Chapter 44 Alain
forty-four
Alain
Her body felt like silk under my fingertips, warmer and fuller than the last time she’d appeared in my dreams. I curled around her from behind, my chest pressed against her back, one arm snaked beneath her to pull her closer.
This wasn’t just another fantasy conjured by a desperate mind. The scent of wild roses filled my lungs, too vivid, too real for mere imagination. Isabeau. Even her name felt like a prayer on my lips as I brushed them against the shell of her ear, feeling her shiver against me.
The borrowed nightdress she wore had ridden up to her waist, exposing the curve of her hip to my exploring hand.
I traced the shape of her, savoring how the once-sharp angles had softened with her recovery.
She was no longer that half-dead creature I’d pulled from the dungeon floor.
Still slender, yes, but with flesh that yielded beneath my touch rather than bones that threatened to slice through skin.
I’d wanted her either way. Even when she was more ghost than woman. What kind of madness was that?
“Alain?” she whispered, and the sound of my name in her voice sent heat spiking through my core.
My palm flattened against her stomach, feeling the rise and fall of her quickened breath. Something dark unfurled within me, a possessiveness I hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge in waking hours.
She planned to leave me. To return to them. To whatever beasts had marked her flesh with claiming teeth.
The thought made my hand tighten around her hip, fingers digging into soft flesh hard enough to leave impressions. She gasped, the sound halfway between pain and pleasure, and I felt my control slipping.
“You’re mine,” I growled against her neck, the words emerging from some primal place I barely recognized. “I found you. I saved you. I rebuilt you.”
She whimpered as I pushed inside her, her body wet and ready despite—or perhaps because of—the edge in my voice.
The feel of her around me, tight and hot and perfect, made my vision blur at the edges.
I held her firmly against me, one hand splayed across her stomach while the other gripped her thigh, keeping her open for me.
God, she felt incredible. Fuller, healthier than before, but still undeniably her. Still the woman who had crawled under my skin from the moment I laid eyes on her, heard her in my mind. The woman my brother dared to look at with lust plain in his eyes across the dinner table.
I’d wanted to tear his throat out. Had barely restrained myself from leaping across polished mahogany to drive my fist into his smirking face. Only my father’s presence had stayed my hand. Later, though, when Theron made that crude comment about warming Isabeau’s bed if I couldn’t satisfy her...
My hips snapped forward at the memory, driving deeper, harder. I’d left a bruise on his face for that. Worth every moment of my father’s subsequent rage.
Isabeau’s fingers clutched at the sheets as I took her with increasing force, her breaths coming in hitching sobs that only fueled the fire building inside me.
I buried my face against her neck, inhaling the scent that had become as necessary to me as air.
Wild roses and female heat and something ancient that whispered of magic I’d been taught to fear but now craved like a drug.
“Please,” she begged, though whether she was asking me to stop or continue, I couldn’t tell, but then she moaned.
I eased my grip slightly, shame cooling my ardor for a moment as I registered the marks my fingers had left on her skin. Something in her voice drifted a note of desperation that matched my own. It snapped the last of my restraint.
I drove into her with abandon, our bodies sliding across silk sheets with the force of my thrusts. Each stroke was punishment and worship combined, my way of telling her without words that she belonged here, with me. That no forest creature could give her what I could.
“Why isn’t my love enough?” I demanded, the words torn from my throat. “Why can’t you stay with me?”
She didn’t answer except to moan, her body tightening around mine as she neared her peak.
I felt my own release building, pressure coiling at the base of my spine, threatening to explode at any moment.
But I needed to see her face. Needed to watch her come undone beneath me, to know it was my name on her lips when pleasure claimed her.
I gripped her shoulder and rolled her beneath me in one fluid motion, settling between her thighs without breaking our connection. Her amber eyes flew open, wide and startled and swimming with...
Tears.
They streaked down her temples, disappearing into her hair, even as her body clenched around mine in the throes of climax. Even as pleasure contorted her features, those impossibly inhuman eyes overflowed with silent grief.
I froze, horrified, my own release crashing through me without permission. She was crying. Crying while I took her. While I forced my claim upon her just as surely as whatever beasts had marked her shoulder.
“Isabeau,” I choked, reaching for her tear-streaked face.
But the dream shattered like glass, reality rushing in to replace fantasy with cold sheets and the dark solitude of my bedchamber.
I jerked upright, breathing hard, my sleep pants sticky with evidence of what my body had believed was real like last time.
Sweat cooled on my skin as shame washed over me in nauseating waves.
She’d been crying. In my dream, my fantasy, she’d submitted to my desire while tears streamed from her eyes. What kind of monster did that make me?
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes until stars bloomed in the darkness.
I’d been too harsh with her. Too demanding.
Too focused on keeping her safe—no, keeping her mine—to see what it was doing to her.
The dream showed me that truth with brutal clarity.
I needed to go to her. To apologize. To promise I would help her find whatever answers she sought, even if they took her away from me in the end.
But the competition began at dawn, and she was sleeping. Gaspard would be arriving with his hunting party, and Father expected me to greet our honored guest personally. There would be no opportunity to see Isabeau alone before the tournament commenced.
By the time I could speak with her, it might already be too late for my actions in her room earlier. The knowledge settled in my chest like lead, heavy with implications I wasn’t ready to face.
The bow felt wrong in my hands today, unfamiliar as a stranger’s limb.
I flexed my fingers, trying to shake off the memory of Isabeau’s face when I’d told her she could never leave.
The betrayal in those sad eyes haunting me even as I took my place among the other nobles.
My words last night had made me no better than Gaspard.
“Mine,” I’d called her, as if she were a possession to be claimed rather than a woman who’d already suffered too much of men’s ownership.
The irony wasn’t lost on me as I notched my first arrow, my gaze drifting toward the man himself, standing three competitors away, preening like a peacock for his adoring audience.
Coventry. The name tasted sour in my mind.
Everything about him sickened me now. The way his perfect smile flashed white against his sun-bronzed skin.
The effortless manner he commanded attention from the crowd, accepting their adoration as his natural due.
The casual strength with which he drew back his practice bow, muscles rippling beneath fine silk that probably cost more than most villagers earned in a year.
This was the man who had taken Isabeau when she had nowhere else to go.
The man who had used her, broken her, nearly killed her.
And here he stood in my father’s tournament grounds, honored guest and celebrated champion, while she remained locked in a tower room because I’d become everything I claimed to despise.
“A fine day for competition, is it not, Your Highness?”
I turned to find Lord Everett’s son beside me, a gangly youth whose name I couldn’t recall, struggling to maintain the formal old English his father insisted upon at court events.
“Indeed,” I replied, grateful my voice betrayed none of the turmoil roiling beneath my skin. “May the best marksman prevail.”
“Thou art certain to place well,” the boy said earnestly. “Though none expect any to best Lord Coventry. Father says he hath not missed a shot in three tournaments.”
My fingers tightened around my bow. “Records exist to be broken.”
The tournament grounds sprawled before us, a vast expanse of manicured grass enclosed by fluttering banners bearing the crests of Durand’s noble houses.
Stands had been erected for the highborn spectators, while commoners pressed against the wooden barriers that separated them from their betters.
The smell of fresh hay mingled with sweat, leather, and the sweet scent of mulled wine being passed among the audience.
At the far end of the field, servants in royal livery positioned the targets.
Circles of tightly bound straw faced with painted canvas.
For the first round, they’d be placed at a respectable distance, but as competitors were eliminated, the targets would be moved progressively farther away until only the most skilled remained.
Father sat on a raised dais beneath a canopy of royal blue, Mother beside him, both resplendent in formal attire that shimmered in the morning sunlight.
Theron lounged in the chair to Father’s right, a goblet already dangling from both men’s fingers despite the early hour.
The bruise along Theron’s jaw from my fist had been unsuccessfully disguised with powder, a detail that brought me a flicker of satisfaction despite everything else.
“Archers, make ready!” the master of ceremonies called, his voice carrying across the field.