Saul was even more convinced that she had realised the impact Aldo’s death must have on their own lives. The knowledge comforted and strengthened him.
‘Have I told you how much I love you?’ he asked.
Giselle smiled at him in relief. He had seemed so preoccupied and distant, but now she could see that he was her beloved Saul again.
‘It was here that we first made love.’ He smiled at her and slid his hand beneath the soft weight of her hair to draw her closer to him. Giselle smiled back at him, but their movement towards one another was halted by a firm knock on the door.
Releasing her, Saul went to answer it. Giselle could see the black-garbed major-domo standing outside in the corridor, and Saul was inclining his head towards him to hear what he was saying, before nodding and then closing the door to come back to her. The warm intimacy had been stripped from his expression, and in its place was a shuttered grimness.
‘Aldo’s body will be lying in state in the cathedral from tomorrow morning. The major-domo says that I may pay my last respects privately now if I wish.’
‘I’ll come with you—’ Giselle began, but Saul shook his head.
‘No. I…It’s best if I go alone. You and I will be expected to open the official lying in state tomorrow. We can go together then.’
He had gone before Giselle could make any further objections. The door closed behind him with a sharp click, like an axe falling between them and separating them, Giselle thought uneasily.
There was a private underground passage that led from the palace to the cathedral, hewn out of the rock on which the city was built. The tunnel might now be illuminated by electric lights, but as he followed the major-domo Saul admitted that it wasn’t hard to imagine it lit only by torches as those using it moved down it with a potentially more dangerous and even sinister purpose at a time when the country had been besieged by its enemies and those who coveted it.
The country had broken away from the Catholic church at the same time as Britain’s Reformation, and now its religion could best be described as Protestant high church.
The Archbishop was waiting to receive him, his formal robes a touch of bright shimmering colour after the darkness of the tunnel and the mourning-shrouded castle.
The cathedral reminded Saul of a smaller version of Westminster Abbey. Above the high altar was a stained glass window, depicting the brave deeds of his ancestors before they ascended to heaven escorted by winged archangels.
Aldo’s white-silk lined coffin was in the centre of the cathedral. Aldo himself was dressed in the ceremonial robes of rulership. The smell of incense hung on the air like the words of prayer the Archbishop murmured before he and the major-domo retreated to leave Saul alone with his cousin.
In death, Aldo’s features had gained a stark dignity that made him look more severe than he had been. Such a gentle man, who had not deserved the cruelty of his fate. A man to whom Saul had given his word, his promise, that he would take up the yoke of rulership that Aldo had been forced to cast down.
Silently Saul knelt beside Aldo’s coffin. It was too late for him to change his mind. He had given his word. With that acceptance came a sense of relief and release, a lightening of the grim mood of resentment that had been gripping him.
Giselle had been right when she had said the country needed a strong ruler. There was so much that such a ruler could do for his people. He could provide them with the schools needed to give them a better education. He could make money available for them to study at the world’s best universities and then bring what they had learned back to their country. He could in time endow their own university, where those people could pass on to others their knowledge. He could turn his country from inertia and poverty into a powerhouse of creative energy. It was a project he knew would appeal to Giselle.
He could be the ruler Aldo had wanted him to be, the ruler he had promised he would be, but to do so he would have to turn his back on the life he and Giselle had created together. They would have to sacrifice its freedoms of choice for the onerous burdens of state and expectation, of tradition and ceremony.
Saul stood up.
The first thing Saul did when he got back to his apartments was take Giselle in his arms and hold her tightly.
He smelled of cold air and incense, Giselle recognized, and she felt his chest expand under the deep breath he took before he exhaled heavily.
She lifted her face to look at him, but he shook his head and then kissed her, a fiercely passionate and demanding kiss of such intensity that Giselle’s own emotions immediately responded to it.
He couldn’t trust himself to talk to Giselle about Aldo’s death, Saul recognised. The pain he felt at losing his cousin so unexpectedly and so shockingly held unwanted echoes of the despair and anger he had felt at the deaths of his parents, and with it came an awareness of his own vulnerability through those who mattered to him. If there was one thing Saul found hard to handle it was the thought of being emotionally vulnerable.
It was easier to act than to speak—easier to lose himself in a physical expression of the need he felt for Giselle’s proximity, for the comfort of her living, breathing presence. Easier to hold her and love her than to tell her how he felt. A man did not show his weakness, after all—not even to the woman he loved. Because she surely needed him to be strong for both of them.
It was like being new lovers again, or lovers who had been parted for too long, Giselle thought. Saul’s hunger for her was that of a man who had suppressed a need he could no longer control. It was arousing her and disarming her too, making her feel that nothing mattered other than their love. The sympathy she had wanted to show him, the comfort she’d wanted to give him, was expressed best via their physical commitment to one another. There was a wildness, a fierceness, almost a savagery about the way he touched her, groaning his pleasure against her mouth when he cupped her breast. His desire ignited her own, so that the silence of the room quickly became broken by the sounds of their need, the harsh gasped breaths, the rasp of hands on fabric, the moan of triumph or despair when a new intimacy was gained or denied by the barrier of clothes that their growing passion not only wanted but needed to cast aside.
This was not the lovemaking of a gentle, accommodating lover. This was the mating of a man’s most basic predatory sensual need, and a woman’s—his woman’s—hunger to meet that need, Giselle recognized, as Saul bared her breasts to his gaze and then his touch with a raw sound of triumph.
His hands on her flesh, his fingertips stroking, shaping and then erotically tugging on the flaunting arousal of her nipples, made her shudder convulsively in wanton pleasure. This was their desire for one another stripped bare to its most raw and sensual elements. This was need brought to a pure boiling point of intensity that was just this side of dangerous and starkly shocking.
A woman would have to trust a man completely to give herself over to such a consuming conflagration of desire. And she did, Giselle acknowledged, as she felt its heat burning inside her just as the heat of Saul’s touch burned her flesh.
‘Kiss me,’ she commanded him, knowing that she was walking into the heart of the fire, giving herself over to it and to him to do as he wished.
They were no strangers to the intensity of their own passion, their hunger for one another, but now there was another element to their lovemaking—or so it seemed to Giselle. As though death had honed and sharpened Saul’s appetite for life, and for her. There was an urgency, a need, a driven and heightened edge to their intimacy as Saul anointed and worshipped every sensual part and threshold of her body until he had tightened the sharp spirals of her desire to the point where she could bear it no longer, and she had to beg him to end her torment, to fill the aching, longing emptiness within her.
Her