“I’m all right.” She reached, found his dark hair, and pulled his mouth to hers, his body a satisfying weight. He kissed her, one hand tipping her jaw back, and the other unknotting the string at the neck of her chemise, loosening it until he could slip a hand inside and closeit lightly around her breast. And he seemed content to stop there, kissing her slowly, rolling the nipple between his fingers, letting her restraint crumble.
“Louis,” she said, and hardly knew her own voice.
She heard his long sigh of satisfaction. “God, Anne, how many nights did I go to bed half-wild for you and hating myself for it? Will you beg me now? Or is it I who must beg?”
“Don’t be nonsensical. Who is begging? I want—” She broke off. She was pressing against him and hardly knew how to say it.
“Do you?” he asked. “Sit up, then.” He lifted her so he could pull off her chemise. His shirt disappeared, and the hose, and when he pulled her down beside him, there was only the startling heat, multiplied by a thousand, as the idle fingers on her nipples were replaced with his mouth.
He licked and sucked and breathed against her oversensitive skin, and she heard him groan between his teeth. His fingers were on her thighs and his mouth against her ear, and he said, breathlessly, “Spread your legs for me.”
It might have been easier if he’d pushed her legs apart, taken her, let her be mindless, only reacting. But she had told him that she feared conquest. This, perhaps, was his answer.
Trembling, she did part her legs for him, until she felt the air touch her there, where they had flung off the quilts, and knew she was blushing hotly in the dark. His fingers were light and reverent on her thighs, but still he did not put his hand between; he came close, running patient, grazing fingers along the juncture of her hip, teasing her. Finally, in the driving need for him to touch her, she caught the wrist of that flitting hand. “For God’s sake,” she said, could almost see him smile in the shadows, and finally, finally, he put his hand where she wished. “I won’t— You won’t hurt me.”
He laughed, and there was something painful in the sound. “I might hurt myself, sweet, with all this patience.” And a finger slipped inside her.
She went rigid around it, trembling; it was as though she could feelthe touch in her womb and feathering along her lips. She realized her legs had closed around his hand and he was waiting for her again. But his thumb rested lightly against the juncture of her thighs, and he moved it and moved it again, and her thighs unlocked. “Like that,” he whispered, raw, when she spread her legs for him, and that glorious thing was building in the place where his hand met her skin. His free hand pushed her knee down when she tried to close up around the sensation. “I don’t—” she began, and then she did, her whole body going tense and shattering in a waterfall of white light, and she found she was clinging to him, her thighs wet, and then she was beneath him again, and he’d drawn her knee up, and she felt him brush against the wetness there.
There was the quick rise and fall of his chest against her tender breasts, his weight on his forearms.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, and then she had no more breath to speak for he pressed himself into her body in a single movement and there was no part of her, in that moment, that was not his.
Chapter
34
Her head cleared slowly. Herfirst fully formed thought was how it would have been to have endured that lightning-stroke under a dozen interested eyes, with none of Louis’s patience. It would have killed something within her. He was studying her face in the faint light. The moon had risen higher.
She smiled at him. “I am glad of this,” she said. “Whatever comes.”
He’d drawn the blankets away to see her in the moonlight, she realized; his eyes were hot, and his look turned knowing when she shivered. “I am glad too,” he said, bowing his head to her breast and licking her there. “But God, Anne, I cannot stand tamely by while you barter yourself to any king now.”
“But there is nothing left to barter,” said Anne, after a slightly rueful pause. “And we do not know what tomorrow brings. When is moonset? Is dawn coming? We must go when it comes.”
“It will set soon,” said Louis. “And I think there is time until dawn. Sleep if you can.”
She was only half-awake when they came together again, the sky just faintly graying through that one traitorous window, the sound of rain still constant on the roof. She came out of dreams with his mouth on her, and her new-wakened flesh already wet and pliant, and she wrapped both legs around him when he slipped inside, rocking. Hewas rougher that time; taking her as though heedless of her soreness, pushing her until suddenly the ache became a piercing ecstasy.
This time he slept, and Anne, tender and fully awake, slipped out of bed and found her clothes. She could not lace her bodice properly, but she left it loose and put his cloak over, slipped down the stairs. The tapestries on the walls below were visible in the dawn light. She considered them, as she had been too tired to do before. Sea-drakes and horses, playing in an azure sea.
Outside she heard the sound of feet and voices. She went softly to the outer door and opened it.
A lady was walking toward the house in the cool dawn. She was young and pregnant and very beautiful. And a korrigan. There was no mistaking the yellow eyes, the thin fingers, the number of teeth. A diadem was plaited into her long hair, and her robe was silk. Her hair was damp, and her eyes shone. The old man stood still, watching her approach. He said, just loud enough for Anne to hear, “Have you come from the dragons, love?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I shall not go again until the child is born. The sea is cold. I must content myself with horses.” She kissed him, smiling, and walked on into the faint dawn. The rain that Anne had heard on the roof starred her hair. Then she was simply gone.Anaon,Anne thought.
The old man stood silent.
Drawing Louis’s cloak tighter around herself, she walked outside, frowning.
The old man turned to her and his face was full of wistful memory.
Anne said, “When I was a child, I used to love the story of a king of men who wedded a princess of the korriganed and ruled an enchanted city. But this lady died in childbed, and the story says that her husband, who was called Gralon Meur, went into the Lost Lands to find her and was lost forever to men.”
The old man made no answer.
Anne said, “Will you tell me your name? I am called Anne, and in the mortal world, I am duchess of Brittany.”
