Free In the Shadow of Midnight by Marsha Canham

throat and she urged her body through a blurred frenzy of ecstasy, not slowing or stopping until the last drop, the last shudder had been wrung from his flesh. Only then, limp and laughing from sheer exhilaration, she collapsed in a weak, trembling heap in his arms.
    Eduard held her that way until his own senses were restored, then chuckled softly as he tilted her face up to his. “Why are you always determined to see me hauled back to the castle in a trundle cart?”
    Gabrielle smiled so deeply a dimple appeared in each cheek. “It is always a challenge to see if I can keep you here an hour more.”
    “An hour more and they will be searching the baileys and bothys for my sapless corpse.”
    “Nonsense. A man finds his strength in a woman’s womb. And you, my lord, have never run short of sap yet.”
    As she spoke, Gabrielle ran her hand across his chest, combing her fingers through the luxuriant mat of crisp chestnut curls. Her fingers snagged briefly on the gold ring he wore suspended from a leathern thong around his neck, but she passed it by without a thought, continuing to trace lacy patterns down onto the lean, flat plane of his belly, then lower still to the coarse, dark nest of hair at his groin.
    They both smiled at the immediate response she won when her hand curled around the thick shaft of his flesh, and, with a sigh, she set her lips and tongue to following the same meandering path her hand had taken downward.
    “Will I see you again before you return to Blois?”
    “I cannot say for certain,” he admitted honestly. “We have been gone from camp a week; too long for a troop of restless knights to remain calmly on their own side of the river.”
    “Have your father’s wounds healed?”
    “My father is made of iron, in flesh and in will. His leg began to heal the instant Lady Servanne set her hands to it.”
    “Mmmm … You have been gone from Amboise three months? I warrant it was not the laying on of milady’s hands that wrought such miracles.”
    Eduard closed his eyes and pressed his head back into the rush-filled mattress. He could not argue with Gabrielle’s theory; his father and stepmother were as much in love now as they had been when they had married fourteen summers ago. The slightest look or most innocent touch could still send them hurrying behind closed doors—where they had, in truth, spent most of the past seven days and nights.
    Eduard himself had managed to resist such fleshly pursuits until today, until the sights and sounds and smells of a lusty autumn day had sent him wandering across the draw and down into the village of Amboise, to the tiny mud and wattle cottage where he knew he would be welcomed without any questions, without any demands of any kind.
    Well, hardly any demands.
    He drew as much air as his lungs could hold and tried to steady himself, tried to ignore the lapping, wet heat that was determined to show no mercy this day. He heard a muffled laugh and he cursed, knowing he had gone too long without a woman to count on any measure of control now.
    The taste of success made Gabrielle’s mouth bolder and the shock sent his hands down, sent his fingers curling into the black waves of her hair. Her zeal was genuine, her energy boundless. Gabrielle had been widowed three times in nine years by men who, it was generally agreed, had wasted away from sheer exhaustion—all with deliriously wide grins on their faces. She was four years older than Eduard, looked ten years younger, and made no secret of what she considered to be the fountain of youth.
       It was well over an hour later when Eduard ducked beneath the low-slung lintel of the door and stepped out into a cool rush of shaded air. The sun had already dipped below the tops of the trees, casting long, slender shadows across the surfaceof the nearby river. The village, nestled securely in an elbow of the Loire, was all but completely swallowed by the silhouette of the castle that dominated the high ridge above. When