Chapter 35 Belle-Belle
Belle-Belle
Guillaume kissed me and then filled me, and in those last few moments I fought for a second climax, ground myself hard against him, wanting nothing more than to have him inside me while I rode wave after wave of pleasure.
And I did. We did.
Unlike my other recent couplings—granted, the only ones I had experienced thus far in my life—this one filled me with such savage joy as to make me feel utterly undone.
While we lay together, our heartbeats slowing, I turned my head so that I could kiss him, slowly and languorously. That was its own pleasure, another new experience to tuck away in my heart’s trove.
To know that someone who so infuriated me could also enflame me with his touch…
it was enchanting, and novel, and perhaps worth forgiving him all the things he said.
Not that I wished to only be adversarial outside the bedroom and amorous inside it, for I was not certain how I could comport myself with discretion and put people in boxes…
…and thankfully, the deepening kiss distracted me from my jumbled thoughts.
I didn’t need to worry about the future just yet.
Everyone in my company, and especially Benoit and Lucas and Aubert and now Guillaume, had taught me that I could be myself with them and accept their acts of kindness and adoration and return such intimacies without fear.
My mind drifted back to my family. I had made it this far, when my sisters had failed within hours of leaving our estate. I could redeem our family’s honor, I was confident in that now.
Then the air shifted.
I felt Guillaume’s muscular body tense under me. And three things happened at once.
Aubert burst into the room.
Guillaume threw a knife.
Aubert cried out: “They know at the palace, about you killing—”
In no time at all there was a wooden thunk. Then silence. Shoved roughly to the side of the bed, I righted myself as quickly as possible.
I saw that Aubert’s head was just inside the door, next to the doorframe, and he had gone almost white.
A curly lock of his blond hair was pinned to the doorframe by a knife.
I realized that I was holding my breath, waiting to see what harm had been done, and I placed a hand to my chest to make sure that my heart was still beating. My pendant was gone—I had taken it off—I groped around on the bed til I found it, and put it back on.
I could not bear it if one of my men came to harm. Even more foully so at the hands of another of my men.
And then Guillaume was turning to me, his gray eyes stricken where mere minutes ago they had been warm with arousal.
As though my mind were catching up with the rapid pattering of my heart, I began to understand the words that were spoken, and the implications lurking underneath them. Why he couldn’t be seen at the king’s residence. Why he almost pushed me to release him from my service.
“You killed the king’s parents,” I said numbly to Guillaume.
He did not deny it.
He was sworn to me, and I to the king—and if those two oaths should clash, who knew what the consequences might be.
“Why did you have to tell me,” I whispered, and put my face in my hands. My lips were puffy from devouring kisses, but I would not cry. Not yet. I would get up and I would do my duty.
Once I knew what that duty was.
THE END
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Court of Masks
Belle-Belle
My whole body was both taut and loose: tight in the face, forcing a pleasant expression, slack in the body from the full release of not one but two climaxes with Guillaume as well as that of crying.
Not just any crying, but the kind of shuddering, jagged sobs that had wracked my body after my mother had died. After that period of grieving, I assumed I would never hurt so much again, in part because I would never love so much again.
My ruse to pose as a chevalier and take my father’s place at court had been a simple one, guided by my na?ve assumption that my good intentions would bear me quite far along the path.
However, aided by the fairy, I had successfully gathered charmed men to my cause and furthered my training in the arts of war.
I felt quite certain that I would arrive and impress the king and he would eventually fall in love with me, and then I could safely place my heart in his hands, and never be hurt or lonely again.
Yet here I was, struggling to remain stoic at my first formal court event. The king’s sister seemed intent on pestering me; did she somehow sense my intentions towards her brother? Perhaps she viewed me as a threat.
After three interactions with her that left me confused and wishing to withdraw even further into myself, as impossible as it was at an event like this one, I took refuge behind a column.
My heart was stamping a frantic beat, calling me to panic and grief again, and I was determined to calm it long enough to resist and find my composure once more.
Perhaps if I allowed myself a glass of wine…
Or if I closed my eyes and tried to channel the influence of Marguerite and Colette, my older sisters whose grasp of decorum and callousness both eclipsed mine…maybe then I could draw about myself a cloak of imperiousness, to help me handle everything.
But no. These pretensions were mere hopes that could not calm my heart or steady my voice.
For I was not ready to face the king or his sister, if I admitted it to myself.
Not while I still felt the heat between my legs from taking their parents’ killer to my bed.
My passionate engagement with Guillaume shocked me to the core, so convinced was I that he disliked me, viewed me as a soft thing on the cusp of failure.
Yet each verbal barb between us on the journey to Laons, and every time he had trained me in the violence he bore like a second skin, were not the dismissals I had assumed.
How was I supposed to know that every barb was a hook embedding itself in our flesh, drawing us more fiercely towards one another?
And how, in turn, was I supposed to know that he was the famed killer, the Butcher, whom the Emperor Matapa had employed to remove his opponents from his way? Including King Aristide’s parents?
Which was the entire reason I had taken my father’s place, as a knight had been summoned, and a knight our family must provide.
Now that I knew Guillaume’s identity and crimes, I would be remiss if I did not turn him in to the crown to face punishment…
but I had made Guillaume swear an oath of loyalty to me.
Based on the conversations happening around me, what many nobles apparently missed noticing was that oaths of loyalty cut both ways: I was bound to Guillaume, and he to me.
I had to protect him, even if he were guilty of heinous crimes.
Our fates were now bound together, which was why my first shocked utterance upon learning the truth had been to wish I had not been told it.
My own response shamed me, now that I was in my right mind after much crying and complaint. I hoped that the low but steady lighting offered by the fairy sconces would not reveal the burning humiliation on my face.
Further, Comrade had advised me that Guillaume would be of use (indeed, he had said this of all the men I had taken into my company).
I trusted the fairy horse, for even in a few weeks’ time of traveling together, he had come to feel like a reliable friend.
If he said I needed Guillaume, it must be true.
Though the question of needing Guillaume, of how I had cried out with pleasure under his tongue, at his touch, sent me spiraling again.
Caught between shame and arousal, my blasphemous body reliving the metallic tang of Guillaume’s scent as we had brazenly entangled our limbs, I would have stayed in that hideous place if I had not heard Benoit’s gruff vocalization near me.
I was touched, and relieved, that he had stayed near me.
Touched, because he was the first lover I’d ever taken, and would forever be special in my heart.
And I had been quite the sorry sight when he and Lucas had arrived after my…
encounter…with Guillaume. Relieved, because I was beginning to realize that I was not nearly as savvy at courtly etiquette as Marguerite would have us believe based on her tutelage.
It did my pride no favors to realize that I required rescuing, but it would do me even less good to persevere under a state of ignorance.
I turned, thinking to see Benoit’s large, broad countenance and pale blue, smiling eyes—yet, no. King Aristide had appeared in front of us.
And his sister was a mere step behind, her green eyes conveying a measured fury, as though she had been outwitted again.
Another stutter-stop of my heart left my chest feeling ragged, for I had taken the engineer of their parents’ demise into my bed.
But the king was all smiles, even if his sister looked like she had swallowed something sour.
“Chevalier Fortune, I feel your godmother has smiled upon you by sending you to us,” he said. His green eyes twinkled merrily, and for a moment I was caught up in them, my shaking, worried hands stilling.
“Certainly, brother,” Melisandre cut in.
“For my high steward has just vacated his position, and I can think of no more fit candidate than the Chevalier here.” As she spoke, I respectfully looked in her direction, and was taken aback by how her eyes were chilly, cold and calculating, almost the opposite of her brother’s, though both were the same forest green.
Surely there was some palace intrigue or gossip afoot of which I was unaware; I must have my men scout on my behalf and inform me, that I did not accidentally misstep and place myself in a proxy brawl between siblings.
“No, I shall make him my chief equerry,” Aristide responded. “For did he not have a most splendid horse when he visited the palace earlier?”
I had to stifle a chuckle at the thought that Comrade was being praised in his absence; for all that my fairy-gifted equine companion was most intelligent and insightful, he seemed to have a bit of an ego about him.
The royal siblings went back and forth briefly before Melisandre yielded to her brother. I made the most profuse apologies I could think of, and bowed repeatedly, until she flounced off, leaving the king and I there.
The king…and I. It was almost too much to comprehend.
This close, I saw that his green eyes had the smallest flecks of amber in them, and that his tan cheeks had the tiniest of rosy splotches on them.
A small sheen of sweat sat on his brow, outlining where his crown rested against his forehead, and suddenly I wondered how heavy his crown was.
How he was bearing it—and whether the weight of it did him ill or good.
“My sister can be, ah, forceful,” he said, running a hand through his chestnut locks, a hand that lingered on where the crown caressed his forehead. I noticed the thoughtless elegance of his fingers, how they seemed poised for art even in a casual gesture.
“I do not wish to cause strife. I only wish to serve you, my liege,” I replied earnestly. Perhaps a bit too earnestly, as he leaned forward, his eyes intent.
“Is that so, Fortune? I am in need of diversion while we are still planning how to retake my lands from Matapa.”
While my heart sang at the closeness with the king, and my face heated, I could not risk being found out so soon after my arrival here.
The garments the fairy had bespelled for me, which I could summon out of the adorned trunk that traveled invisibly to accompany me and Comrade, would easily convince anyone I was a handsome, charming man…
…as long as I was wearing them.
My mind racing, my cheeks burning, I deliberately forced myself to take a step back and to the side, ostensibly with the goal of lifting a delicate wine flute from a nearby tray.
This was what I had wanted, was it not? To be near the king, the object of my adoration for as long as I could remember?
But in what guise? Surely he would not stoop to marry me as I was, the youngest daughter of a frontier noble, and an impoverished noble at that.
If I were to distinguish myself in fighting, however, make a name for myself in battle or in diplomacy, then he might accept the match between us when I doffed this mask and became myself again.
And he might forgive my relations with his parents’ murderer…but I pushed the thought away. I knew not what to do with Guillaume, even as my core twitched in memory of the pleasure he had given me. I would deal with that later.
Yet all this speculation assumed that my father would not be fined a greater fee: for not only evading the royal order commanding all men of noble lineage to come join King Aristide’s army or else pay a fine, but also for sending someone in his stead.
Indeed, it hit me in the chest with a heavy finality: my gamble in coming here might cost my father.
This was happening, truly happening.
It was real.
It could go horribly wrong, implicating my father and sisters in a crime of identity. And yet it might pay off handsomely indeed, especially given the fairy-charmed horse and men that now accompanied me.
Even if the future was not guaranteed, not so concrete…
I could not ignore the handsome man standing before me, his eyebrows slightly raised as he waited for my response.
I could not throw away what sacrifices I had made to be here, on the hope that I could serve him, and he would come to recognize and love me.
It was worth waiting for, working for. The sentiment sunk into my skin with a heavy feeling of determination.
When and how exactly I had come to this conclusion, I did not know, but traveling to the capital had wrought some new feeling in me, a yearning for not just the object of my desire, but something like acceptance, too.
I brought the flute to my lips, and took a small sip, barely tasting the wine. It was bland for a sparkling wine, but still much better than the vinegary vintage my father had preferred.
As I lowered the glass, I conspicuously licked my lips.
He leaned forward slightly. The bubbles were bitter on my tongue.
“Diversion, you say? Do you mean horse racing?”
It hurt my heart to play at being so obtuse as to the king’s meaning.
Yet as his lips quirked upward, it occurred to me that he enjoyed the chase.
And even if I were to play the simpleton, to keep him thinking I might be interested were I to realize what he proposed, that would keep me near him. That would have to be enough.
In which case, let the games begin.