The Heir - Catherine Coulter [118]
He managed to raise himself on his elbows and stare down at her. “I cannot,” he said. “I am just a man, Arabella, just a weak man and you have wrung me out.”
“I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
He leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose. “Give me a little while and then I will please you again.” He paused, then said in a low gruff voice, “Do you forgive me for hurting you? Can you forgive me for all of it?”
He was deep inside her. She lifted her hips and he moaned. “Yes,” she said. And he began moving deep inside her again and she loved it, no, craved it, and soon she was with him and it went on and on.
She snuggled into the warmth of the covers, held tightly against him, and soon fell asleep.
She was magically transported to the chamber beneath the old abbey ruins. Rock rumbled and fell about her, striking her head, her face, her shoulders. She tossed forward on her face, frantically trying to avoid the sharp, jagged stones, desperately flailing her arms about for protection. Her fingers clasped about brittle, spiderlike projections. She felt her hand squeezed with such force that she was jerked forward. Though she was struggling in darkness, she saw with terrifying clarity what held her so mercilessly. A skeleton’s hand held her fast, its fleshless fingers digging into her wrist. She heard a low cry, a moan of hate and pain, the rattle of imminent death. The skeleton rocked up from its prone position, broken teeth falling from its rotted hollow mouth. Slowly, before her eyes, the bones of its hands began to turn to dust and trickle away. The head tottered backward and fell, crashing and crumbling to the ground. She heard hellish screams all about her. She felt death upon her, clogging her throat, enclosing her in a shroud of terror.
Arabella awoke, her hands tearing at the bedcovers, a final cry dying on her own lips. “Arabella, dammit, wake up!”
The earl lit a candle and raised it above her head. She drew back with a gasp as the light fell upon the jeering face of the skeleton on The Dance of Death. Dream and reality mixed in her mind. Had the screaming come from the skeleton? Could it have been the wailing of an infant? The hopeless cries of a woman? Had she heard the ghosts of Evesham Abbey?
“Arabella, wake up. Come, love, come back to me. You had a nightmare. It’s over now.” He drew her to him and began to rub his large hands up and down her back.
She drew a shaking breath. “It was that horrible skeleton in the old abbey ruins. Then I thought I heard from our ghosts, but now I begin to doubt that their cries were not my own. Oh God, it was horrible.”
“I have heard the ghosts.” He looked over at The Dance of Death panel. “I do not like that thing. Should you like it if we removed it to the attic?”
She nodded slowly. “It was odd, Justin, but somehow that panel was part of the dream. I don’t understand it. Yes, let’s send it to the attic. It means nothing to anyone now.” She snuggled against him again. “I came very close to dying this afternoon. I would have died without ever having known all of living. I would have died without knowing you as my husband. I thank you for saving me.”
“You’re shivering.” He was kissing her temple, shoving her hair from her forehead. “Here I am trying to avoid speaking honestly to you. It is because I am a man, I suppose. We don’t wish to speak of things so deeply felt. It makes no sense, but there it is. If you had died, I couldn’t have borne it. It’s that simple.”
“Gervaise tried to kill me today. No, don’t shake your head. I know that he must have. The collapse of all the rocks and dirt were only around the cell I was in. He asked me to stay there. He said he wanted to go exploring. Why, Justin? Why did he want to kill me? I have thought and thought about it but I can’t dredge up a reason. Why did he do it?”
The earl was silent for a long time, but he didn’t loosen his hold on her. His fingers lightly caressed her shoulder, the softness of her upper arm. “He didn’t want to kill you,” he said finally. “What he wanted was to get me out of Evesham