“Nicholas,” she whispered, but he still didn’t look at her. She slipped the concealing robe from her. The nightgown she wore wasn’t outrageous by twentieth-century standards, but it was when compared to Elizabethan modes of dress. Its thin straps, low neck, and clinging fabric left nothing to the imagination.
She crawled across the bed to him, like a tigress on the stalk. “Nicholas,” she whispered. “Do not marry her.”
When she was near him, he looked at her—and the wine sloshed from his tankard. “What do you?” he asked hoarsely, his eyes at first shocked, then hot.
“Perhaps you’ll stay with me this night,” she said, drawing nearer to him.
Nicholas looked down the front of her nightgown, and when he put out a hand to touch her shoulder, his hand trembled.
“One night,” she whispered, moving her face close to his.
Nicholas reacted instantly. His arms were around her, his lips on hers; he was drinking of her, taking of her, as he’d wanted to do for so long. The fabric of her nightgown tore away as his hands and his lips were on her breasts, his face buried in them.
“This one night for your promise,” Dougless was saying, her head back. She was trying to remember what she had to do before Nicholas’s lips and hands drove all thoughts from her mind. “Swear to me,” she said.
“All that I have is yours. Do you not know that?” he said, his lips moving lower on her body, down her stomach. His hands were on her hips, his fingers digging into her flesh.
“Then do not go tomorrow,” she said. “This one night for tomorrow.”
Nicholas’s strong hands were lifting her hips up, and the remains of the gown were sliding farther down. “You may have all my tomorrows.”
“Nicholas, please.” Dougless was trying to remember what she meant to say, but Nicholas’s touch was making her unable to think. “Please, my love. I do not believe I will be here after tonight, so you must swear to me.”
After a moment Nicholas raised his head and looked up at her, up past her lovely body to her face. His mind was reeling with the sensations of touching this woman who had come to mean so much to him, but he was beginning to hear her. “What would you have me swear to you?” he asked in a low voice.
Dougless lifted her head. “I will spend tonight with you if you’ll swear not to marry Lettice after I’m gone,” she said evenly.
For a long moment Nicholas looked at her, his bare body poised over her half-nude body, and Dougless held her breath. She had not come to this decision easily, but she knew that, even if it meant losing Nicholas forever, she had to stop this marriage.
He rolled off of her and the bed in one smooth motion, pulled on a loose robe, then went to stand before the fire, his back to her. When he spoke, his voice was low and husky. “Do you think so little of me to believe I would risk the loss of you for one night’s pleasure? Do you think so little of yourself to sell yourself to me for a promise?”
His words were making Dougless feel very small. She pulled her torn gown up over her shoulders. “I couldn’t think of any other way,” she said as an excuse. “I’d do anything to stop your marriage.”
He turned to look at her, his eyes dark with emotion. “You have told me of your country and of your ways. Do you think yours is the only way? This marriage means naught to me, yet it means all to you.”
“I can’t have you risk your life for—”
His eyes blazed. “You risk our life for her!” he said angrily. “You tell me again and again that you cannot come to my bed. Yet you are here now, dressed as a . . . as a . . .”
Dougless pulled the sheet over her bare shoulders, feeling like a strumpet. “I only meant to try to get you to promise you wouldn’t marry her,” she said, feeling near to tears.
He went to the bed, looming over her. “What love is this you bear for me? You come creeping to my bed, appealing to me like a whore. Only you do not want gold, nay, you want me to dishonor my family, to put aside what means most to me.”
Dougless put her hands over her face. “Don’t, please. I can’t bear this. I never meant—”
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her hands away. “Do you have any idea how much I dread the morrow? That I dread the woman who I must make my wife? Were I free, were I in your time, I could freely choose where I love. But here and now, I cannot. Were I to marry you, I could not feed you. Kit would no longer give me a place to live, food to eat, clothes to—”
“Kit’s not like that. Surely there would be a way for us to live. You help Kit with the estates, so he’d not throw you out. He’d—”
Nicholas’s hands tightened on her wrists. “Can you not hear? Can you not understand? I must make this marriage.”
“No,” she whispered. “No.”
“You cannot stop what must be. You can only help me.”
“How? How can I help you? Can I stop an axman’s blade?”
“Aye,” he said. “You can. You can stay by me for always.”