Chapter 22 Belle-Belle
Belle-Belle
The sight—and smell—of the recently dismembered corpses stayed with me. Even once I was bundled off to relative safety on Comrade’s back, the wind in my face. Part of me noticed Lucas running ahead and the weight of someone…Aubert?...joining me on the saddle.
To safety.
My jaw clenched, jolting tighter with each bounce on the saddle, for Comrade was making haste, more than usual.
What did safety even mean, in a world where we stumbled upon dismembered corpses in a glade? Where there was no sign of Matapa’s army, the only threat I had thought mattered? Who, or what, could do such a thing?
The scene also threatened to unlock another image in my brain, one I did not wish to revisit. I gripped my locket even tighter through whatever layers I was wearing.
I gripped the locket until my hand began to hurt. And then I fell away from the pain, my mind adrift.
I did not even realize when the journey was over, not until I was being carried from the saddle and into a room. If there were stairs to go up, I did not perceive them. If the room had a bed in it, I did not see it.
The child’s corpse without a head crowded my vision.
I came to my senses under the gentle hands removing my clothes—a set of fingers I already knew, thankfully, as some far-off part of my mind noted. Being undressed by a stranger would have certainly been a new and distressing experience.
Lucas murmured soft things to me, his hands caressing my skin without being demanding.
Though he was nowhere near as large as Benoit, he still lifted me effortlessly once I was nude—and again, that part of my mind wondered if I weighed more when in the faerie clothing, if my maleness was substantial in those sensory ways.
I did not realize how cold I was until I was submerged in warm water. Then I began to shiver.
“No, Milord, no need to fear. I shall stand watch outside the door,” Lucas murmured, kneeling at the small wooden tub’s edge to encompass me in his arms, not seeming to care that he was still clothed and liable to get wet.
I stared bleakly ahead at the tiny room’s walls, noting the lack of furnishings.
Then Lucas vanished, leaving me along with what few thoughts I had left.
Someone else deposited a large bundle of herbs into the hot water with me. They smelled both sweet and pungent. Some part of my mind decided that it was Aubert, it must have been.
More time passed. I could not let myself think of how this meant my quest was doomed from the start…
but then I realized I could not think much at all, so much did the coldness penetrate my skin and bones.
Yet I had to keep my mind on something else, somewhere else, away from the bodies in the glade.
Secretly, I knew it was horrifically selfish of me to gaze upon devastation and interpret its meaning in terms of what it meant for me. The situation made me ascertain that I was doomed to fail at my task.
Then for a time I felt nothing.
Until there was warmth.
It spread from behind me, to envelop my back and my arms.
The warmth was touching me, and then lips were touching me, gently breathing warm air onto the back of my neck. I gasped, feeling as though I were breathing for the first time after a long time underwater.
Callused hands began rubbing the outsides of my arms, which…hurt? Because, it came to me belatedly, I had goosebumps all up and down me, despite sitting in water warm enough to let off tendrils of steam.
The only warmth in the world, it seemed, was emanating from the body behind me, the hands touching me. As if it, and only it, could pull me out of the cold depths to which I had sunk.
“Is this all right, Milord?”
It was Aubert, of course it was, though for a moment I had hoped for Lucas, since I already knew and was intimate with his body. There would be less to think about, since we had already been intimate.
I pushed back into his embrace, noticing for the first time his built musculature as I encountered skin taut with muscle.
“Yes,” I murmured, feeling as though my jaw had been freed from being grimly locked in place.
He bent his lips to the back of my neck again, this time to kiss.
A corresponding flame of sensation leapt through my body. I must have gasped, for I felt his body twitch in response.
“More,” I panted.
Aubert obliged, his hands beginning to roam my body, and I felt small twitches and shakes in my limbs, as though they were coming alive again after having been turned to stone.
His lips fastened onto the back of my neck, and I moaned.
One arm secured my waist and belly so I could not break the seal between our skin, while the other roved both up and down, caressing my breasts before skimming down to touch my thighs.
My hips began to rock, almost of their own accord, and my mind cleared except for the sensations now reaching my skin, and subsequently the sensations building in me.
I writhed in his embrace for some time, relishing each fingertip that brushed across my arms, nipples, neck, legs.
Initially, when Aubert had joined me in the bath, he had kept some distance between his groin and my rear, but as my skin heated up, I began to wriggle my hips backward, mindlessly seeking what I had surely begun to associate with pleasure.
One of his hands left me, in what I assumed was a move to adjust himself, to move his member out of range. Before I could protest, however, one of his hands latched onto my nub, gently tugging it at first, then rolling it between his fingers, and even flicking it a little.
The water made all the sensations more intense, and erased any friction, such that I fell limply back, allowing him to tease and touch me.
I let my head loll back on his chest, and he began to lick and nibble at my ear.
I had not thought how sensitive my ears might be, until his lips and tongue teased first one and then the other, even as his hand cupped my pubis and began to rub insistently, rubbing and rubbing against my whole front region, so that my swollen nub finally began to pulse and release under the pressure.
I cried out my climax, legs tensing where my feet touched the edges of the small tub, and my backside pressing against his front. Waves of warmth finally finished spreading everywhere throughout my body, as though lightning were arcing from my throat to my toes.
Finally, I came to my senses enough to remember what I had wanted before he had decided to focus on my pleasure, and once again, I attempted to wriggle backwards in search of his member.
He withheld that part of him, though, such that I did not feel much more than a brush against a delicious hardness, and that only when I bucked nearly out of his grasp.
I whined.
He disengaged his lips from kissing and licking at all angles of my neck. That, too, nearly elicited a whine from me.
“Milord, I…” his voice was soft, and even so, I could hear that he was regretful.
I tried to turn around and look him in the eye, but he held me in place. His arms crushing me against his chest just aroused me even more.
“Aubert, what is it? I consented to your touch just now, and in fact I feel quite revived by it.”
“I…I would want to reserve our first occasion of intimacy when we can truly savor it. Not at a time of duress. Especially since it would also be…my first time”
This time I struggled so forcefully that he did release me, and I maneuvered about in the small tub to face him, just in time to see his bright green eyes turn downwards with solemnity.
“You don’t mean that…you’ve never…taken a lover before?” I had to pause before I laughed at the absurdity. Prior to this week, I had never either!
He disentangled himself and rose to tower over me. I finally got a glimpse of what I had barely felt, and I had no complaints about what I saw, other than that it was not currently inside me.
“Nay, never before, because I have always found it difficult to connect with other people. And I want my first time to be special.” His voice was still soft, perhaps with a mournful tinge.
“And you, Milord, are quite special. I am pledged to your service and have no regrets about being here and giving you pleasure. I just hope that you will feel the same way about me once you get to know me better.”
With that, he stooped to raise me to standing, and pressed a kiss upon my lips. He handed me a towel that likely counted for plush in these rural parts, then got his own towel and excused himself from the room.
He had guided me from the cold, dark place I had gone to, and for that I was grateful. But I was also perplexed, and I began to wonder what other eccentricities were hiding amongst my men.
And…whether I was worthy of even calling them my men. Clearly, I would have to comport myself more appropriately when we encountered death. And encounter it we would, going to war with Matapa.
I would need to do better to deserve my men, and to impress the king.
I set my lips to a grim, turned-down expression. Almost like Marguerite if she were about to scold me for shredding my clothing while out hunting. Again. Whatever it took, I would do.
I poked my head outside the door.
“Lucas, to me!”