Darelles Trinity

Chapter One Orleans, France June 1348

Darelle unlaced the bodice of her dress and slipped it off, along with her shift and skirts. Leaving her clothing in a pile on the riverbank, she made her way to the water. The wide, slow-moving river beckoned to her, the water deliciously warmed from the afternoon sun. Her flock of sheep grazed on the hillside above the embankment, dotted over the expanse of green.

She waded into the river, delighting in the slosh of clean clear water against her skin. Suddenly, she had the distinct feeling she was being watched. Her breath caught in her throat. He was here with her, the invisible spirit that had invaded her body and mind for the past year.

The sensation was always vivid, vibrant, a ghostly pair of hands caressing her bare flesh. Her n*****s puckered under the invisible caress, which shivered gently over her back and breasts, over the swells of her hips and buttocks and slipped into the hidden moist crevice between her thighs. Her eyes fluttered closed and she leaned her head back as ghostly lips brushed down her throat and along the ridge of her collarbone.

Even though she had never known a man’s touch or kiss, Darelle sensed the masculine hunger covering her body, holding it captive in sensual t****l. Her powerlessness to resist her invisible invader always frightened her, yet her body hungered for the pleasure. She dipped farther into the water up to her neck, following the unseen ravager’s path over her limbs and torso with her own hands.

I’m waiting for you, petite. The words whispered in her ear. The disembodied sound entered her consciousness, setting off a wild tingling in her breasts.

The feel of a strong warm hand closed over her wrist, guiding her hand down to the nest between her thighs, past the honey-colored thatch of hair over her mound, to slip her fingertips between the fleshy folds. The unseen force guided her fingertips to the tiny nubbin of flesh in the center of womanhood now thickly coated with the musk of arousal, and bade her rub in tiny languid circles.

Darelle pleasured herself, her breath growing ragged as shards of heat spread from her c******s, through her s*x. The invisible caresses on her body continued. The feel of strong yet gentle male hands on her breasts heightened the pleasure building under her fingertips. Her n*****s tingled under the sensation of being gently squeezed between fingertips in a pulsing motion.

The tiny muscle under her fingertips clenched suddenly, sending ripples of blissfully intense pleasure shuddering through her. She squeezed her eyes shut and cried out from the blinding release.

The hands vanished suddenly and she no longer felt watched. Her chest heaved from labored breaths as she scanned the hillside and a copse of trees at the edge of the nearby forest for the possible source. She was completely alone.

The ghostly ravening on her flesh released her. Its spirals of erotic heat had passed from her body, leaving her treading the water. Her body was languid, yet guilt washed through her. Her mother would have been ashamed of her daughter’s s****l imaginings of an invisible male force. But Maman had gone to the angels eight years ago and so Darelle remained alone with her shameful secret. She feared her own impurity and had thus chosen to remain unmarried and help Papa take care of her two sisters and younger brother.

Darelle emerged from the water and climbed up the bank. She put her clothing on over her wet body, picked up her staff and rounded up the flock. She’d been away for several days grazing the sheep. Papa wanted to fatten them up on the juicy summer grasses so the wool would be healthy and bring in a good profit for Seigneur Lascaux, the lord of the estate on which her family were serfs. The late afternoon sun slanted over the hills and she pushed the sheep to move along. It would be nearly dark before she reached home.

Darelle’s blood froze the moment her family’s cottage came into view. Her intuition, finely honed by hours and days spent shepherding in solitude, told her that something was wrong. She dropped her staff, making her way through the flock of sheep that followed her from the meadow. The moist earth of summer squished between her toes, each step bringing her closer.

The cottage sat in the gathering dusk. No light from the hearth glowed through the windows. As she drew closer, her breath caught in her throat. Carcasses of their hens and roosters littered the small dirt yard in front of the cottage.

Behind her, the soft baa of the sheep she had left behind floated to her ears, the only other sound besides the crashing of her blood through her veins.

“Papa?” she called out, her gaze sliding back and forth over the tiny thatched-roof cottage. No smoke curled from the chimney. Her brother and sisters weren’t running about in the yard. She stopped at the wooden door, her hand curling into a fist near the latch. “Michel?” Certainly her brother would be about somewhere. Perhaps it was he who’d killed the hens for market.

Only silence greeted her.

“Do not go inside, petite.”

Darelle gasped at the low masculine voice behind her. She’d heard no one approach. Her stomach tightened like a fist in her gut. Slowly she turned. “Seigneur Lascaux,” she breathed, recognizing the lord of the estate.

He stood a few feet away, tall and regal, handsome as a god with raven dark hair, its length captured in a leather binding.

He did not appear the ordinary Frenchman. Darelle had always thought him a Saracen, with his bronzed face, high cheekbones and large eyes, darker than a moonless night underneath elegantly arched eyebrows. A long dark cape covered broad shoulders and a wide muscled chest barely concealed under his shirt and leather jerkin. Long strong legs bulged through the rough material of his trousers and ended in boots of the softest calfskin. She remembered seeing him exactly this way when she was a girl of five. He had not aged a bit in all those years.

She stared at him for several moments, unable to speak.

He continued to gaze at her from those sensual eyes. “I was out hunting and saw you come out of the hills. I wanted to prevent you from going inside.”

A shimmer of heat passed through her body. The way he watched her reminded her of her experience in the river. Certainly he had not been there… A lump formed in her throat. “Why do you prevent me?”

He took a step toward her. “La peste has come to our part of France, petite. You will not…find your family alive.”

It took another several moments for his words to penetrate the haze that enveloped her. She found it strange that he called her “little one” when she had reached her twenty-fifth year just last month. And he was telling her that her family was dead from the plague. “Non,” she whispered, “it cannot be.” Before he could respond, she swirled around and lifted the latch.

“Petite—”

She pushed open the door and crossed the threshold. A scream ripped from her throat. As Lascaux had warned her, her two younger sisters and brother lay dead. Her father was slumped over at the table, his skin blackened, oozing with pus-filled sores. The stench of rotting flesh caused the bile to rise in her throat.

Strong hands grasped her arms, dragging her from the macabre scene into the small dirt yard strewn with animal carcasses. Vitality drained from her body, like water pouring from a vessel and the world darkened around her. She fell against Lascaux, feeling his arms enfold her just as darkness enveloped her.

* * * * *

Something cool and moist moved over her breasts. The sensation caused her to open her eyes. Her blurred vision could see only glowing lights and dark shadows. She heard the trickle of water, like a cloth being wrung into a bowl. And then the cool dampness passed across her stomach and over her pubic mound.

Her body felt weightless, as if it were floating on something soft, the way she imagined a cloud would feel.

“Darelle.” The voice of Seigneur Lascaux carried to her ears in a low masculine tone.

She blinked several times, struggling to see him. As her vision cleared, she distinguished his form hovering over her. The cape was gone and he wore only his white lawn shirt, open at the throat. A small forest of dark hairs peeped through the parted material.

A sliver of heat passed through the cleft between her thighs at the sight of him and it took another moment to realize it was he who passed a wet cloth over her naked body. She gasped and attempted to move her arms over her front to hide her breasts from his sight. She could not, however, finding her limbs heavy as molten lead and just as hot.

“Where am I?” she whispered. Her throat was parched, as if flames simmered inside it.

“You are in my bed, petite,” Lascaux answered. He lifted the cloth from her skin and deposited it in a wooden bowl on the bedside table. He reached over and covered her with a thin sheet of the softest material she’d ever felt. “Ah,” he said. “You have never felt silk against that luscious skin.” His fingertips whispered over one of her bare shoulders. “You will never know anything else but silk after this night.”

Above her head, she saw a canopy of red velvet. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted embroidered tapestries covering stone walls. She was in Seigneur Lascaux’s castle.

He reached for a pitcher and she heard the sound of liquid being poured. He slipped a large hand behind her head and lifted it, raising a goblet to her lips. The cool water trickled into her mouth and down her throat, extinguishing the burning heat. When she’d swallowed, he lowered her head gently to the pillow and set down the goblet. His dark, simmering eyes never left hers, even as he perched himself on the edge of the soft mattress.

“How do you know my name?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

A smile curved his bow-shaped lips. Dark stubble covered his cheeks and jaw, rendering his face a rugged image of potent maleness. “I make it my business to know a beautiful demoiselle who works my land.”

Darelle remembered an evening after sunset the previous summer in the wine press, holding her skirts up around her knees, her bare feet squashing grapes that oozed between her toes. She’d looked up and seen the seigneur standing nearby, eyeing her, his handsome face reflected in the glow of torchlight. In that moment, she’d stared back, captured by the handsome lord whose eyes held a hunger she’d never before seen. For those few moments, nothing and no one else existed but the two of them, gazing at each other.

Since that time, images of him invaded her thoughts and her dreams. For the past year, his face had become her constant companion. Later in the summer, he sent a servant to bring her to the castle to serve him directly. She had begged to be allowed to remain with her family. Lascaux had not asked for her again, sending her a return message that he would wait for her.

“Your lovely feet have trodden on the grapes from my arbor, n’est-ce pas?”

She nodded weakly against the pillow. “Oui.”

Lascaux’s smile faded and he reached again for the cloth, wringing it out and laying it across her forehead. “You are burning from fever,” he said tightly. “I’m afraid you too have fallen prey to la peste. In hours pustules will erupt on your skin and in days, four at the most, you will die.”

The nightmare image of her family, their ravaged corpses strewn about the cottage surged in her mind, and she began to sob. Her fevered eyes could not release actual tears. Through her haze of grief, she felt her hand being picked up and pressed to a pair of lips.

Lascaux regarded her over her hand, which he gently kissed then brought to rest on his hard thigh. “I’m sorry for what you have seen and for the loss of your family.” His voice caressed her and she calmed a bit. “I would hate to see you suffer the same fate, Darelle.” Her name spoken in his voice was rich and sensuous, almost wild. “I can prevent it, ma petite.” His dark eyes glowed, reflecting the flames of the torches in their wall sconces. “I can give you eternal life. Your hair will always be the color of warm honey. Your skin will remain pristine.” He smoothed a fingertip over her fiery lips. “And your eyes will be forever the enchanting azure they are now.”

He brushed the pad of his thumb across her hand where it rested on his leg. “I would have done it already, but I want you to be awake when I do.” His voice fell to a silky dark tone. “I want you to experience the absolute pleasure when I drink from you.” He lifted her hand once again to his lips for a brief kiss. “You would not come to me before, but destiny has rewarded my patience. I’ll show you the world and we will pass the centuries together, you and I.”

Lascaux’s words frightened her and had she not felt so weak and ill, she would have bolted from the bed and tried to flee. She broke out into fresh sobs, her heart pounding painfully in her chest.

Gentle fingertips smoothed her hair aside, off her neck and Lascaux bent over her. His breath was warm on her skin and her body betrayed her with slithering waves of arousal that surged in her loins as his muscular chest rubbed ever-so lightly against her n*****s. The soft cloth of his lawn shirt pressed on the small buds, causing them to harden and the flesh of her areolas to pucker. She moaned softly.

“Ma belle femme,” he whispered, nuzzling her cheek. He dotted a soft trail of kisses across her cheek and down her neck. She felt his lips part widely. Pinpricks pierced her flesh and slid out. His lips covered the spot he’d just bitten, the tip of his tongue soothing the sting away. In the next moment, he made a suction with his mouth and suckled gently on the tender flesh.

She gasped with the pleasure. The pulsing sensation caused a swirling of erotic heat in her s*x that spread outward, down her legs, into her breasts and through her arms. The blissful explosion that had happened to her in the river earlier that afternoon now shrouded her entire body and she cried out from the sheer ecstasy.

Of its own will, her hand rose, pulling at the leather tie in his hair. The black silken waves tumbled over her hand and she wove her fingers in it as Lascaux continued to drink. Her body grew languid and calm and she felt the burning heat of fever drain from her limbs and torso. She felt neither hot nor cold. The only reality was Lascaux’s lips on her neck.

He withdrew slightly from her skin and she felt the moist, light friction of his warm tongue caressing the spot he had bitten. Murmuring low in his throat, he laved her neck with tender caresses for what seemed like hours. When he finally lifted his face and gazed down at her, his black eyes like obsidian pools, droplets of blood lingered on his lips. He swiped his fingertips over the errant drops and licked them clean, smiling down at her like a satiated cat.

The smell of her blood lingered in the air, a sweet aroma that stirred her senses, the way the invisible caresses in the river had stirred her erotic longings. “What have you done?” she whispered, her eyes widening as she stared up at him. Her stomach rumbled deep inside and the rising hunger for blood terrified her.

Lascaux swiped his fingertips gently over her neck and held them to her lips. The scent of her own blood aroused her and she licked the tiny droplets hungrily. His smile widened. He took another soft swipe at the side of her neck and lapped up the last bit of blood. “You are the most delicious creature on this earth,” he said in the vibrantly sensual tone that stirred the lust inside her womb.

Lascaux picked up a goblet and held it to her lips. The scent of blood incited her hunger, a haze of lust unlike any she’d ever known. She sat bolt upright, the cloth falling from her forehead, grasped the goblet from him and drank greedy gulps of thick blood that slid down her throat, quenching her hunger.

Only when she’d finished did she realize what she’d done. She threw the goblet, which clanked on the stone floor. “What have you done to me?” Her breasts heaved in her panic and she no longer cared that he could see her body.

He pulled the fallen cloth away. “I cured you of la peste.” He held up the cloth, his eyes simmering again. “You no longer need this, ma belle. You will never have a fever again.”