A Knight to Remember by Christina Dodd

the grace of God.”
    “Aye, and He used you as His instrument.” He stroked her hair. “Should I not be privileged to rescue God’s instrument from the despair of poverty into which she has fallen?”
    Her goodwill evaporated. “I’m doing well on my own!”
    “Ah, aye.” He glanced around at her beloved dispensary. “Very well indeed.”
    She knew what he saw. The low ceiling, the dirt floor, her carefully tended herb boxes: what was this place when compared to a castle with glass in the windows, a wooden floor strewn with rushes, and tapestries on the walls? Yet because of her previous generosity, she’d had an abbey to come to instead of needing to resort to the streets to support her children. It had been as the priests said—the Lord rewarded good deeds. What Hugh saw when he looked on her was a woman who had fallen on bad times. She thought of herself as a woman who had done well with little.
    She voiced a woman’s universal complaint. “What asses men are!”
    He didn’t answer that. He only brought her head to his and kissed her again. Little kisses, nibbles that gave her a taste of him. She didn’t want to know about him and kept her teeth clenched, but his tongue darted through her closed lips and she had a sample of him anyway.
    The billows of his breathing lulled her as his chest rose and fell against hers. She was hungry for human contact, it seemed, for she found herself inhaling with him, exhaling with him.
    “Open,” he whispered. His beard had grown to a soft pelt that caressed her chin, and the sweet scent of him titillated her desires.
    Plastered so closely against him, she felt his heart pulsate against her breastbone, and the beat overwhelmed her own natural rhythm to sweep the blood through her veins.
    “Edlyn, give to me.” His hand rubbed her neck, then her scalp, in slow, hypnotic circles.
    Her eyes had closed, but she saw with his vision. Her ears had failed her, but she heard her own denial. She felt his triumph as he surged into her mouth, then his frustration as she let him do what he would and made no attempt to reciprocate.
    He gathered her closer when there was no closer, tangling his legs with hers, pressing his knee between and high until the pressure brought familiar sensations, then new urgings. She fought to deny them, but he moved insistently, insidiously.
    “Feel me,” he crooned. “’Tis Hugh who holds you, who pleasures you. ’Tis your old friend, your new lover, your future husband.”
    “Nay.”
    “So faint a sound!”
    He mocked her, but benignly. His hand—how many did he have?—wandered over her throat, her shoulder, along the length of her torso to her hip and rested heavily there. So aware of him, she could even imagine the pain of his wound. She fought the merging of two selves into one. He was an enchanter to so absorb her into his bones and his bloodstream.
    “I feel your passion,” he murmured. “So long denied, so hungry and demanding.” His knee moved. “When you respond—”
    Preservation made her answer, “Not going to.”
    He stopped moving, stopped breathing, and remained so motionless her eyes opened and fixed on him.
    She had seen him unconscious. She had seen him in pain. She had seen him recovering. She had seen him curious. She had never seen him determined, but she saw him that way now.
    His level gaze held hers. His wide mouth slashed his face straight across. In a voice all the more convincing for its lack of emotion, he said, “I’m not going to leave you alone. I’m not going to let you get away. I will hold you until you respond or until both of us perish of hunger and thirst.”
    She wanted to tell him it wasn’t possible. Someone would come looking for her. And lovers didn’t really die in each other’s arms, regardless of the romantic fables.
    Yet looking at that hunting-mastiff expression he wore, she thought it just seemed easier to give in. Then it would be over, she’d be free, and he’d have his manhood