Forever His(111)

“Would you wish me to say words that have no meaning to me? Would you have me lie to you?”

“No,” she said forcefully. “Because I’d always know it’s not the truth. You’re going to fall in love with Rosalind.”

He swore a short, vicious oath. “By all that is holy, I wish I had never heard her name!” He turned on his heel, then turned back again. “I will never love her.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know what you might feel for her. It’s like ...” She lifted her hands helplessly. “Oh, God, how can I explain something to you that you don’t even believe in?” She made a bitter, humorless sound that could not be called a laugh. “Think of it this way: if you had never seen a destrier or a trencher before, you wouldn’t know exactly what one was when you saw it, would you? You might be able to make a good guess, you might be able to describe it, but you wouldn’t use exactly the right word.” Her eyes melted into his the way the rain soaked into the ground, lush and deep. “Until someone who knew, someone who had maybe a little more experience, told you the word.”

Gaston scowled at her, unable to follow the maze of her female reasoning—especially when he was feeling such a rush of pure male possessive fury. He wanted to shout at her, at the storm overhead, at fate, at the fact that control of his life had been wrested from him.

Instead he spoke calmly. Too calmly. “Ma dame, you have spent this day persuading Lady Rosalind to accept my proposal of marriage. You assume that I will offer for her after you are gone.”

Celine went very still. “You have to,” she gasped. “It’s in the book.”

“Damn the book.”

“But the future—”

“I make my own future.” He glanced heavenward, repeating it to the thunderous clouds. “I make my own future!”

“But you can’t change what’s meant to be!”

He lowered his head, his hair falling into his eyes, and pinned her with an unyielding gaze.

Then he closed the distance between them in one stride, taking her in his arms. “You are my wife,” he said roughly, his voice sharp with all the ache that filled his soul, all the fury that God would dare take her from him. “You are the one I want, Celine.” He lowered his head to hers. “You.”

“Gaston.” She pushed at his shoulders, but she might as well have been trying to move an entire keep. “We can’t—”

He kissed her, deeply, pouring out the impossible longing he felt with ungentle motions of his mouth and hands. Her tongue was rough velvet against his. A sound began in her throat, protest ... that became need. Caught in the grip of feelings stronger than any he had ever known, he sank with her onto the damp leaves and soft grass beside the dying fire. They had no blankets, no furs, naught but nature’s bed beneath them, earth wet with the promise of spring, of life.

She uttered a sob and her fingers speared through his tangled hair. Rain pounded down on them as they consumed each other, mouths mating, her arms wrapping around him, his fingers tearing at garments, one hand lifting her hips against him. He ripped off his gloves. He had to feel her. The silk of her wet skin. The soft, strong grace of her legs as she arched beneath him.

Sweet violence swept them both as he drove deep inside her in one smooth, hard stroke. Ravening, groaning, they moved. Sensations he had felt uncountable times before astonished him with their fresh intensity, so real he must have only dreamed of them before. The lush petals of her mouth. The feel of her fingertips at the sensitive nape of his neck. The clinging feminine heat of her. She was a burning flame, all glittering contrasts, strong yet vulnerable, stubborn yet giving, and she cried out words of wanting as he took her hard and fast.

She was his. His. She was not Christiane, not a liar, not Tourelle’s ward. She was exactly what she had insisted all along: Celine Fontaine, from seven hundred years in the future. And she was a part of him.

And he was going to lose her.

The rain washed over them. The thunder could not drown out the pounding of his heart over hers. As their bodies entwined on the grass, steam from the dying fire swirled around them. A blinding stroke of sunlight broke through the clouds, danced over them, winked out as the storm consumed it once more.

For all the years of his life he would remember her this way: crying out his name as she found fulfillment, there among the earth and the thunder and his ungentle giving.

He wanted to make it last, on and on until now became forever and they both forgot the meaning of time. Embedded deep inside her, all he could think of was that he would remember her. His sweet Celine. All rain and tears. And he did not wish to remember.