Kissing the Bride (Medieval 4)

The words were in his head, beating like a drum, and he was not even sure he had said them aloud until she froze beneath his hands. When he stepped back and looked up, she was gazing at him as if he had grown horns, hooves and a tail.

“Henry? Did you just ask me to marry you?” Her voice was hardly more than a breath.

“I think I must have.”

She swallowed, eyes wide and disbelieving. She did not look exactly pleased. More bewildered, confused, uncertain…There was an anxious crease between her brows. Her hands went to her hair, twisting it back into some sort of order.

“Henry, you must not feel…you must not think that…I do not expect you…” She took a breath. “Before I asked you to stay, and you said you could not. Why are you now asking me to marry you? I do not understand.”

Henry gave a shaken laugh. “’Tis not personal, Jenova, ’tis—”

Her face went blank. “Oh?”

“You are in danger. I want to protect you. If I am your husband, I can do that far more easily.”

The words sounded sensible to him, reasonable. And yet the silence that followed was long and heavy.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the green had turned hard and cold and distant. “No, Henry. I do not need your protection. I suppose your offer is kindly meant, but I can manage very well on my own. I am sorry if my asking you to stay gave you the impression that I was clinging to you for protection. It is far from the truth. Now, if you will excuse me….”

It was ridiculous. They had just made rough, passionate love on the stair landing, and she was asking to be excused. He laughed, sick at heart, longing for things to be different. And yet he understood her point of view. Jesu, he even applauded it! There was no reason for her to trust him. He was not a man to lean upon, and things were far worse than she imagined.

“Jenova,” he whispered. “Jenova, please…”

She didn’t look back. Her midnight

blue skirts flicked around the corner and vanished up the stairs. Her footsteps faded into the general hum of castle life. Henry was alone. He had asked Jenova to marry him—his first ever proposal—and he had botched it.

The words had come from nowhere, surprising him as much as Jenova. Perhaps he had hoped for her to smile, and weep a little, and say yes. Then again, perhaps he was secretly glad she had refused him. What could he offer her, after all, but disgrace? If the truth became known, she would learn to loathe him.

It was a bad bargain for Jenova.

Henry rested his brow against the wall where a moment ago Jenova’s head had rested. Smelling her scent, breathing her in, he wondered what he was going to do.

Chapter 17

“Protect me?” Jenova muttered to herself, flinging open the door to her solar and finding that Agetha wasn’t there after all. She slammed it shut behind her. “If he is my husband he can protect me far more easily?” She strode to the shuttered window, then to the warm brazier, then back again. “’Tis not personal?” Her clothing was in disarray, her hair tangled down her back, her body still throbbing from Henry’s lovemaking.

And she was angry. More angry than she had ever been. Angrier than she had believed it was possible for her to be.

Henry had asked her to marry him. To be his bride. And she hated him for it.

“Jesu! He doesn’t want me because he cannot live without me by his side. He doesn’t want me because he worships the ground I walk upon. Not because our bodies sing together. Not because he loves me….”

Nay, none of that. Henry wished to marry her because he was worried that she was in danger from Baldessare. He wanted to protect her with his name, so that he could gallop off back to London with a clear conscience. For even Baldessare would not dare lay a hand upon a lady who was wed to the great Lord Henry of Montevoy!

She was panting. There was a piece of embroidery folded upon a stool—painstaking stitches, beautifully arranged. She threw the cloth at the wall. A goblet followed, and a pair of slippers. The violence relieved her somewhat of her fury, but it still roiled within her like the sea in a storm. Fury with lashings of intense disappointment.

Jenova had told herself she would never marry again. Look at what had happened with Mortred. She had given him all of herself, opened her heart and soul to him, and she had expected the same from him. Instead he had betrayed her, humiliated her, wounded her so deep that she had struggled to recover.

And then look what had happened?

Because of Mortred, in the need to reassure herself and mayhap to revenge herself upon a dead man, in her loneliness, she had begun to look favorably upon Alfric. Alfric had seemed perfect for all her needs. Instead he had been another mistake.

Now Henry wanted to wed her and clear his conscience. Then he would leave her, and she would be no better off than she had been before. Worse off, because she had grown used to him being there, used to the sound of his voice, and his warm morning kisses. It would be like losing Mortred all over again. Only much, much worse.

She could not do it. She would not do it. For the sake of her own bruised heart, she would not marry Henry. It would be a terrible error of judgment. A sort of prison for both of them. For him, who clearly preferred to be away from her, and for her, who only wanted him by her side.

Jenova remembered again Henry’s face when he had blurted out the question. That in itself had been odd—Henry losing his fabled charm and easy way with words—but at the time she had hardly noticed. He had looked ill. And shocked. As though the words had been forced from his unwilling mouth. As though he had not wanted to ask them but had felt obliged. As though he had been offering her some sort of payment for what they had just done on the landing.