I will not allow my people to mistreat you.
Im not asking you to. Im not an idiot. I just want you to give everyone a chance to get to know me and realize Im not like Tamara.
Talorc picked Abigail up by the waist and drew her to him. You are nothing like that evil bitch.
Im not, Talorc. Im really not. She needed him to believe her.
He didnt reply, but he did kiss her, long and deeply. Kissing led to touching and touching led to disrobing. Soon, they were writhing together in the furs. By the time she could string two thoughts together again, she was naked and snuggled atop her husbands chest.
Sound vibrated through his chest and she knew he had spoken. She lifted her head, affecting a sleepy yawn. What?
I said you will be the death of me.
I do not think so. You kissed me, if you will recall.
You challenged me.
Considering the consequences, I believe I will have to challenge you more often.
He growled in mock outrage and rolled her under him to begin kissing her yet again. She loved his taste and could have kept at their current occupation in perfect bliss for the next hour, but Talorc lifted his head and looked toward the door.
Someone must have knocked. Chills chased down her spine as Abigail acknowledged yet another source of revelation for her secret. What if someone knocked and she did not hear them? She would have to keep the door open when she was in the chamber. There was no help for it. Unlike in her room in her fathers keep, she could not feel the vibrations of the floor when someone approached the door.
Or perhaps she had merely been preoccupied? She lost all sense of her surroundings when her husband started touching her.
He brushed a lock of hair back from her face. We must go down for the evening meal, angel.
I am not overly hungry, are you? she asked, placing her hand on his neck and caressing the sensitive spot she had discovered earlier.
He needed more time to calm down in regard to Una. Abigail still hoped to convince Talorc of her plan to give the clan a month to get used to her.
I might be convinced to forego the evening meal if I thought other, more pressing appetites were going to be fed.
She made no comment about how they had just been fed, but leaned up to press her lips to his throat. Many aspects of her new life were precarious, but not this.
The marriage bed was everything he had promised it would be and more. So much more.
Here, she felt like a complete woman, like her deafness did not matter. She did not need to hear to make him shudder above her like he was doing now while her lips moved along the strong column of his throat.
In this one place, where touch ruled, the silence of her world meant nothing.
The next morning, Abigail was both chagrined and relieved to wake alone. Again.
She had not managed to extract a promise from Talorc to allow his clan time to accustom themselves to their new lady, one who had been born and raised in England. A country and its inhabitants even he expressed nothing but disdain toward. She worried that even now, he was banishing Una. Abigail would feel terrible if that happened.
She knew too well what it was like not to have a secure place to call home, one in which she belonged without question.
However, as much as that possibility distressed her, Abigail could not
regret having the privacy to face a more personally terrifying prospectthe risk she was going mad. Perhaps the Church was right in teaching her deafness meant she had an affliction of the mind, that her fever had robbed her of her reason as well as her ability to hear.
Though why such an infirmity should take so many years to show itself, she could not begin to comprehend.
Abigail refused to believe she was possessed by a demon, as the priest taught such impediments indicated, but she could not deny something was amiss.
The night before, Abigail had once again been certain that she heard Talorcs voice. It was a wonderful, masculine voice, one that made her giddy with warmth and filled with joy. Even the memory of it caused her to lament her perpetual silence more intensely than she had for many years. Only the voice could not be real, for just as in the hot springs cave, she heard nothing else .
The voice had to be completely conjured by her imagination, which was a disquieting enough thought. She refused to entertain the other possibility that the voice was that of some demon that supposedly caused her deafness. The fever had stolen her ability to hear and that was that.
According to Emilys friend the abbess, priests were too quick to point to a demon when faced with the inexplicable. The learned woman had said so in one of her first letters to Abigail. They had continued a correspondence with each other that Emilys move north had forced Emily to drop.
Now, Abigail had no more notion of how to maintain the friendship than her sister had done. It was the single relationship she truly regretted leaving behind. The abbess had known of Abigails deafness and never thought less of her for it. Other than Emily, the abbess was the only person who had ever been so accepting.