Free A Knight to Remember by Christina Dodd Page B

his well-being? She’d worked too long and hard to drop him, but that confident expression he wore irked her. She got him within a finger’s width of the pillow and let go. Her action was not enough to hurt but enough to give warning she wouldn’t be easy.
    She tried to jump back. He already had his arms around her, and he used that off-balance position to tip her forward and onto him. She collapsed on his chest and he groaned.
    “Serves you right,” she said, struggling to elbow her way up. “I don’t want this.”
    “Be ruthless.” He just kept blocking her, expending as little of his precious energy as possible while she exhausted herself. “Hit my wound.”
    She couldn’t do it. She wanted to so badly, but shejust couldn’t take him back to the edge of death. Instead she balled her fist and tried to hit his face. He caught her by the fingers and gripped. She struggled, and when she flagged, he grasped the back of her head and held her still for his kiss.
    He tried to use his tongue, and that infuriated her all over again. Who did he think he was? Her long-lost love?
    Well, he should have stayed lost.
    And who did he think she was? A lady of easy virtue?
    Her tight-lipped resistance must have given him the message, for he let her pull back her head. She tried to scramble away again, but he handled her with great care, rolled onto his good side, and tucked her half under him.
    He was so calm, so deliberate! How could a man who’d been so near death just a few days ago restrain her, a healthy woman? A little alarm worked into her voice as she struggled. “This…is…not…right.”
    “I’m just going to kiss you, and that is right between couples who have pledged to wed.”
    “I’ve made no such pledge.”
    “You’ll see the good sense of it soon.”
    He said it as if it were the truth. As if her objections meant nothing. As if she were nothing but a silly lady who needed a man to tell her how to live her life! Worse, he probably believed it, the dunce.
    With one thigh anchoring her down, he controlled her. He got rid of her wimple first. The covering slipped easily off her head, and his fingers caught in the fine, straight strands that had escaped her braid. Holding the braid aloft, he stared at it.
    “Stop that!” She grasped his wrist.
    He looked at her, pressed between the floor and hisbody. “I remember seeing this, all unbound, in the light of a fire, and seeing you, too, wearing nothing.”
    “I wore something! I wore a—” She stopped talking.
    Too late. Satisfaction curved his mouth, and she snapped, “What else do you remember?”
    He didn’t answer. He just leaned forward and brushed her lips with his. She kept her eyes open, and when he lifted his head, she said, “First you try to sweep me away. Then you try gentleness. What’s your next tactic?”
    She must have betrayed an emotion better concealed, for he replied, “Gentleness will do what I wish.”
    She tried to stiffen even further, but she knew he was probably right. The loneliness of the abbey echoed in her soul. Oh, there were always people around, but in a place where flesh equaled sin, the residents spurned touch. Her sons hugged her, of course, but she couldn’t help but remember Jagger Castle. She missed the impulsive embraces of the girls she fostered, the respectful kisses of greeting she gave her guests. Most of all, she missed the body embraces she shared with her man, and this unwilling response to Hugh had to be nothing more than a sequestered soul reaching out to the nearest human for contact.
    Either that or she was as wicked as Lady Blanche intimated.
    Hugh’s forearm lay beneath her head, and he watched her with a fascination she knew to be unwarranted. His regard made her want to squirm, but she held herself still and said tartly, “What are you looking at, knave?”
    “At the lady who would be my wife, and—dare I say it?—the woman who saved my life.”
    An unwilling warmth softened her. “’Twas