She closed her eyes desperately against the rampant assault on her senses. Her breath came in strange little gasps over which she had no control. Her legs were like jelly. A low flame burned in the pit of her stomach, yet a chill raced along her spine.
“Sweetheart, my sweetheart,” he repeated as he kissed the bare flesh where her breasts swelled. He raised his head and pulled her up straight against him, almost brutally, and kissed her again hard on the mouth. She could feel everywhere he touched or looked, distinctly, intimately. He kept her hard against him, and his voice shook when he spoke.
“We have to go back or we will have them beating the bushes for us. And if we stay any longer, what they will find is you flat on the ground with your skirts up in the rain.”
He released her and, under his hot gaze, she brushed back her tumbled hair and smoothed her dress with little shaky tugs at the cloth.
“I truly meant to only find you and bring you back to the landing, sweet, but when I saw you here alone, I could not help myself. It has been so many years I have longed for the forbidden fruit, Mary, and I am not really a very patient man. You were angered with me today for kissing Maud, but years of smiling and laughing with you and breathing in your sweet scent and seeing that luscious face and body near me and then bidding you a curt goodnight as you go to Will’s or Henry’s bed is pure hell.” He reached over to smooth her hair. “I tell you, Mary, whomever I have slept with these past five years, I have dreamed it was you or, if not, your face came back to tease me—to haunt me—soon after. Do you understand?”
She nodded, her eyes wide. It was like a dream and she wanted to be hidden away with him forever. Then she heard her own voice say in a rush, “I rely on you above all others, my Staff, even though I try not to admit it to myself sometimes.”
He put his head out of the bower and looked both ways, then came back toward her and kissed her swiftly on the lips. “I want more, much more than your reliance, Mary Bullen, and I will have it. But we must be careful, very careful. I will not have your safety or our chances to be together at all ruined by one passionate mistake.”
He pulled her gently from under the arched trellis after him, and she was amazed to feel the rain had almost stopped. He held her arm so tightly it almost hurt.
“Perhaps there will be some day soon, some place where we will have time to finish what we only started today, sweet. I see no one on the path. Go back along that way. I shall come from another direction in a few moments. Go on. Now!”
She turned on wooden legs and hurried down the crunchy wet path toward the line of trees that hid the boat gate. Her heart pounded, and she forgot to lift her sodden skirt hems in her excitement. Let the king cast her out, let Will hate her, and her father storm. There was one who loved her and whom she could trust. She glanced back quickly but he was gone as though he had never been there at all.
She darted from the overhanging yews toward the barge landing as the rains began lightly again. Her seat by the king awaited her, although he had put Anne on his other side. Will gazed off at the far Thames bank while pretty Maud Jennings had her lap full of roses.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
October 17, 1525
Eltham
All during that summer, while the dreaded sweat stalked the narrow streets of Tudor London, the great herds of roe and fallow deer fed and grew among the leafy boughs of Eltham forest. At morning and evening some became bold and walked the orchards and green swards on their spindly, graceful legs. Unknowing, they awaited the bow and the packs of the king’s hounds and his nobles who would hunt them bloodily, lustily in the months the court hid from the sweating sickness in the Kentish countryside.
King Henry had been at Eltham for nearly a week on this trip, stalking deer, riding merrily to the horn, and feasting off the groaning tables under the massive hammerbeam roof of his rebuilt hunt lodge. The queen was absent, sequestered as she had been throughout the long, dangerous summer at Beaulieu, but the gentle slopes of elm, ash and beech rang with shouts of His Grace’s favorites.