Velvet Angel

  The plaid Elizabeth had worn fell from her body and Elizabeth, eyes wide, began to throw pies in earnest, using both hands. She wasn’t sure but she thought she saw murder in those gray eyes.

  Miles kept coming, only moving when a tart came flying at his face. His entire body was covered in a mixture of peaches, cherries, apples, dates, plums, all running down his muscular body in a glorious riot of colors—and flavors, Elizabeth thought irrelevantly.

  When he reached the table, his piercing eyes held hers and she didn’t dare move. He bolted over the table to stand beside her and Elizabeth, breath held, looked up at him. But as she looked, a cherry, plump and juicy, ran down his forehead, his nose, and hung for just a second before plopping down onto the floor. Another giggle escaped Elizabeth.

  Slowly, tenderly, Miles drew her into his arms. “Ah, Elizabeth,” he said, “you are such a joy.”

  As his lips came near hers, she closed her eyes, remembering all too well the sensations of last night. He bent her backward in his arms and Elizabeth gave herself over to the strength of him. He had power over her. All he had to do was touch her and she began to tremble.

  But lips did not touch hers. Instead, she received a face full of juicy, syrupy peach pie. As peaches ran into her ears, her eyes flew open. Gasping, she looked up into Miles’s devilish face.

  Before she could even protest, with a wicked little smile, he lifted her and set her on the table—smack in the middle of the second platter of tarts. Fruit juice oozed over her legs, somehow did the impossible and traveled up her spine. Her hands were covered, peaches dripped off her chin, her hair was glued to her body.

  With utter disgust, she lifted her hands, brushed them against each other, saw that did no good whatever, and on second thought, she ate two apple slices from the back of her wrist.

  “A little too sweet,” she said seriously, looking at Miles. “Perhaps we should complain to the cook.”

  Miles, nude before her, showed that his mind was not on the cook. Elizabeth’s eyes widened in mock dismay. It was difficult, if not impossible, to retain one’s composure while sitting in a puddle of fruit pies. She opened her arms to her sticky lover and he came to her.

  When Elizabeth kissed Miles’s neck and came away choking on a cherry pit, their laughter began. Miles noisily began eating peaches from her forehead while Elizabeth nibbled plums from Miles’s shoulder.

  Miles grabbed her, rolled onto his back amid a great clatter of dishes and the squish of food, and set her down on his swollen manhood. There was no more laughter as their thoughts turned serious and they made love with vigor, twice changing positions, ending with Miles on the bottom.

  Elizabeth lay quite still on top of him, weak, exhausted, thinking she might die before she had energy to rouse herself.

  But Miles, with a grunt, lifted both of them and removed a small earthenware bowl that had once contained a sauce of some sort from the small of his back, and flung it to the floor.

  Elizabeth raised herself and absently scratched her thigh. “You are a sight, Miles Montgomery,” she said, smiling, brushing a poached egg from his hair. The yellow was working its way down toward his scalp.

  “You are not exactly presentable at court.” With another groan of pain, he removed a serving fork from under his buttocks.

  “What do you think your MacGregor is going to think of this?” Elizabeth asked, moving off Miles. She sat up, cross-legged beside him and surveyed the room. The walls, floors, furniture were covered with smashed tarts, and the table was a disaster, everything overturned, dripping, running together—except for a couple of dishes at the very end of the table. On her hands and knees, Elizabeth crawled toward the undisturbed food, squealed once when Miles gave her buttocks a sweet caress, but came back with a bowl of chicken cooked with almonds and a small loaf of wheat bread.

  Miles, still stretched on his back on the table, raised himself on his hand. “Still hungry?” he teased.

  “Starved.” She grabbed a spoon from under Miles’s ankle and dug into the stew, and when Miles turned soulful, forlorn eyes up to her, she began to feed him also. “Don’t get used to this,” she commanded as she shoveled more food into his mouth.

  Miles merely smiled at her and occasionally kissed her fingers.

  All in all, they found quite a bit of undestroyed food on the table. Elizabeth hung over the side, with Miles holding an ankle and a wrist, and retrieved a whole roast partridge which had caught on the leg stretchers. Miles refused to feed himself and Elizabeth was “forced” to feed him, even to stripping the meat from the partridge bones.

  “Worthless is what you are,” Elizabeth said, scratching. The food on her body was beginning to dry and it itched!

  “What you need,” Miles murmured, running nibbling kisses up her arm, “is—”

  “I don’t want to hear any of your suggestions, Montgomery!” she warned. “Last night you got me drunk and pounced on me in a tub and now…this!” There were no words to describe the fragrant mess about them. “Damn!” she cursed, using both hands to scratch her thigh. “Is there nothing normal about you?”

  “Nothing,” he reassured her as he lazily stepped down from the table and began to dress. “There’s a lake not far from here. How about a swim?”

  “I have no idea how to swim.”

  He caught her waist and lifted her from the table. “I’ll teach you,” he said so lewdly that Elizabeth laughed and pushed against him.

  “Underwater?” she said, and when Miles seemed to consider this seriously, she nearly ran from him, slipping once on an ooze of cod livers but catching herself on the table edge. In record time, she’d slipped into a tartan skirt, a saffron-colored shirt and tossed a plaid about her shoulders. The skirt had been in the line of fire of a cheese tart.

  “Do I look as bad as you?” she asked as he pulled food from his hair.

  “Worse. But no one will see us.” With that cryptic sentence, he walked toward a tapestry on the far wall, pulled it aside and revealed a staircase built inside the thick stone walls. He took Elizabeth’s hand and led her into the dark, cold passage.

  Chapter 10

  TWO HOURS LATER THEY WERE WASHED AND MILES WAS drying Elizabeth with a plaid.

  “Quite useful, aren’t they?” she murmured, wrapping the tartan cloth about her cool body. The Scots summer was not conducive to lying about nude.

  “Many things about the Scots are practical as well as pleasant—if you’d give them half a chance.”

  She stopped drying her hair. “What does it matter to you whether I like the Scots or not? I understand your wanting to get me into your bed but I don’t understand this constant…interest, I guess, in my welfare.”

  “Elizabeth, if I’d merely wanted you in my bed I could have taken you that first day when you were delivered to me.”

  “And you would have lost part of yourself to my ax blade,” she snapped.

  After a moment’s surprise, Miles began to laugh. “You and that ax! Oh Elizabeth, you were such a charming sight with your leg sticking out and surrounded by so much hair. You were—”

  “You do not have to laugh quite so hard,” she said stiffly. “It was not humorous to me. And I may yet escape you.”

  That sobered him. He pulled her down to the ground beside him. “I don’t want to have to go through more nights like those. Rab was missing and we found dead wolves along the cliff and the mare you rode came back limping. We were really afraid you’d fallen over the cliff.”

  She pushed at him because he was holding her so tightly she couldn’t breathe. As she looked up at him, she frowned. She’d always thought that if a man did take her virtue, she would hate him, but hate was far removed from what she felt for Miles. Between them now was a soft sense of sharing, as if they’d always been here and always would be.

  “Is it always like this?” she whispered, looking up at the trees overhead.

  There was a pause before Miles answered. “No,” he said so softly it could have been the wind
.

  She knew he understood what she meant. Perhaps he was lying to her, perhaps tomorrow he’d again be her enemy, but right now he wasn’t.

  “There were never days like this when my brother was alive,” she began, and when she started she couldn’t stop. Although she’d fought Miles at every opportunity, she now knew that in truth she’d never been in any real danger—not the danger she’d experienced for most of her life. In the last few weeks she’d seen courtesy; she’d seen love between Bronwyn and Stephen, Miles and his son—and love that asked very little in return was something she’d not seen in her lifetime.

  Instead of telling a horror tale of all the atrocities Edmund had committed, she talked of the way she and her two other brothers had bound themselves together. Roger had not been very old when his parents died and he’d been turned over to the rule of his treacherous brother. He’d done all he could to save his younger siblings but at the same time he wanted to live his own life. Every time that Roger slipped in his vigilance, Elizabeth was summoned from her convent and used in Edmund’s nasty games. Roger, in remorse and guilt over his lapse, would strike out and renew his vows to protect Brian and Elizabeth, but always, Edmund’s slimy ways would undermine Roger’s good intentions.

  “He’s never had anyone but us,” Elizabeth said. “Roger is twenty-seven but he’s never been in love, never even had the time to while away a summer afternoon. He was old by the time he was twelve.”

  “And what of you?” Miles asked. “Didn’t you consider that you deserved some time for laughter?”

  “Laughter.” She smiled, snuggling against him. “I don’t think I remember any laughter in my life until a certain young man rolled down a hill with me.”

  “Kit is a delightful child,” Miles said with pride.

  “Kit, ha! It was someone larger who, even as he rolled, protected his fine sword.”

  “Noticed that, did you?” he said softly, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.

  For a moment they were silent, with Elizabeth looking at him in puzzled silence. “You are not a kidnapper,” she said at last. “I have seen you with men and with women and if you are nothing else in life, you are kind to women. So why do you not release me? Is it because, as you said, I have so many…problems?” She said the last stiffly.

  He did not take her question lightly and it was a while before he answered. “All my life I’ve seemed to enjoy the company of women. I like nothing better than to lie about with a beautiful woman in my arms. My brothers seemed to think this made me less of a man but I don’t guess one can change how one is. As for you, Elizabeth, I saw something I’d never seen before—a man’s hatred and anger. My sister-in-law Judith could probably organize all of England, yet she needs my brother’s strength and love. Bronwyn loves people and could make anyone do her bidding, but she’s unsure of herself and needs Stephen’s stubborn belief in himself to back her.”

  He paused. “But you, Elizabeth, are different. You could probably exist alone and you wouldn’t even know there was more to life.”

  “Then why…” she began. “Why hold someone like me prisoner? Surely some soft, docile woman would be more to your liking.”

  He smiled at the insult in her tone. “Passion, Elizabeth. I think you are surely the most passionate human on earth. You hate violently and I am sure you will love just as violently.”

  She tried to move away but he pinned her to the ground, his face near hers. “You’ll love only once in your life,” he said. “You’ll take your time in giving your love but once it is given, no power on earth—or hell—will break that love.”

  She lay still under him, gazing up into those deep gray orbs that burned into her.

  “I want to be that man,” he said softly. “I want more than your body, Elizabeth Chatworth. I want your love, your mind, your soul.”

  When he bent to kiss her, she turned her head away. “You don’t ask much, do you, Montgomery? You’ve had more than I’ve given any other man—but I don’t think I have more to give. My soul belongs to God, my mind to myself and my love goes to my family.”

  He rolled away from her and began to dress. “You asked me why I keep you prisoner and I’ve told you. Now we’ll return to the MacGregor’s and you will meet his men. The MacGregor is angered over your taking a knife to him and you will apologize.”

  She did not like his attitude. “He is a friend to the MacArrans who are related to my enemies, the Montgomerys”—she smiled sweetly—“therefore I had every right to try and protect myself.”

  “True,” he agreed, handing her her clothes, “but if the MacGregor isn’t appeased, it could cause problems between the clans.”

  She began to dress sullenly. “I don’t like this,” she muttered. “And I’ll not enter a hall of strange men without a weapon.”

  “Elizabeth,” Miles said patiently. “You cannot wield an ax at every gathering of men you enter. Besides, these Scots have some beautiful women of their own. Perhaps they won’t be so enraptured with your charms that they’re driven to insane acts of lust.”

  “I didn’t mean that!” she snapped, turning away from him. “Must you laugh at…?”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t mean to laugh at you, but you have to begin to realize what is normal and what isn’t. I’ll be there to protect you.”

  “And who will protect me from you?”

  At that, his eyes lit and he ran his hand down the side of her breast. “You will be pleased to know that no one will protect you from me.”

  She pulled away from him and finished dressing.

  What Miles had planned for Elizabeth was, to her, sheer torture. He clamped his fingers down on her elbow until pain shot up her arm, and he forced her to shake hands with over a hundred of the MacGregor men. When she finished, she collapsed in a chair against the wall and shakily drank the wine Miles handed her. When he complimented her as if she were a dog that’d performed a trick correctly, she sneered at him, which made him kiss her fingers and laugh.

  “It will get easier,” he said confidently.

  Indeed, it did get easier, but it took weeks. Miles never let up on her for a moment. He refused to let her walk behind the men and when she turned constantly to check the men’s whereabouts, he made her be still. They rode on a hunt and once Elizabeth was separated from Miles. Three MacGregors found her, were quite cordial to her, but by the time she reached Miles, there was terror in her eyes. Instantly, he pulled her onto his horse, held her and soothed her and when that wasn’t enough, he made love to her under a beech tree.

  There was one man at the MacGregors who Miles warned her against: Davy MacArran, Bronwyn’s brother. Miles had a fierce dislike for the boy who was actually older than himself. Miles said, with great contempt, that Davy had tried to kill his own sister.

  “For all the arrogance of my brothers,” Miles said, “they would give their lives for me as I would for them. I have no use for men who go against their families.”

  “As you are asking me to do?” she retorted. “You are asking me to forsake my brothers and give myself body and soul to you.”

  There was a flicker of anger in Miles’s eyes before he left her alone in the room they shared.

  Elizabeth went to the window to look down at the men in the courtyard below. It was an odd feeling to know that if she wanted she could walk in that courtyard and not be molested. She need have no fear that she would have to fight for her life. There was no urge on her part to test her knowledge but it was pleasant to consider.

  The MacGregor walked by and the powerful strut of the big man almost made her smile. His vanity had taken a beating at Bronwyn’s hands and again at Elizabeth’s, and when Miles had practically pushed Elizabeth before him, the MacGregor’d hardly looked at her. This had never happened to her before and before she knew what she was doing, she found herself practically coaxing him to talk to her. It had taken only minutes before she felt him twining about her fingers. He liked pretty women and he was old eno
ugh that he was beginning to wonder whether pretty women liked him. Elizabeth soon dispelled that idea.

  Later Miles looked at her in disgust. “You changed quickly from the frightened rabbit to the temptress.”

  “Do you think I make a good temptress?” she taunted. “Lachlan MacGregor is a widower. Perhaps—”

  She didn’t finish because Miles kissed her so hard he nearly bruised her lips. With her fingertips on her lower lip, she watched his broad back as he moved away from her—and smiled. She was beginning to realize that she had some power over Miles, but as yet she didn’t know the extent of her power.

  Now, as she watched the courtyard, men, wearing the MacArran cockade, rode into the area. The MacGregors falsely acted with nonchalance, but Elizabeth saw that all the men’s hands were very close to their sword belts. Miles came from inside the MacGregor’s stone house and talked to the MacArrans.

  Elizabeth watched for only a moment before turning back to the room with a sigh, and she began to gather Miles’s belongings. She knew without a doubt that they would be leaving.

  Miles opened the door, paused for a moment, saw what she was doing and began to help her. “My brother Gavin has come to Larenston.”

  “With Roger?” She paused with her hand on a velvet cape.

  “No, your brother has escaped.”

  She whirled to face him. “Unharmed? With all his body parts?”

  Miles’s eyes widened for a moment. “As far as I know, everything is attached.” He caught her hands. “Elizabeth—”

  She pulled away. “Perhaps you should have one of the MacGregor’s beautiful lasses to pack your fine belongings.” With that she fled to the stairs behind the tapestry.

  In spite of everything she could do, tears began to fall. She tripped in the black darkness, barely caught herself from falling and ended up sitting down hard on a stone stair as several rats squealed in protest at her disturbance.

  Sitting there, crying as if her life were over, she knew she had no reason to cry. Her brother was no longer a prisoner as she was; he was unharmed. And now Gavin Montgomery had come, no doubt to force his younger brother to release her. By this time tomorrow she’d probably be on her way home. No more would she have to shake hands with strange men. No more would she be a captive, but she’d be free to go home to her own family.