The Lord's Bride Read online

  “Martin! Cease!”

  “I will cease when you understand that there is a law you must answer to now.”

  “I understand, Martin. I understand that you are a brute and a wretch and a…”

  Martin stilled his hand for a moment. “You do not truly think this brutal, Mary. You have seen brutality. You know its face.”

  “Hmph.”

  It was as close as she could get to conceding the point. He understood that. She was a proud woman, and being turned over his lap did not allow her to be prideful at all.

  “I do not think you are feeling more than a sting,” he said, smoothing the flat of his hand across her pleasantly rounded cheeks. She felt wonderful. She was soft and she was full, her cheeks high and pert, her legs shapely and spreading with a feminine urge that Martin understood but would not permit himself to take advantage of. They would be married soon enough, and then the rocking of her hips that she was trying to hide would lead to the right and proper conclusion.

  “Please, Martin,” she said softly. “Let me go.”

  Liking the change in her tone, he released his grasp and watched as she pushed up from his lap and took refuge at the head of the bed.

  “I have always adored you, Mary,” he said. “You will be happy here. Perhaps not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but there will come a day when you will be glad I brought you here. I promise you that. Now, my dear, get some sleep. You will need your strength to fight me tomorrow,” he winked.

  There was no smile in response. Martin had to steel himself to leave the room without further entreaties. He did not like to see Mary in emotional torment, but in many respects, it was a torment of her own making. He could not free her from the chains she had shackled herself with, nor could he force her into love. Patience was all that was required. Patience and love.

  Chapter Twelve

  The wedding ceremony took place on a blustery day. It was not well-attended, nor was it a grand affair. Mary had refused to participate in preparations, and Martin was not inclined to give her a forum for her hysteria. She had been quite rude in the days leading up to her nuptials, hardly the blushing bride at all.

  “You might do well to reconsider,” she hissed at Martin through the lace of her veil as they stood before not just any priest, but the abbot of the local monastery. “My last husband did not live to see the wedding night.”

  “Your first husband was on his last legs when he promised himself to you,” Martin replied in a soothing murmur. “But you, young lady, should be careful about the threats you make. They, like you, will soon be unveiled.”

  Mary felt a tremor of fear. What would Martin do with her, now that she was in his grasp? She could perhaps have run, assumed permanent form as Robert de Vere, but without land, riches would soon be spent, and then she would be no better off as peasant or postulant.

  It seemed that Martin de Stafford was her destiny, as inescapable as the flowing of time.

  When the priest began to speak the words of holy binding, she felt herself begin to tremble with genuine fear. Memories of the past rose thick and fast, putting a lump in her throat and making her limbs weak.

  “Mary.” Martin spoke softly, his hand caressing a gentle path down her arm. “Look at me.”

  She looked at him and saw a man so handsome her heart almost broke. In that moment, she hated herself for her willful ways. All she had ever wanted was before her, and yet she was too tormented to feel any joy or any love.

  “I am broken,” she whispered to him, ignoring the priest. “You tie yourself to a fallen woman.”

  “I tie myself to the woman I have always loved,” he said, caressing her back with long, slow sweeps of his large hand. Held closer to him than any unmarried woman rightly should be, Mary finally felt herself relaxing. Her breath came easier, her heart felt lighter, and finally she managed to say the words he so wanted to hear.

  “I do.”

  * * *

  From wedding to bedchamber, Martin de Stafford wasted no time in taking his bride. Indeed, Mary’s feet did not so much as touch the ground from altar to bed. Tossed upon the soft coverlet by her ardent husband, she watched as he swept off his clothing and revealed his naked frame.

  She could do nothing besides stare. He was very well formed, broad of chest, with thick dark hair marking the muscles of his torso and trailing down, down, down to the thick rod which already stood erect. Mary had seen etchings of such man parts before, but she had never in all her days laid eyes upon the hard male member. It seemed to her to be too large and too thick to possibly fit inside her body.

  “Martin, we cannot do this…”

  “Ah, but we can,” he said, moving to lay beside her. The sight and scent of him so close nigh made her faint. He was so large, so hard, so full of muscle. Though she had felt all of it through his clothing at one time or another, it was overwhelming seeing him laid bare before her. “Why do you look at me so?”

  “You are very… hairy.”

  He laughed, and she blushed, for she had not meant to say hairy. There was not a word for what she meant to say, only a wild feeling rushing through her veins. Her mind was bereft of sense, but her body was responding with simple instinct.

  “Let us both disrobe,” Martin suggested, “and we shall both see what goodness the Lord has made.”

  Mary did not object. The clothing she wore suddenly seemed very hot and very tight and very unnatural. When Martin began peeling it from her body, she felt a rush of liberation. Before long, her pale curves were bared on the coverlet and Martin was beside her, tracing fingertips over the smooth line of her stomach beneath the rise of her breast.

  “You are more beautiful than I dared imagine,” he said reverently. “I must have pleased the Lord greatly to be rewarded with such sweetness. Let me taste of it.”

  Mary could not imagine what he meant, until he slid betwixt her thighs and fixed his mouth against her quim. The touch of his tongue and heated breath against the delicate petals of her womanhood were quite heavenly, and she soon found herself with hips arched skyward, eyes closed, mouth open as she panted her pleasure.

  To her great surprise, she found herself rising toward climax, the sensation she had only ever achieved through the manipulation of her own body with her fingers. To be taken there with nothing but the muscle of his tongue, swiping about the ridge of her pleasure bud and tracing the petals of her flower, was a most extraordinary experience.

  His hands held her hips steady as he stoked her toward that final peak, placing his lips about her bud just as she reached ecstasy previously unknown. Her entire body was taken with rapturous tremors as she reached down and held fast to him, anchoring herself to the rock of her gratification.

  “You peak so prettily,” Martin drawled as she regained her senses. “And you shall reach those heady heights again and again ere the evening is over.”

  She did not believe him at first, but soon his touch was back on the wet petals. She felt her body spread before him, welcoming his fingers inside to the place no man had gone before. Her thighs spread wide as he fed his fingers deeper and reached the soft veil of her hymen. There he stilled his digits, twisting knuckles slowly around in her tight canal.

  When she whimpered in protest at the pressure, he made quick amends by pressing the pad of his thumb against her lady nub. The effect was immediate, her hips bucked against him and she thrust her hips down, nearly impaling herself on those probing fingers.

  “Not so eager,” he murmured. “I wish to take you properly. Not with fingers, but with the part of myself made for you.”

  He rose up over Mary, impressing her greatly with the breadth and power of his shoulders. His hips lowered toward hers, and the flare of his manhood slid gradually into her outer lips, pressing them around the intruding member. She moaned prettily and lifted herself toward him. As he slid in, she could feel her walls clutching at the head of his cock, drawing him in closer.

  “You will find yourself much more settled after this,
my sweet bride,” Martin said, holding himself still as he pressed against the barrier of her hymen. “Once you have known this marital love, you will be cleansed of your wild ways.”

  “Never,” Mary said, whispering the word against his lips.

  Sinking down, he pushed his cock through the thin barrier and gained entrance to her body. Her small cry of pain was muted by a deep kiss, his tongue caressing away her whimpers as the heat of his body sank through her belly.

  She could not quite believe how very full she felt as slow strokes claimed her, then faster thrusts branded her flesh as his own. She was virgin no longer. She was her own no longer. She felt as though she were a receptacle for his lust, the warmth through which his hardness penetrated. It felt wonderful to release her tightly held beliefs about what coupling might be and, for just a moment, be as the animals were, lustful and innocent.

  Martin’s hot kisses upon her bare breast and neck and ears and lips made her feel as if she were being consumed entirely. With him thrusting deep inside her, his lips locked up on the pink nubs of her nipples, all that mattered was the muscular thickness spreading her open, the gliding of his rod deep inside her channel over and over until spirals of pleasure wound up her spine and burst somewhere behind her eyes.

  She clutched at his shoulders and ground her wetness against him, crying his name and the Lord’s name in quick succession. His cries joined hers. He was spilling his seed inside her. She knew it, for he was no longer thrusting; instead he was pressing his hips as hard and as deep as they could go, and she could feel the leaping of his cock inside her body.

  Slowly, they both relaxed. She felt him slide from her well branded quim and wondered what it must look like after such a vigorous filling. Sitting up, she gazed between her thighs and saw that her lips were still parted, red and engorged with desire. Thick white liquid was oozing from her interior, the mark of his dominion over her. It was done. She was his.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Perhaps that could have been the end of the matter.

  Perhaps Mary might have accepted her long-held but oft denied fate of being bound to Martin de Stafford.

  Perhaps she might have settled in at the manor and become an exemplary wife.

  Perhaps once upon a time, that might all have been possible. But the hard years between her father’s death and her discovery as the scourge of Staffordshire had changed Mary. She could no longer find the same peace in spinning and sewing, and no matter how many letters she copied neatly onto parchment, there was a certain excitement missing. Besides, she had not forgotten the kindness of the gypsies. Though there had been little communication from them since she took residence in the abbey, Mary would never forget their kindness, nor the fact that she was so deeply in their debt.

  Martin did not understand. He had always been a man of honor and of law. He understood the way things were meant to be. He knew the world and his place in it. But she had seen beyond the veil of propriety. She had known weakness in place of power, poverty in place of abundance.

  So Mary continued in her old ways, sneaking out of the manor under cover of darkness or in the guise of a maid. It was not hard to obtain simple clothes in which she was not so much as looked at, let alone recognized.

  Martin did not know of her outings, for he was kept busy with his duties as sheriff. Sometimes he was gone from dawn to dusk, and though she went to sleep each night in his arms, the long days without anything to entertain her besides activities befitting a lady of her stature were lonely and indeed boring.

  When her husband paid her a rare mid-morning visit in her chambers one fine day, she thought at first he had come for one of the carnal interludes they both so enjoyed. However, the tone of his voice as he spoke her name suggested that he was there on different business.

  “Mary.”

  She turned to him, a pleasant smile on her face. “Yes, my love?”

  Her husband fixed her with the look he usually reserved for those clapped in irons. “There is word from Patridge house that six roasted turkeys prepared for this evening’s dinner party were stolen away.”

  “How terrible,” she said, winding thread about a spool, then unwinding it again.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “How could I possibly have known? I have been sitting here with my loom.”

  Martin looked at the loom, which was as empty and unused as it had ever been. “I see no thread placed upon it.”

  “I did not say I had been weaving,” she said with a pert smile. “I said I had been sitting here with my loom.”

  “Mary,” his voice darkened to a low growl. “If you are making mischief in the shire…”

  She put on a petulant sigh. “Are you going to come to me with every petty crime and accuse me of it?”

  “I know you have been getting up to something, Mary. You have not done any of the things you have claimed to be doing. You have not sewn a stitch, nor woven a line. You have not so much as inscribed a word of the good book. So what is it you have been doing, my sweet bride?”

  “Would you believe I have been planting bluebells in the forest?”

  “I would not.”

  Mary smiled. “Then I suppose you will have to accept that I and my loom have been spending time together.”

  “I will not accept any of your silly stories, Mary. I require the truth.”

  “Ask the loom if you wish to know the truth.”

  “Mary!”

  He snapped her name so sharply she glared at him. “I have not stolen any turkeys, Martin. I suggest you continue your investigations elsewhere.”

  “I do not care for turkeys. I care for you, Mary. You are my wife.”

  “I have been made abundantly aware of that.”

  “I will then ask you one more time. What have you been doing with all the time you have claimed to be working on your home crafts?”

  “And I will tell you one more time that I have no answer that will satisfy you.”

  Martin’s eyes were narrow with frustration. She was half-concerned that he might unleash his hand against her bottom. Instead, he did something much worse.

  “If I cannot trust you, I cannot allow you to have the run of the shire. You are confined to your rooms until further notice, Mary. I will have men guarding the doors.”

  “You cannot be serious.”

  “I do not jest, Mary. Remember, had I not intervened you would surely be for the hangman’s noose. If I cannot trust you, then I will have to contain you.” He reached out and touched her hair gently. “Simply speak the truth, Mary, and you will be free.”

  “The truth? The truth is that you are a suspicious brute, nothing more than a jailer. The truth is our marriage is a shackled sham.” The words were lies, but Mary’s temper was roused, so she spoke them regardless.

  “There was a time you would have married me gladly.”

  “There was a time. And then that time passed, and all I had was ripped from me. And you? You married Elizabeth. To be certain, had she not passed, you would still be married to her—and what of me?”

  “I was promised to Elizabeth. You were promised to Jonathan.”

  “I mattered less to you than a promise you yourself did not make. You watched me become the bride of a man forty years my senior. You watched my lands go to his family.”

  “I was not yet sheriff, Mary, I could do very little.”

  “And that is precisely what you did. Very little.”

  Husband and wife glared at one another.

  “If you are still harboring some mad thought of revenge against your uncle, I must caution you against it,” Martin said, changing the subject from past hurts to current concerns.

  “Revenge? Is that what you call it? Those lands are mine. They have belonged to my family for years, and they will go to my children.”

  “We do not yet have children.”

  “Nor will we until those lands are mine.”

  Martin stared at her until she felt as if she had perhaps grown
another head. He seemed unable to quite believe that it was not lust for revenge that motivated her but a desire to reclaim her territory. “What you are talking about would mean the de Staffords owning more than half of Staffordshire.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing?”

  A slight smile teased at Martin’s lips. “Enlarging one’s holdings is not a bad thing at all, but achieving such expansion through underhand means leads only to bloodshed.”

  “Only if one crosses a man. If one crosses a woman, she can be married off and silenced.”

  “There is no silencing you, Mary.” He reached for her and drew her up into his arms, bowing his head so as to place sweet kisses on her lips and cheeks. “Oh, how I love you, my sweet little plotter.”

  Mary’s smile came reluctantly, but it did come.

  “Tell me this at least,” he said, “for I am certain you are behind it. What role do the turkeys play in your master plan?”

  “The village children go hungry more often than we do,” she admitted. “I may have shared the meat out amongst them.”

  “I see,” he said. “And did you think that perhaps the evening’s celebrations might be harmed as a result?”

  “I did not, but I am not sorry to hear it.”

  “I imagine you are not.” His hand slid down her back and settled on the rise of her bottom. “You will have to punished, of course.”

  “Before or after you lock me away?”

  “Before,” he said, slapping over her skirts with a heavy hand that did nothing to truly punish, but served very well to ignite the flame betwixt her thighs. “I am glad you confessed, Mary.”

  “But you still intend to punish me.”

  “I do,” he said. “Though I have no intention of being harsh with you. Stealing turkey is a harmless enough prank.”

  “Yes,” Mary said. “Harmless.”

  They went unto their shared bedchamber, where Martin laid her over the bed and hiked her skirts high about her waist. Mary felt his fingers thrust between her lips and find the very center of her being.