A Perfect Knight (Knights of Passion Series 2) Read Free

peaks.
    Triumph surged through him. He reached to fondle one plump mound, his thumb passing over the tight little nipple again and again, until she trembled with desire.
    “Is this what it feels like?” she murmured. “To love?”
    “Yes, this is what it feels like.”
    Carefully he slid down her robe and kissed each inch of skin he bared. She tasted sweet. With his hand he tilted her breast up to his mouth, and covered the peak, his tongue swirling around the nipple until she was squirming. Then he put his mouth fully over the hard bud and sucked.
    “Simon,” she said . “Oh Simon.”
    “Your beauty makes me bold, lady,” he said huskily.
    “I feel . . . I want . . .”
    She writhed against him, as if she had been starved of a man’s touch for far too long.
    His hand rested on her thigh beneath her robe and then moved higher. And felt something that should not be there. Simon’s eyes widened and flew to hers, and saw that the sadness in them had returned.
    “ Yes. I wear a chastity belt,” she said bitterly. “My husband placed it upon me when he went to the Crusades so that no other man could enjoy me.” 
    He could not believe it. He had heard of such things happening but had thought they were mere myth. With shaking hands he stripped off her robe and beheld with his own eyes the barbaric metal girdle that hung from her waist, with a metal thong between her legs, covering her womanly parts, apart from a narrow opening for her to complete her bodily functions.
    “Can you not take it off?” he asked, eyes fixed upon the cruel contraption. Although smooth and decorated with strange symbols, the metal looked brutal and utterly unyielding against her creamy skin.
    She sighed and shook her head. “My husband took the key with him.”
    “And does that mean you must wear this weapon of torture forever?” Now his gaze rose to hers, shocked and horrified.
    “ That was what he wanted,” she said, but her eyes begged for release.
    Simon kissed her again, and this time it was a promise. “I will free you, Lady Yolanda. I swear it.”
    She drew her robe back a round her and stood up. Her smile was tentative. Hopeful. “Thank you, Simon. No one else will do it, no one else can, but when you knelt before me tonight and asked me to give you a quest, I thought . . . I thought Simon can do it.”
    Simon lay back down as the door closed. He would free her, he told himself feverishly, and when he had, he would have her love and gratitude. Tonight she had shown him she was a woman who needed the love of a man, and Simon knew he would be that man.
    * **
    The blacksmith eyed him curiously, sweat running down his half clothed body as the fire roared and his hammer clanged. “Aye, I made the belt for Sir Edward,” he agreed. “I’m a locksmith as well as a blacksmith. At least I assisted in the making of it, with Sir Edward’s man Taskill. He had secret ways I didn’t understand.”
    “Secret ways?”
    “He muttered words over it, spells I reckon. And when he was finished, well, I’d never seen the like.”  
    Simon frowned. This Taskill character worried him.
    “You must know that Sir Edward died on Crusade with King Richard,” he said to the blacksmith.
    “I know it.”
    “Lady Yolanda has asked me to come to you. She wants a key to unlock the device now her husband is dead.”
    “A key?” the man mocked, his eyes narrowed.
    “Yes, you must have a key that fits it?”
    “Sir Edward had the only key. He was clear on that. Only one key and he had it.”
    Simon shifted his feet impatiently. “There must be a second copy. Didn’t he make some provision if he died? If he couldn’t come home to free his wife?”
    “No, he had the only key . He didn’t trust anyone else with one. Doted on her, he did. Old husband, young wife, you get the picture. He thought everyone was out to take her off him.”
    “What about this man, Taskill? Where is he now?”
    The blacksmith shrugged. “Gone off to foreign parts I