No Greater Pleasure Read online

  “The fire,” was all he said.

  She stroked her hand down his back, feeling the muscles and the knobs of his spine where he’d grown thinner. Then she extricated herself from his grasp and went to the sink to fill the kettle. When she turned round he’d wiped his face and straightened his clothes.

  “Something to eat?” she asked, slicing bread and putting it on the table, then hanging the kettle over the fire.

  “No.”

  She gave him a glance from the corner of her eye as he took a chair. She pushed some stray hairs off her face and tucked them into the braid she wore for sleeping. Gabriel watched her.

  “Will you ever forgive me?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer him. After a moment in which silence stretched between them, the kettle whistled. She removed it. Made tea. Sat across from him at the table.

  “How long do you plan to stay?” she asked.

  “If you don’t want me here—”

  “That wasn’t the question I asked, Gabriel.”

  He sighed and scrubbed his face. “I intend to stay until you forgive me.”

  “And if I never do?”

  “Why won’t you!” His shout did not make her flinch. She sipped her tea and regarded him with a raised brow. “Why will you not forgive me, Quilla!”

  “Perhaps because you’ve not said you were sorry.”

  He got up from the table so fast his chair fell over. “I am sorry! I am sorry I treated you so! Don’t you understand that? Can you not see it? I plead your mercy!”

  She slammed down her cup, and it broke. Tea spilled across the table. She stood, too.

  “You’re an arrogant son of a bastard!” she shouted. “Asking for forgiveness when you deserve none! I did nothing to deserve your anger and your ire! Nothing! All I ever did was care for you!”

  “Because of your purpose and your place?”

  She made a disgusted noise at his shout. “Of course! I was a Handmaiden, Gabriel! ’Twas the reason you called me to Glad Tidings, wasn’t it? To care for you?”

  “And later?”

  “Later was different!”

  They squared off, the table between them, else she wasn’t certain she wouldn’t have slapped his face. Anger made her careless and had brought color to her cheeks. She tried to catch her breath and couldn’t quite manage.

  “And Jericho?”

  “I didn’t love your brother!” she cried. “Not the way I loved you! And you were a fool to think otherwise. As he was a fool to try and take what was yours, so you were a fool to think that’s all he ever wanted!”

  “Loved,” was what Gabriel said, as if the rest of her words had been silence. “Then. But not now.”

  She gave him her back. “You know what it’s like to have your love burnt to ash and thrown in your eyes to blind you, for you told me so yourself.”

  “I plead your mercy,” Gabriel said. “It’s all I can do.”

  Another man might have wept, or gone to his knees. Another man, a different man, might have begged her. But she did not love another man, she loved this one.

  “You do not need to sleep on the floor,” she told him at last. “There is an extra room abovestairs. You can have that.”

  She left him and did not wait to see if he would follow.

  And here I will plant gillyflowers.” Quilla paused in the bright spring sunshine to wipe her forehead. The day had warmed considerably. She had black, rich earth all over her. They’d been digging all morning.

  Gabriel rested on his shovel to look at the patch she’d pointed out. “Gillyflowers are little more than weeds. Why cultivate them?”

  “Because I like them,” was the first and easy answer. “Because they are lovely to look upon. And because the lady beetles like them.”

  Gabriel nodded, looking along the neat rows they’d worked together to furrow. “They are different, plain but beautiful at the same time. Unassuming until you stop to notice their beauty.” He looked up at her, a small grin on a face beginning to be browned by the sun. “Like you.”

  She’d been turning as he said it, and the smile and the simple, easy sincerity of his words caught her off guard. She watched the path of his hand as it rose to wipe the sweat from his brow, and she remembered how that hand had felt against her skin. Her heart thump-thumped, making her dizzy.

  He was there at once, his hand under her elbow and one at the small of her back. “Quilla? Do you need something?”

  She nodded and turned in the circle of his embrace to face him. “Yes, Gabriel. I do.”

  He put his arms around her, holding her steady when she feared she might stumble. The wind came and pushed the hair off his forehead, and her hand followed the wind’s kiss, coming to rest against his cheek.

  “I love you,” Gabriel said. “I know I don’t deserve to. But I love you, and I beg your forgiveness for the wrong I did you. I have found I do not wish to live without you. I want you and I need you; there is no difference between them.”

  She let her eyes travel over every inch of his face. The face she loved. “You wish me to be your Handmaiden again?”

  He shook his head. “No, Tranquilla. Not that. I want you by my side, not at my feet.”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Gabriel. I love you. But I’m not certain—”

  “All I ask is that you give me the chance to prove myself.” He put his hand over the one on his cheek and again let his mouth brush her palm. “I would be what you need before you need it. I would be your solace and your comfort.”

  Tears welled in her vision and she wiped them away. “You would do such, for me?”

  He nodded slowly, then put his arms around her waist, urging her closer to him. His lips met hers briefly. “If it pleases you.”

  And Quilla laughed, the sound like lady beetles dancing amongst their flowers, and Gabriel joined her. They laughed and kissed and laughed some more, until breathless, she pulled away to look into his eyes.

  “I would spend the rest of my life pleasing you, if you allow me,” Gabriel said.

  “The rest of my life is a very long time.”

  He smiled, a man transformed, and even the memory of how he’d been fell away beneath it. “Then I should think we must start now.”

  Quilla nodded, a smile of her own on her lips, and kissed him again. “If it pleases you.”

  And what she discovered, when she took him by the hand and lay with him on a bed of sun-warmed grass, was that it pleased both of them very much, indeed.