“Oh, Griffyn,” she whispered. “Oh please.”
He touched her face, she opened her eyes, and then her body exploded in shuddering undulations up and down the length of him as she howled out his name in gasping whimpers and spiraling moans.
The sheer force of his orgasm knocked Griffyn dizzy as he roared in release, her body quaking and shuddering around him. He wanted to engulf her, pull her inside of him and keep her safe from whatever had made that tear slide down her cheek, from whatever sorrow he was going to cause her, to hold her and just love her, and that would never be enough anymore, not with the lies already begun.
They lay, sprawled on the bed, catching their breath. Griffyn played with a lock of Gwyn’s hair, lifting it, letting it run through his fingertips, then fall. After a moment, she rolled onto her belly and looked at him.
“Well. We succeeded in not talking.”
He smiled faintly. “We should not talk more often.”
Her body rippled with a small laugh. “I think we don’t talk quite often enough.”
“I don’t.” She smiled and ran her fingers along his jaw. He caught them up and kissed them. “That’s all I want, Gwyn.”
She rolled her eyes and gestured to the mattress. “That? All you want is to…not talk?”
He smiled. “I want small things. Family, harvest, children. Bien?”
She kissed his neck, dropping her eyes out of sight. He nestled his finger into the warm space under her chin and lifted. Her head came up, her eyes bright with tears. She smiled a watery smile. “I’ve been wanting children since I was only a child myself. I just never knew…”
“Never knew what?”
She shook her head.
The brazier was burning dimly. The moon was rising, and neither he nor Gwyn ever wished the shutters closed unless the weather demanded it. He pulled the furs up over her slim shoulders.
She rested a hand lightly on his chest and stroked her fingers idly. “And you, Griffyn? What of your dreams, as a child?”
He crossed his arms beneath his head. “I had a dream, as a child.”
“Just the one? It must have been important.”
He dropped his arm onto her shoulder and pulled her close and after all these years, he talked. “We left the Nest when I was eight. I used to lie in my bed, in Normandy, and all I wanted was to have it stop. I thought that meant coming home, as if that could fix everything. Hold everything at bay. But of course, that’s a child’s wish. Our past is like our shadow. It follows us everywhere. All any of us have is what we’ve been, and what we mean to become.”
She watched him through the dark, flickering candlelight.
“I’ve decided,” he continued, shifting his gaze down to hers, “what we intend to become matters more.”
She pushed up to kiss his chin. “That’s right. That has to be right.”
“Or else we’re doomed.”
A moment later, she asked the question he’d practically begged her to ask, “What was ‘it,’ Griffyn? What did you want to have stop? What was coming home supposed to end?”
He stared up at the cobalt-blue linen weave stretched between the posts of the bedframe. “Nothing. My father. He was known as Mal Amour, bad love. In Normandy, he was a curse. Mothers used the threat of Mal Amour to make their children behave, or he would ride through their villages and take off the heads of their fathers, rape their mothers.”
“Good God.”
“My mother had the worst of it, I believe.”
Griffyn did not think of his mother with any regularity. She’d been a quiet soul, barely verbal, and could do little to protect either herself or her son. Over the years, Griffyn’s love for her had been as real and contorted as a wire wrapped around a supple willow trunk: devoted affection distended between the whetted filament of unwanted contempt.
All of which was the deep past. None of which mattered now. His father was dead almost thirteen years now, thank God, his mother, bless her soul, was too. And now he lay in his own home, in his own bed, with his own, astonishing woman, who was soon to be his wife. Things could be different now, could they not?
“Do you think she tried her best, Griffyn?”
The sound of her voice pulled him back. He looked down.