well as in
ceremony?” Dominic asked bluntly.
    Simon’s fingers paused, then resumed their
caresses.
    “No,” he said succinctly.
    Dominic cursed in the language of the Saracens.
    “What happened?” Dominic asked.
    “My wife is as cold as a northern
sea.”
    “She refused you?”
    A narrow, bleak smile changed the line of
Simon’s mouth, but the gentleness of his hand on the grey cat
never varied.
    “She refused me,” Simon agreed.
    “Why?”
    “She said she would rather die than lie
beneath a man.”
    “Then place her on top,” Dominic said
impatiently.
    “I have it in mind.”
    Dominic waited.
    Simon said no more.
    “How were you wounded?” Dominic
demanded.
    Though the Glendruid Wolf’s tone was
insistent, it carried no farther than the two men.
    “With a dagger,” Simon said.
    “Who was holding it?” retorted
Dominic.
    “My wife.”
    It was what Dominic had suspected, but hearing the
truth spoken was somehow shocking.
    “She truly tried to kill you?” Dominic
asked.
    Simon shrugged.
    “God’s teeth,” Dominic muttered.
“No wonder you haven’t sought her bed again. It would
be enough to take the steel from even the stoutest
sword.”
    “Would that it had that effect,” Simon
said beneath his breath.
    “What?”
    “Would that my wife’s dagger could take
the steel from my sword. But it can’t. I fear my temper if
she refuses me again.”
    Dominic’s black eyebrows rose. Whether on the
battlefield or in the bedchamber, Simon’s self-control was
the envy of many a knight.
    “That is why you sleep alone?” Dominic
asked.
    “Aye. And now she is wearing that witchy
dress once more,” Simon said. “God’s teeth, but I
would love to get my hands beneath it.”
    Dominic looked at his brother’s taut features
and picked his words very carefully before he spoke.
    “Do you think she prefers another man?”
Dominic asked.
    “Not if she wishes to live.”
    The deadly coolness of Simon’s voice warned
Dominic that even a brother and a lord combined had bettertread warily around the subject of Ariane’s
desires. Dominic had not seen Simon so intense since he had pursued
Marie’s artfully swaying hips between battlefield campfires
that burned no less hotly than Simon himself.
    Abruptly Simon cursed and some of the savagery left
his eyes. A flick of the cat’s tail under Simon’s nose
reminded him of his true mission in life—making His Laziness
purr.
    “No,” Simon said quietly. “Ariane
loves no man. In some ways it might be easier if she did. I could
kill him.”
    Dominic smiled sardonically. “Then Lady
Ariane is like some of the sultan’s harem. She prefers the
touch of her own sex.”
    “Nay. Ariane prefers no touch at all. Even in
the bath, no one attends her.”
    “The bath…”
    Dominic smiled to himself as he remembered the
pleasures of bathing with his Glendruid wife, whose love of water
was even greater than that of the Saracen sultans whose palaces
sang with fountains.
    “Such a cream-licking smile,” Simon
said, half-disgusted, half-curious.
    Curiosity won.
    “Is that how you tamed your small
falcon?” Simon asked. “Did you catch her when her wings
were too wet to fly?”
    Dominic laughed softly.
    Stroking the cat, Simon waited with leashed
impatience.
    “I tamed my small falcon quite
carefully,” Dominic said, “whether in the bath or the
forest or the bedchamber.”
    Simon looked at Meg. Her hair burned brightly, but
nothing was as vivid as the Glendruid green of her eyes as she
talked with Amber.
    “Was it the golden jesses you made for her
that tamed her wild heart?” Simon asked.
    “Nay.”
    “A sound beating?”
    Dominic shook his head.
    “’Tis just as well,” Simon
muttered. “I have no taste for thumping on things smaller
than I.”
    “Excellent. I have it on good authority that
the small things don’t care for it either.”
    Simon laughed aloud. The sound was so unexpected,
and so infectious, that Ariane looked up from her nearly empty
plate. Amethyst eyes flashed in the instant before she looked down
once more.
    “She looks only at you,” Dominic
said.
    “What?”
    “Your wife. No matter who is in the room, she
sees only you.”
    “Wait until the sun god arrives,” Simon
retorted.
    “Erik?”
    “Aye,” Simon said curtly.
    Dominic shook his head. “You are the sun that
shines in her eyes, not Erik.”
    “Of course. That’s why she tried to put
a dagger through my