The Velvet Promise Read Free Page B

moment, but as layer after layer of Alice's clothes were flung to the ground, his senses took over. She was eager for him as he was for her. What if she did not want to take too long before their bodies were skin to skin?
    Gavin would have liked to savor Alice's slender body for a while, but she pulled him quickly to the ground, her hand guiding him immediately inside her. He did not think then of leisurely loveplay or kisses. Alice was beneath him, urging him on. Her voice was harsh as she directed his body, her hands firm on his hips as she pushed him, harder and harder. Gavin at one time worried that he would hurt her, but she seemed to glory in the strength of him.
    "Now! Now!" she demanded beneath him and gave a low, throaty sound of triumph when he obeyed her.
    Immediately afterward she moved from beneath him, away from him.
    She had told him repeatedly this was because of her warring thoughts as she reconciled her unmarried state with her passion. Yet he would have liked to have held her longer, enjoyed her body more, even perhaps made love to her again. It would be a slow lovemaking this time, now that their first passion was spent. Gavin tried to ignore the hollow feeling he had, as if he had just tasted something but was still not sated.

    "I must leave," she said as she sat up and began the intricate process of dressing.
    He liked to watch her slim legs as she slipped on the light linen stockings. At least watching her helped some of the emptiness dissipate.
    Unexpectedly, he remembered that soon another man would have the right to touch her. Suddenly he wanted to hurt her as she was hurting him. "I too have an offer of marriage."
    Alice stopped instantly, her hand on her stocking and watched him, waiting for more.
    "Robert Revedoune's daughter."
    "He has no daughter—only sons, both of them married," Alice said instantly. Revedoune was one of the king's earls, a man whose estates made Edmund's look like a serf's farm. It had taken Alice a while, those years while Gavin was in Scotland, but she'd found out the history of all of the earls—of all of the richest men in England—before deciding that Edmund was the most likely catch.
    "Didn't you hear that both sons died two months ago of wasting sickness?"
    She stared at him. "But I've never heard a daughter mentioned."
    "A young girl named Judith, younger than her brothers. I heard she had been prepared by her mother for the church. The girl is kept cloistered in her father's house."
    "And you have been offered this Judith to marry? But she would be her father's heiress, a wealthy woman. Why would he offer to—?" She stopped, remembering to conceal her thoughts from Gavin.
    He turned his face from her, and she could see the muscles in his jaw working, the moonlight glinting on his bare chest, still lightly covered in sweat from their lovemaking.
    "Why would he offer such a prize to a Montgomery?" Gavin finished for her, his voice cold. Once the Montgomery family had been wealthy enough to stir the envy of King Henry IV. Henry had declared the entire family traitorous and then set about breaking up the powerful family. He had done so well that only now, one hundred years later, was the family beginning to regain some of what it had lost. But the memories of the Montgomery family were long, and none of them cared to be reminded of what they had once been.
    "For the right arms of my brothers and myself," Gavin said after a while. "The Revedoune lands border ours on the north, and he fears the Scots. He realizes that his lands will be protected if he allies himself to my family. One of the court singers heard him say that the Montgomerys, if they produced nothing else, made sons who lived. So it seems I am made an offer of his daughter if only I will give her sons."
    Alice was nearly dressed now. She stared at him. "The title will pass through the daughter, won't it? Your eldest son would be an earl, and you when her father dies."
    Gavin turned abruptly. He hadn't