Tarnished Rose of the Court. Amanda McCabe

built walls slipping and she struggled to hold onto them. Nay, this could not be happening! Five minutes in John’s presence could not be destroying all she had built up to protect herself. She twisted away from him but he wouldn’t let her go.

      “Let me go!” she cried. His hands just tightened, holding her between the wall and his body. The heat of him, the vital, fiery life that had always been a part of him, wrapped around her like velvety unbreakable bonds. She remembered the tenderness, the need she had once felt with him.

      “What has happened to you, Celia?” he said roughly.

      “What do you mean?” she gasped.

      She went very still and stared at the hard angle of his jaw above the high collar of his doublet. A muscle flexed there and his lips were pressed in an angry line. She imagined twisting her hands in that collar, tighter and tighter, until he let her go. Until she could hurt him as he had once hurt her.

      “You look like the Celia I remember,” he said. One hand slid slowly down her arm, rubbing her velvet sleeve over her skin until he touched her bare wrist. Something flared in his eyes as he felt the leap of her pulse, and he twined his fingers with hers.

      Celia was too frozen to pull away. She felt like the hawk’s prey in truth, mesmerised as he swooped closer and closer.

      “You’re even more beautiful than you were then,” he said, his voice softer and deeper. “But your eyes are hard.”

      Celia jerked in his arms. “You mean I am not a foolish, gullible girl who can be lured by a man’s pretty words? I have learned my lesson well since we last met, John, and I’m grateful for it.”

      He raised the hand he held to study her fingers. The pale skin and neat buffed nails. His thumb brushed over her bare ring finger. Celia tried to twist out of his caress, but despite his deceptive gentleness he held her fast.

      “You aren’t married?” he asked.

      “Not any longer,” she answered with a bitter laugh. “Thanks to God’s mercy. And I intend never to be again.”

      He raised her hand, and to her shock pressed his mouth to the hollow of her palm. His lips were parted, and she could feel the moist heat of him moving slowly over her skin. It made her legs tremble, her whole treacherous body go weak, and she braced herself tighter against the wall.

      That weakness, that rush of need she had thought she was finished with, made her angry. She made herself go stiff and unyielding, building her defensive walls up again stone by hard-won stone.

      “I may have changed, John, but you certainly have not,” she said coldly. “You still take what you want with no thought for anyone else. A conquering warrior who discards whatever no longer amuses you.”

      His mouth froze on her skin. Slowly he raised his head and his stare met hers. She almost gasped at the raw, elemental fury she saw in those depths. The blue had turned almost black, like the power of a summer storm.

      “You know nothing of me,” he whispered, and it was all the more forceful for its softness. “Nothing of what I have had to do in my life.”

      I know you left me! her mind cried out. Left her to the cruel hands of her husband, to a life where she had nowhere to turn for sanctuary. She bit down on her lip to keep from shouting the words aloud.

      “I know I do not want to work with you on the Queen’s business,” she said.

      “No more than I want to work with you,” he answered. With one more hard glance down her body, he abruptly let her go and spun away from her. His back and shoulders were rigid as he raked his hands through his hair. “But the Queen has commanded it. Would you go against her orders?”

      Celia braced her palms against the wall, trying to still the primitive urge to smooth the light brown waves of his hair where he had tousled them. “Of course I would not go against the Queen.”

      “Then to Edinburgh we go,” he said.

      He heaved in a deep breath, and Celia could practically see his armour lowered back into place. He shot her a humourless smile over his shoulder.

      “I shall see you at the ball tonight, Celia.”

      She watched him leave the small closet, the door clicking shut behind him. She was surrounded by heavy silence, pressing in on her from every corner until she nearly screamed from it.

      She let herself slide down the wall until she sat in the puddle of her skirts. Her head was pounding, and she let it drop down into her hands as she struggled to hold back the tears.

      She had thought her life could become no worse, no more complicated. But she had been wrong. Sir John Brandon was the greatest, most terrible complication of all.

      God’s blood. Celia Sutton.

      John shoved the pile of documents away so violently that many of them fluttered to the floor, and slumped back in his chair. It was of vital importance that he read all of them, that he knew exactly what he would be up against in Scotland, yet all he could see, all he could think about, was Celia.

      Celia. Celia.

      He raked his fingers hard through his hair, but she wouldn’t be dislodged from his mind. Those cool grey eyes watching him in the shadows of that closet, sliding down his body as if she was remembering exactly what he was remembering himself.

      The hot touch of bare skin to bare skin, mouths and hands exploring, tasting.

      Her keening cries as he entered her, joined with her more deeply and truly than he ever had with anyone before. Or since.

      But then her regard had changed in an instant, becoming hard and distant, cold as the frozen Thames outside his window. His Celia—the woman whose secret memory had sustained him for so long, despite everything—was gone.

      Or maybe she was just hidden, buried behind those crossed swords he’d seen in this new, hard Celia’s eyes. It was clear she had walled herself away from something, that her soul had been deeply wounded, and no matter what they had once been to each other she wouldn’t let him reach her now. And she was quite right. One of those wounds on her soul had been placed there by him.

      Once he had wanted her more than anything else in the world. She had awakened things in him he had thought he could never feel. He had even dared to dream of a future with her for one brief, bright moment. That connection was still there, after all these years. When he’d touched her it had been as if he could sense her thoughts, her fury, her passion. Hatred so close to lust he’d almost tasted it, because it had called out to the yearnings he felt just as strongly.

      It had taken every ounce of his iron control not to push her to the floor, shove her skirts above her waist, raise her hips in his hands and drive his tongue into her. Taste her, feel her, until her walls fell and his Celia was with him again. The girl who had once made him smile.

      He groaned as he felt the tightness in his codpiece, half-hard ever since he’d first touched her, lengthen. Just the memory of how she tasted, like summer honey, the way she would drive her fingers into his hair and pull him closer between her legs, had him aroused.

      But if the murderous look in her eyes was any indication, memories were as close as he would ever get to that part of her again.

      John pushed himself up from his chair and strode over to the window of his small chamber. He opened the casement to let the freezing wind rush over him, despite the fact that he had discarded his doublet and wore only a thin linen shirt. He needed the cold to remind him of his task, his duty. He had never failed in his service to the Queen. He couldn’t fail now, no matter how much Celia distracted him.

      He could see the river, a frozen silver ribbon as grey and icy as Celia’s eyes. This Christmas season had been the coldest anyone could remember, so frigid the Thames had frozen solid and a frost fair was set up on the surface. It had warmed a bit in the quiet days after the Christmas revels, but chunks of ice still floated along the water and the people who dared to go outside were muffled in cloaks