The Concubine (12 page)

Bo Tao nearly groaned. The only one more powerful than the dowager consort was the emperor himself. Yi Zhen had clearly taken an interest in Ji Yue, if only to torture Bo Tao. Sweet heaven, women’s politics gave him a headache! He sighed and spoke from the heart.

“Great Imperial Dowager Consort Kang Ci, I do not care! I do not have time to eat nor do I wish to tarry. Chen Ji Yue will be punished for her parents’ hideous effrontery to myself and the Dragon Throne. And she will be punished now.”

And with that he gestured widely with the phallic statue. People cleared a pathway before him, if only to avoid being hit by the heavy thing. At the opposite end of the path stood Ji Yue, tears escaping from her eyes and streaking her makeup. An ache welled up deep inside him. He hadn’t wanted to cause such anguish in her, but he’d had no choice. With a last bow to the dowager consort, Bo Tao turned away, forcing Ji Yue to limp after him.

Bo Tao almost smiled. Trust Ji Yue to defend herself to the very end, for all that she was alone and vulnerable in his private office suite.

“What is wrong with you? Why do you limp?”

She flushed and looked away. “It is nothing.” Then she abruptly spun back to him, her eyes blazing. “And if you really cared, you would have stopped it from happening two nights ago!”

He grimaced at the confirmation of his fears. “So the virgins have continued beating you.”

She nodded. “I have brothers. I know how to fight back.” Then she took a wobbling step forward. “But why do you allow it? They are vicious bitches!”

He shrugged. “It is a woman’s life in the Forbidden City. Like hens and a pecking order. Eventually the hierarchy will be established, but for now—” he shook his head “—as long as the dowager consort despises you, you will stay on the bottom. If I were to interfere, it would only go harder on you.”

She didn’t answer. She knew it was true.

Then he gestured to the couch. “Come, come. Let us see your injuries. I will call the doctor and she will do what can be done.”

Ji Yue crossed her arms over her chest. “Call no one. I know what is wrong. It will heal in time.”

Bo Tao narrowed his eyes. He did not like the fact she kept these things from him. “Tell me what is the matter or I will call the doctor.”

She balled her fists and glared at him. “It is nothing, I tell you! I am beaten and bruised.”

He stifled a curse. “I should have been here. I should have guarded you better.” Then he sighed. “You know I must see these injuries, Ji Yue. You cannot always know what will fester and what will not.”

“But you cannot!” she cried.

“I can. I am master of the festival, and I will see how a virgin under my care was injured.” He had thought that seeing her again would decrease his desire. That his lust would fade in the cold light of day, but it was not so. Now that he had her alone, he would not be denied her. Not on this most frustrating of days.

She understood what he meant. She knew and he could smell her excitement in the closed air of his tiny office. His dragon stiffened to painful intensity, but he did not move. He saw the fear in her eyes. Finally she shook her head. “Someone will know.”

“The door is shut.” Then on impulse, he dragged a heavy table in front of it, blocking anyone from entering. “Someone must hear you being punished, Ji Yue. Your screams of pain must be very loud as I beat you for frustrating me so.”

She straightened. “You do not seem like a man who beats a woman.”

“Ah, but who knows where lust will take a man?” He took her to the couch, setting cushions behind her back before she slowly sat. “The emperor knows I crave you like a sickness, Ji Yue.” Her eyes brightened at that, but he paused to let the knowledge sink in. “He is testing my loyalty. He knows there is another physical examination in two days.”

She nodded. “The final check for virginity before he selects his brides.”

“If you remain a virgin despite our time together, despite my beating you now, then he will know lust cannot tempt me away from my duties to him.” He took a deep breath and told her everything. “I pray it is his final test before he gives me an appointment.”

Her expression turned serious. “Then what my mother said is true. You have no wealth of your own?”

“Not enough for a wife or a family. Barely enough to keep a modest home on my parents’ land.”

“You depend upon the emperor, then,” she said. She reached out, touching his face with a tentative caress. “As do I, since my parents will not have me back.”

He took her hand from his cheek, pulling it slowly to his lips, where he pressed a kiss into her palm. “My fortunes may change,” he said. Then he gestured to the papers in his office. “I am working very hard to get an appointment and a salary, but…” He shook his head.

“Not soon enough. Not for my mother, at least.” She took a deep breath. “Did you know that the dowager expelled the Luo girl this morning? We are now down to the final twenty-eight virgins.”

The news hit him like a blow to the chest. He had not realized that all the extraneous girls had been culled. Every one that remained would be divided into one of Yi Zhen’s harems. He could barely breathe for the pain of it. “You have been selected then. You will be a concubine.” His heart broke to say the words. Six days ago, he hadn’t even known she existed. Since that time, he had gone from despising her to lusting for her to maneuvering every way he could so that he could court her. All to no avail. “I can never have you, JiYue. I thought if you were expelled, if I stayed away and the others found a way to push you out…” He began to pace out his agitation. “But I couldn’t stay away any longer. I couldn’t watch you in pain, humiliated for all to see.”

He looked into her eyes and saw tears glistening there. She understood what he was saying. She knew what he would offer her if he could. But she didn’t speak, and so in her silence, he did the boldest, most dishonorable thing he’d ever done. He guided her hands to his groin. She did not fight him, but let him lead, and when her fingers touched the bulge in his pants, he nearly groaned at the feel of her slender fingers.

“But there is a way we can take what pleasure is left to us without risking your virginity.”

Her eyes leaped back to his face. “Like the women in the old emperor’s harem. You would put your mouth…” Her voice trailed away and her skin turned bright red.

“Yes. And you could do the same to me. If you wished.”

She bit her lower lip, her small white teeth pulling at the pink flesh in a way that made his blood pound. “It is all we could ever have of each other,” she said softly. She put a hand on his chest to stop his agitated movements and looked up at him with dark, yearning eyes. “And besides, you could teach me what to do.”

His heart was pounding from her touch, but his mind was still locked on the impossibility of his life. To finally find a jewel such as JiYue, and then be forced to surrender her to the emperor. “I cannot think of you in the lowest harem,” he whispered. “Such a waste of your talents! Such a terrible life!”

She nodded and stepped closer into his arms. “Then you must help me see that I avoid such a fate. You must teach me, Bo Tao.”

He frowned. “You already know more than any other virgin about being a political wife. Your mother taught you well.”

“But I know nothing about being a concubine,” she said. “Nothing about pleasing the emperor.”

He groaned and rubbed a hand over his face, at last understanding what she asked. “Yi Zhen is not an easy man to please.”

She took a breath. “You said a man in lust will do many things.”

“Of course—”

“If I had met you before coming to the Forbidden City, I could have tried for something different.”

He almost laughed. He had spent nearly all his moments in the last few days thinking what if and what might have been. He knew exactly how useless those fantasies were.

“But I am here,” she continued. “And I must make the best of the life I have chosen. If I don’t find a way to satisfy the emperor, then I am doomed to the lowest harem. I will be—”

“The lowest girl in the lowest harem.” He had tried to warn her of such a fate before, but she hadn’t listened. And now it was too late.

“What’s done is done.”

He nodded. “You are smart to think of now rather than what could have been.” Much smarter than he.

“And so you must help me. Please do not doom me to what you showed me in the harem window.”

This time he did laugh. All these virgins and their families with their bribes and their smiles, didn’t they understand he had no control over who was selected? “There is nothing I can do, Ji Yue.”

“Yes, there is,” she said as she slowly lowered herself to her knees before him. He thought she was dropping into a kowtow, but she stopped with her legs folded beneath her and her upper body straight. “You can teach me. Show me how to pleasure a man.”

His mouth went dry. But not his jade stalk, which tightened in joy. But he could not believe she was suggesting this. She was a virgin! “You want to…to do what you saw in the window?”

She nodded, her hand slowly stroking the bulge in his pants. “I do not know how to do it to a man.” She lifted her eyes to his. “And if this is all we can have, then I want you to teach me.”

“So you can do it to Yi Zhen.” His voice was harsh, his bitterness sour in his mouth.

“You are my only hope,” she said as she stroked him. His body throbbed with her caress, and his blood pounded so hard that it threatened to drown out his thoughts. Then she reached beneath his tunic and touched the skin on his belly. He grabbed her hand before her fingers reached to the tie there. “You go too far!”

“Isn’t this what you suggested a moment ago? Isn’t this what you wanted?”

It was, but not like this! Not so that she could seduce his best friend!

“If we had met before I was the emperor’s virgin, if you had come to the door of my house instead of secreting yourself away in my palanquin, then I would have found a way to become your wife. I would have waited if you asked. I would have forced my mother’s hand and accepted your suit somehow.”

“But I did not,” he said in misery.

“You did not.” She twisted her hand from his then quickly thrust it into his pants to pull the tie apart. The fabric loosened immediately, slipping down until it caught on his engorged organ. “If ambition is all that I have left, Bo Tao, then I will hold on to it like the lifeline it is.” She looked up and he saw how fiercely she had thought about this, how determined she was to make the best of her life as it was now.

He reached out and stroked her face. “You are already becoming hard, Ji Yue. Ambition does that.”

Tears shimmered in her eyes. “I planned to have myself expelled yesterday,” she said. “The bruises were at their worst then. I could have claimed an illness. I even walked to the examination room in search of the doctor.”

“She must be summoned from her home in Peking,” he said softly.

“The physician was not there, and you had forgotten me.”

“Never!” he cried. “But you had made your choice.”

“No,” she said. “My mother made my choice for me. She will not allow me back home. And you had forgotten me.”

How those words cut him.

“And so my choice was to leave the Forbidden City to walk the streets—”

“I would not have allowed that.”

She arched her brow. “Perhaps, perhaps not. You do not have the money or the political stability to support a discarded virgin.”

True enough. He had to stay in the emperor’s good graces or starve.

“In any event, I did not know what you thought. So I chose.”

“To become a whore?”

She hissed in anger. “To not become a whore. To learn what it means to seduce an emperor.” With a quick jerk, she pulled his pants down to his knees. “I do not even know what a man looks like, and I have less than two days to learn all I can about it.” She reached up and boldly cupped his sack. He nearly cried out at the force of her grip. “Do you teach me then, Bo Tao?”

With his balls in her hand, he had no choice. He reached down and touched her wrist. “Gentler, JiYue, they are not ink stones.”

She softened her grip, then she rolled him slightly in her fingers. “They seem so hard. Underneath.”

His entire body trembled and it was a moment before he could breathe. “There is a point behind the balls that has special sensitivity.”

“Really?” She tilted her head to look.

“Not yet!” he gasped. “Not yet,” he repeated as his breath steadied into shortened pants. “Begin with the stalk then proceed higher,” he instructed.

She did as he bid. He had to shed his tunic or else the sweat would stain it. Then he stepped away from her to remove all his clothing. If she wanted to see a man, then so be it. She would see all of him.

“Oh,” she breathed softly as she looked at him from head to toe. “Is the emperor this muscled?” she asked.

“No,” Bo Tao said with a touch of arrogance. “Though he takes special pride in his legs.”

She nodded, obviously making a mental note. Then she stroked his legs, running her hands through the dusting of hair on his thighs, then up to the thicker part between.

“You are beautiful,” she said. “I have seen coolies, of course. I watched them most closely when Mama wasn’t looking. You are not so thick as them.” She flashed him a smile. “I like your leanness better. Can I touch it now?”

Her words and her touch were like opium smoke; his thoughts floated away into sensation. He instructed her as best he could. She cupped and she caressed. She gripped his stalk and rolled her thumb over the head. And when she extended her tongue to taste, his buttocks thrust of their own accord. He breached the confines of her mouth.

She drew back in alarm, but he had to steady himself on her shoulders. “You are losing control,” she said in awe. “I have made you lose control.”

“Not yet, you haven’t,” he growled.

“Then I shall have to try harder.” And she engulfed him in her mouth.