Free Claudia Dain by The Fall

falling. Shall we not rise up together, at least in the speaking of it? That is more to my liking."
    "What is to your liking does not interest me, my lord," she said, giving her full attention once more to her plate. "Rising and falling, those are the concerns of a man. I am a woman. My interests take a different course."
    "Let me run that course with you and you will find that rising and falling will be a part of all."
    "Are you so sure?" she asked.
    He noted that she still avoided his gaze. She was keeping to herself what she could, her eyes and the thoughts behind them. A woman's game she played, after all.
    "I would not injure you with a careless word, my lady, I would only remind you that you are a woman of compelling beauty. Nay, more than beauty. Fire. Heat. Passion burning low and dim, but burning still. You glow, Lady Juliane, you glow, and my eyes burn with desire at the sight of you."
    "Then turn your eyes, my lord of legend; I would not burn you for the world," she said simply, unmoved, eating her fish with precise bites.
    Philip sighed into his wine and looked at Ulrich over his cup in disappointment.
    "What course would you have me run, lady? Command me," he said.
    "I do not want you, my lord, neither your service nor yourself," she said. "I have all the devotion I can suffer."
    He was failing. He could feel it, though he had never felt the like before this moment. She was beyond the reach of his words. Of his charm and his seduction, his ribaldry, his play, his look, his manner, his very self; she was beyond his grasp. The hardness of his cock, which rose and stood whene'er he looked or even thought upon her, failed him. He sank. He fell.
    How was it so? He could not fail, not from mere rejection. Yet when had he ever been so boldly and so publicly rejected?
    Hard, hot anger rose in him that she dared defeat him with dismissal.
    "Shall I tell you what the wager was and is?" he asked, turning upon the bench to face her as best he could. Their knees bumped and pressed. He did not pull back from her.
    If he bruised her, let her wear that mark of Ulrich upon her, if no other. "There are two. One is that I will stand before your chill, lady. The wager is that I will not fall. No harm to you, no seduction of your body, no ripping of your maidenhead, no blood, no wounds, unless they be upon your cold and stony heart."
    The hall had gone still.
    "The second wager was struck just after None. Your sister and your fosterlings and my brother knights, albeit against their own counsel, wagered that I would tender a kiss upon your tender throat. That is all. A kiss. A single kiss."
    Juliane had stopped eating. She sat looking at her food, her head bowed, the merlin upon the edge of the table fluttering in agitation. Her pulse was racing in her throat, a sign of emotion in a taut, still neck. Her skin was the color of ripening wheat, her hair a tangled web of golden strands that sheathed her neck and breast with all the comfort of a cloak. That pulse, it rushed, it pumped, pressing against her skin, calling to him of blood and heat and life, of passion's very heart. Calling to him, beating for him, pulsing, pressing, calling, calling.
    And he would answer it.
    "A wager I would win, lady," he growled with a nod of apology to her watching father, "if I shall win no other."
    Ulrich reached out and took her head hard in his hands and forced her back upon the bench against his arm, her neck exposed, lifted up for him, her pulse leaping beneath the thin, white skin. He held her by her jaw and by her golden hair; he held her for his mouth to take and lowered himself onto her with a buried growl of sudden, hot hunger.
    There was no sound in all that vast hall. The only sound was the pulsebeat in Juliane's throat and the answering roar of his heart. She made no cry, no protest. She did not fight.
    With a snarl, he laid his mouth upon that line of hidden blood and mouthed her, tasting her, learning the scent of her, the salt tang above