Wariness rose between them. “What do you feel for me, Vilda?”
That asked of her not with hope nor anticipation—almost grimly—she wished she had not said anything, but it was too late. “’Tis not just that you are honorable, but that your touch, be it light or firm, is more felt than any I have felt. It is that your kiss makes the woman of me believe I am something where I had begun to think myself nothing. It is that in your arms I feel what was empty become a world within me. It is that”—she shrugged—“each time I believe I will see you no more, there is a still inside me that awaits your return.”
He was silent so long, the warmth moving into her face was felt all the way down her neck and shoulders. Then he rumbled, “Are you saying you love me?”
So this fool was. Lowering her chin, staring at the toes of his boots, she whispered, “Am I? As you have loved before—and greatly—you would know better. Is this love? And if ’tis, what am I to do with it, Guy?”
She did not know what to expect, but so greatly feared his response that when he stepped forward, a whimper slipped from her. Then his hand rose from his side, fingers slid up her jaw and curved beneath her ear, and he urged her face up.
Lord, he is too much for this sturdy Saxon, she thought as she moved her gaze over his chin, lips, and nose. Some attraction and some heart, but even were we not different sides of this conquering, lacking good alliance and great dowry, he would be out of my reach.
When her eyes met those she thought the most alluring of his features, she was more certain the distance between them was passable only in moments like these. Never hours…days…months…years… Never a lifetime.
“I think it must be love,” he said, “and that it is truer for your honesty, something with which you are better acquainted than the woman I loved and lost.”
“Honesty? After the lies I told?”
“Being attempts to protect others, they were not self-serving but sacrificial, and they had naught to do with this. What I am saying is your love is honest. As for what to do with it…” He drew his thumb to the center of her mouth, gently tugged down her lower lip in trailing it to her chin, then slowly traced the other side of her jaw and raised her face higher as if—
The scrape of weary feet sounding from the corridor, he released her, whatever he meant to do left undone, whatever he left unsaid remaining unsaid.
She turned, and as he opened the door wider, he looked around. “Be it known to the still inside you that waits on me, you will see me again ere you depart for the convent, Vilda.”
One last time, she thought as he stepped into the corridor, murmured something to the monk, and closed the door.
For a long while after being secured inside, she sought the still within to assure it of his return, but there was none about her, only churning—as if what awaited him was aware though she would see him again, after that no more.
But no matter how far his journeys took him from her, ever she would have memories of him, she assured herself, then acknowledged time would tell if that was a good thing.
She snuffed the candle, lowered to the pallet, and as she pulled the blanket over her, pushed Guy from her thoughts. And regretted it for the one who slipped in behind him.
After the last game that saw the Conqueror capture very few of her pieces before making his final move, he had accompanied her across the tent.
As she started to duck beneath the flap, he had said, “Long ere I was king, whilst yet a boy struggling to keep hold of my dukedom with all around trying to tear it from my grasp, painfully I learned what is required to bend others to my will so I not be bent to theirs.” He had looked away, and when his gaze returned, said, “What happened after Hastings was not meant to. Following the great slaughter both sides, I believed I could rule and be respected by my new subjects the same as those in Normandy, but Saxons…” Almost like a child seeking understanding for bad behavior, he had turned up a hand. “One day you are all conciliatory and promises, the next all spleen and lies, seeking to take what is mine and put a blade in my back.”
When Vilda had remained silent, he had smiled crookedly—almost charmingly—and said he would arrange an escort to deliver her to a convent. He had not named the one chosen, and she had not asked since it mattered not behind which walls she spent the remainder of her life.
When he had raised his eyebrows, she thanked him and turned away, and he had let her go. Quite possibly—hopefully—that was the last time she would see him.
“Then one more time Guy,” she whispered and closed her eyes.
He had thought he would have to save her, even if it cost him all—current and future standing, liberty, perhaps life—but it seemed not. What Vilda had revealed of her time with William was answered prayer, though it baffled the Almighty had moved the king with regard to one Saxon rebel.
“My rebel,” he spoke aloud the thought, making it more real than it had cause to be. She loved him, and as he had said, what she felt was honest unlike that of the woman who last professed that depth of feeling for him. Not that Elan had not loved him, he corrected what had once been bitter but was now mostly fact. Simply, hers had not been
