He Calls Her Jasmine (7 page)
His mouth went dry, and his cock twitched with anticipation. God’s blood, but she tempted him to stay between her pale, satiny thighs and devour her. Spreading her labia with gentle fingers, he leaned in to sip her honey. Her swollen bud stood out, a tiny bit of flesh that quivered and elongated when he worried it with his teeth and tongue.
Her hot wet slit felt slick and slightly salty to his tongue. Saddle leather, horse hide and the damp, rich smell of the forest in springtime mingled in his nostrils with the erotic scent of aroused woman. Sounds of forest creatures and a gentle breeze rustling the leaves of the trees that curtained the clearing gave accompaniment to Jasmine’s soft moans when he inserted two fingers in her cunt. Her juices flooded his hand and mouth.
More blood slammed into his cock. His balls tightened. Carefully, for he was so hard he barely dared to mount, he pulled away and heaved himself into the saddle.
“Free my cock, sweeting,” he ordered even before he’d finished swinging her around to drape her legs across his rock-hard thighs.
Jasmine didn’t hesitate. Her cunt wept, she wanted him in her so desperately. His braies posed little impediment but for the knot at the waist of his braies that didn’t want to let go under her trembling fingers.
Finally it gave way. Cupping his heavy sac in one hand, she used the other to free his big, throbbing cock.
A sunbeam reflected off the gleaming ring, heightened the contrast between rigid gold metal and his purplish, swollen cockhead. He wept for her, too. A pearly drop of lubrication glistened in its dimpled eye.
He lifted her, impaled her inch by inch until she rested in the saddle. Her labia cradled his balls while her cunt eagerly took in the full length of his cock. She held onto his muscular shoulders, her gaze locked with his. Her entire being focused on the delicious sensation of fullness. The feelings coursed through her body one nerve to the next until she trembled with the intensity of them.
Jumbled feelings. Love for this strong knight who saved her from rape and certain death, took her in, and gave her pleasure beyond her wildest fantasies. Desire so intense that every time she clasped his cock within her body she wished she never had to let it go.
“Rajah…” Rolfe spoke softly to the horse in a strange, melodic language Jasmine had never heard before, and Rajah began to plod slowly along the path they’d taken moments earlier.
“Oh!” The horse’s motion jostled them, just enough to heighten the delightful sensation of being filled beyond full with her lover’s huge, hard cock. “Fuck me harder…yesss. I want to touch you.” She burrowed beneath his tunic, seeking contact with warm, satiny skin.
“We could be seen along the road, sweeting.” He glanced about, as though looking for their escort. “Even now my men may be close enough to see what we do.”
Rajah picked up the pace, setting off vibrations that began where they were joined and radiated through her with every contact of the destrier’s hooves upon the firm surface of the road. Even the thought of being observed heightened her erotic pleasure. “This feels so delicious, I care not.” She tasted the firm, slightly salty sweat at the base of his neck and down the slit that left a tanned strip of his massive chest bare.
“Use your cunt like a fist. Yes. God yes. Squeeze me.” Rolfe gasped, as though the effort it took to speak had stolen his breath. “I thank God I found you, sweeting. Oh, yes. Like that. Milk out my seed.” He groaned, a loud, guttural sound that seemed to rumble from somewhere deep in his chest.
When his cock spasmed and began spurting his scalding seed deep inside her, the sensations triggered her own shuddering climax. Her quim clenched with every spasm. Shards of sensation spread, then burst in tiny explosions. Each explosion came stronger than the last, and they kept coming. More and more waves wracked her body until she slumped on his chest, limp and spent.
‘Twas only when they came in sight of Hedgewick as the sun was setting that he lifted her off him and arranged their clothing. “We will sample yet another of life’s pleasures in the privacy of my solar.”
That night Rolfe noticed Jasmine’s withdrawal. ‘Twas almost as though her mind had fled, toward some place where he could not go. Though she’d bathed him and herself, she now stood, her luscious body still wrapped in a linen drying cloth, staring out an arrow slit into the darkness.
“Sweeting?” He hated times like this, when he couldn’t reach her. “Do memories trouble you again this night?”
“Nay. ‘Tis the lack of them that plague me. To have no past and no future—”
“Your future is here, with me.” When Rolfe came near and enfolded her in his arms, he realized mere words would not convince her. “I love you, my Jasmine.”
“Yet you cannot wed with me, for I have naught but myself to recommend me. Any children I give you will be bastards. I wish…”
Rolfe wished, as well. “I would wed with you. But you deserve more than a landless knight who holds this rotting pile of stone in his brother’s name. Be assured that you hold my heart in your soft, talented hands. Forever.”
A cool, damp wind gusted through the solar, making the candles flicker in their sconces. Jasmine shivered as she pulled the linen tighter around her shoulders.
“Sweeting, come to bed before you catch a chill.” Rolfe shepherded her toward the big bed, wishing he could dispel her melancholy mood. “Will you pick a scene for us to re-enact this night?” he asked when she stopped by the window seat and stared down at the book that lay open there.
“Nay.” Turning away, she went to the bed and crawled between the covers.
When he joined her, he found her curled up tightly like a babe, totally still but for the regular motion of her breathing. If only… If only she were the heiress he needed to secure his future. If only he had more to offer her and any children they might have.
He lay behind her for hours, until dawn’s light began to filter through the arrow slits, stroking the gentle curve of her back as the breeze ruffled her raven locks. The faint tremors that flowed into his fingers infuriated him. By the bones of St. Jude, he’d help her find her past and keep her in his bed, against all who might come to challenge him.
“Marry me, Jasmine,” he said, his words muffled against the silken strands of her hair. At that moment Rolfe cared not that she brought him no estates or title.
A great sob erupted, so deep it seemed to have come straight from her heart. “I cannot. For all I know I may be the meanest serf, unfit to bear your heirs…or, saints forbid, the wife of another.”
“You came to me a virgin, love, a condition no serf who looks like you would be able to maintain for long around her masters. A state no sane husband would allow to continue longer past the saying of the vows than the time it took for the briefest of appearances at his own wedding feast.”
“Sometimes I think I recall a gray stone castle upon a cliff overlooking the sea. Waves crashing against the rocky shore beneath it. The great hall had a hearth as wide as two men are tall.” She paused. “I can make out no more. No faces but those that have haunted me before…”
Her words trailed off, as though she pondered possibilities too painful to put into words. “Rolfe, I lived in that castle…in my dreams I’ve seen myself standing at the bedside of some gravely injured knight. Heard my sire give orders to his men to take me away.”
“Then you are no serf.”
“Nay. I am…my name lies somewhere deep in my mind. I cannot…Yes. I see an old woman now. She calls me Demoiselle.”
“‘Tis the courtesy title given a maiden of noble birth. Think, sweeting. What is your name? The name of the castle in your memories?”
She turned in his arms, burrowing her face against the hard wall of his chest. “All I remember is an old woman helping me to dress, calling me Demoiselle.”
A gray stone castle, on a cliff that overlooked the sea. Rolfe could think of only two within the distance of two days’ travel that fit that description. He and Giles had overseen the destruction of one of them, in Lincolnshire, during their most recent service with King Henry. The other stronghold was to the north, about two days’ hard ride away.
“Might your sire be Earl William of Summerfield?” Rolfe asked gently.
Jasmine lifted her head and looked into his eyes. “I know not. Mayhap if you took me there…seeing it might stir my addled brain.”
“Summerfield lies two days’ hard journey from here, sweeting. I’ve glimpsed it only once, when Giles’s army did King Henry’s business in the North some months ago. It has two great circular towers and an older square one. The portcullis is emblazoned with a large, elaborate replica of a hawk on the wing. A deep moat protects the three sides facing land. The steep cliff protects it from intruders who would come by sea.”
Her eyes tightly closed, Jasmine appeared to be trying to place the details Rolfe described—details he imagined only a warrior would recall.
“Does this place have a massive fireplace in the great hall?” Her dejected expression told him his description had opened no doors in her flawed memory.
Rolfe stroked Jasmine’s silky cheek, hoping to dispel the anguish he heard in her voice. “I know not. We did not venture within its gates.” The king had let his army bypass Summerfield. When he recalled the reason—that Henry had known Earl William lent succor to the northern robber barons they’d been fighting to destroy—Rolfe barely managed to hide the apprehension that washed over him.
“Jasmine, think on this. Did the sun rise or set over the sea?” Please God, her home would prove to be the keep in Lincolnshire, even though it now was naught but a pile of rubble and its lord had departed in disgrace for France.
She lay still for a moment, as if in deep thought. “The sun disappeared into the sea at eventide,” she told him after a few moments’ silence.
‘Twas Summerfield from which she came. Bones of the Savior. Rolfe’s emotions vacillated between joy and terror. His Jasmine was an heiress beyond any he’d have dared to seek. A marriage prize without equal if she was now her father’s only heir. The heir of a man who stood on the cusp of disaster, if rumors that had circulated around the battlefield not two months past were true.
“Have you sisters, sweeting?”
“Nay. Only a brother. The one at whose bedside I stood vigil.” She sounded strangely certain about that, as though that particular part of her lost memory had suddenly been restored.
Rolfe’s hope dwindled, for he knew Earl William’s only son had recently succumbed to his wounds. His credentials were such that he could aspire to win the well-dowered daughter of a powerful nobleman, but not the only heiress to a great estate. “I believe you are the demoiselle of Summerfield, sweeting. Too rich a prize for the fourth son of Comte deVere of
“Nay!” she cried, rising from his arms and glaring down at him. “You have asked me to wed with you, and I now accept. I will have no other man in my bed. No other hard cock in my cunt, spewing its seed. Even now I may carry your babe,” she said, her voice gentler now as she toyed with the rings in his tightening nipples. “Summon your priest and we’ll say the vows, and then take me to this place you believe to be my home so I can regain the parts of me that I have lost.”
“‘Twould be dishonorable to wed you without your lord father’s blessing, sweeting.” Possibly fatal as well unless King Henry could be persuaded to order the marriage.
Jasmine clasped his face in her dainty hands. “If I knew who my sire was, ‘twould dishonor him. But I do not know. You said you wished to marry me. If you still do, you will stand before the priest with me this day.”
Rolfe wanted nothing more, but… “The banns…”
“…can be waived,” she said. “The priest owes you his livelihood, so he will do your bidding.”
“Rise, sweeting. We will break our fast, then depart for my lord brother’s castle. If he agrees ‘tis the right path to take, we will be married there ere we journey north to end the mystery that surrounds and confounds you.”
A wife he loved who loved him, too? An estate even richer than his brother’s? Rolfe allowed himself to fantasize as he and Jasmine rode there across Harrow’s fields and meadows toward Giles’ castle. He imagined himself a marcher lord, King Henry’s faithful follower keeping order along the wild Scots border. He’d have strong sons and beautiful daughters. Jasmine would sleep in his arms each night, be at his side by day.
Not likely. Henry would most likely have his head for defiling such a marriage prize and give his woman to another more favored vassal.
Not while he yet breathed! With luck the king would remember the services he’d rendered…the fact that Giles had saved his life on the field of battle…the times they’d drunk ale and wenched and fought side by side for Henry’s causes.
If they were very lucky, Henry might let him live and let this marriage stand, while confiscating Summerfield and bestowing it separately upon some other worthy knight. If so, Rolfe knew he’d have won the greater prize.
“‘Tis a bold move you plan, my brother. Marrying her could mean your fortune. Or your death.”
His throat dry from the hurried ride from Hedgewick, Rolfe quaffed his ale, then met Giles’s concerned gaze. “I wed with her for love. Not for the riches she may bring me.”
“Nonetheless—your Jasmine is a great heiress indeed if she is Earl William’s daughter. King Henry has declared the earl an outlaw and ordered his properties reverted to the Crown. We ride out on the morrow, to join his armies and take Summerfield by force.”
“Why had you not sent me word?”