How foolish he had been to be afraid to come back. And afraid to know anything about Tegfan. Afraid, as if there would be malevolent ghosts here to haunt him.
This sorry hovel had been a place filled with love. And there was love here again. A love that had somehow purged all the old doubts and pain.
His fingers played gently through Marged’s hair as she slept.
She was wonderfully comfortable and surprisingly warm. And warm right through to the heart, she thought. He loved her. He loved her! And he was still inside her. She could feel him hard again, though he was relaxed. His fingers were gently massaging her scalp.
“I did not want to come here, you know,” she said. Perhaps she should not be mentioning this to him, when it involved another man and her disturbing ambivalent feelings for that other man. But she knew that part of loving was being perfectly open and honest with the beloved. “He lived here as a child. The Earl of Wyvern, I mean.”
His hand stilled in her hair. “You loved him as a child,” he said. “You have memories of this place?”
“One memory is very recent,” she said. She hesitated for a moment and then told him about her meeting with Geraint the day before.
He stroked her hair again and said nothing.
“He has had a hard life,” she said. “Almost unbearably hard. It is not easy to believe, is it, when he was taken at the age of twelve to a life of wealth and security and privilege and when he is probably one of the wealthiest men in the country now. But happiness does not come from things, does it? I don’t believe he has known either love or a home since he was in this place.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “he felt comforted by your sympathy yesterday, Marged. Perhaps he felt something like love. Was there some love in what you did for him?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I love you.”
“But there are many kinds of love,” he said. “If we love one person, we do not necessarily not love everyone else.”
“We are talking about the man we both hate,” she said. “Of course I feel no love for him.”
“I am fighting against a system, Marged,” he said, “against an injustice that is larger than one person. I do not hate anyone.”
“It shows,” she said. “You are so very careful that no one is hurt during the smashing of gates, either on our side or on the other side. And somehow you arrange it that those who suffer material loss are compensated. You are a compassionate man. Is that why you are doing this, then? You are fighting against a system rather than against people?”
“Yes,” he said.
“It is better than hatred,” she said. “Hatred—hurts.”
“Yes.” He kissed the top of her head.
And he lifted her off him at last, turned her so that her back was against the blanket, and knelt over her, his thighs on either side of her legs. He began to make love to her again with skilled, sensitive hands and mouth and tongue.
She gave herself up to the physical joys of love. But something had happened, she realized, and she could not seem to do anything about it. She was feeling Geraint’s arms about her as he held her and cried, and Geraint’s hand holding hers. And she was lying in the darkness of this hovel with Geraint and feeling the tenderness she had experienced yesterday blossom into a different kind of love.
Because she had never seen the man behind Rebecca’s mask and could not visualize him as he made love to her, she substituted the face and form of Geraint. She made love with Rebecca and poured out to him all that she had felt for Geraint yesterday. She tried to give him back some of the love he had known here as a child and had never known since.
The rational part of her mind told her that she would be horrified tomorrow when she remembered this, and that she would doubt her love for Rebecca when she recalled that she had made love to Geraint as much as she had made love to him. But the emotional part of her being was far more powerful at the moment than the rational.
“Cariad,” she whispered to him when he finally knelt between her thighs and lifted her with his hands to cushion her for his penetration. “I love you. I love you.”
It was Rebecca she loved. It was Geraint she visualized behind her closed eyes. She gave her body and her tenderness, trying not to wonder to whom she gave.
He came inside her and she loved—the man who loved her in return.
Chapter 22
CERIS clung to Aled, numb with relief. She had passed large numbers of men fleeing from the road, but the road itself had been in darkness until she was right down on it. She had looked wildly about her. What had happened? Had some of them been caught in the trap? Some of the leaders? Aled?
Then the moon had broken free of the clouds and she had been able to see where the tollgate and house had been. There had been just a heap of rubble left. And there had been no one in sight. No one except for two men scrambling down from the opposite side from the one by which she had come, and a horseman galloping down from her side—a horseman looking like a woman in a dark dress, with long dark hair.
He galloped up beside her and swept her up with one powerful arm. Aled. He was Aled and he was safe. He had not been caught. She clung to him, numb with relief. For several moments after the shot was fired, she did not realize what it was. And then she did realize and the numbness deepened. That shot had been fired at them. At Aled.
“Get out of here!” Aled yelled suddenly. “What are you waiting for?”
She turned her head on his chest and opened her eyes. There was another horseman, clad all in white. Even his hair and his face looked white in the moonlight. Rebecca! Ceris’s stomach felt as if it turned a complete somersault.
She turned her head the other way as both horses galloped off so that she would not have to see Rebecca. And she clung harder. They had been shot at! The truth of it was only just beginning to hit her. She still had her eyes open as the horses turned to go uphill again. Three men on foot watched them go by. She wondered that they were standing motionless and were still so close to the road. Crowds of men had been fleeing when she had been on her way down.
Several moments passed before the fact registered on her brain that one of the three men—the one whose eyes she had met—was Matthew. The truth dawned upon her at the same moment. He had used her to lead him to Rebecca and all her followers. To Aled. If anyone had been caught or hurt, it would have been her foolish fault.
She remembered Marged’s concern that inadvertently she might betray some of her knowledge, and her own indignation that her friend should think she could ever do such a thing.
She might have killed Aled tonight. She buried her face against his chest again, moved her hands higher up his back, and tightened her hold.
Two things happened simultaneously. His breath hissed in through his teeth. And her right hand encountered something warm and wet and sticky.
She did not move. She was afraid to move a muscle. “You have been shot,” she said against his dark gown.
“It is nothing,” he said, though the sound of his voice gave the lie to his words. “I will have you home and safe in no time, Ceris. Just hold tight.”
She moaned. “No. Stop, Aled,” she said. “You have been shot. You are bleeding.”