TheKingsViper (2 page)
Authors: Janine Ashbless
“Here,” he breathed—the only word he’d permitted either of
them since he’d joined her in the marriage bed. There was a thin ooze, a
trickling glisten on his flesh, a peppery green scent in her nostrils. Olive
oil. The smell took her back suddenly, fiercely, to that night in the inn on
the border—just as it did every time she dipped salted bread in oil for a meal,
every time the lamps were filled. As always it woke a fluttering stab inside
her belly, an unasked-for gush of heat and moisture to her sex.
This time, at least, her memory was not a private torment.
Taking her hand again, he guided her fingers to his cock and
buried his face in her hair as she slicked him thoroughly, up and down. His
breath was shallow and impatient. With his free hand he grasped the nape of her
neck. The oil soaked his pubic hair to black ringlets and ran down over the
corrugations of his clenched scrotum. That ball-sac was fat and tight just as
she recalled—filled to bursting.
They would be getting oil on his hose, she thought irrelevantly.
It was inevitable. Concupiscence always left evidence, she knew now, even if
the stains were hidden within the soul.
His staff skidded between her slippery fingers. It was as
hard now as the phallus of carved wood that the ladies-in-waiting had shown her
when they explained the mysteries of the marriage bed.
He will tear your
maidenhead open to plant his manhood inside you. This. This is what it will
look like.
And she had refrained from saying,
I know. And his is
bigger than that.
The hand at the nape of her neck tightened to a knot,
tugging her hair, as his other brought her stroking to a stop. Eloise found her
head tipped back and she caught her lip in her teeth. He held her by her hair
as he shifted round to kneel behind her on the mattress, and then tore the last
rags of her dress from about her hips to bare her. Still no words. She wanted
to scream. Then he pulled her back between his spread knees, until she was
almost sitting upon his lap—except there wasn’t a lap, there were only hard uncomfortable
thighs and a thick bar of insistent flesh that rubbed the seam of her sex. She
couldn’t tell if it was his oil or her moisture but everything down there was
as slippery and hot as melted butter. He cupped a hand over her pubic mound to
hold her while his other hand, clasping her against him, squeezed her breast
and rolled her trapped nipple.
Bending his head, he licked her neck. Eloise squirmed, but
she had no purchase on anything. He was easily strong enough to hold her, to
lift her and move her just as he wanted, and that strength made her feel all
the weaker, as if her body was falling open and apart. His fingers broke the
puffy split of her labia and circled her clit, making her whimper under her
breath. The head of his cock slithered through the furrow of her sex, fore to
aft and back again. It took very little—a lift, a shift of his hips, a push of
his fingertips—for his cock to find the mouth of her maiden passage and press
inside.
Her spine arched.
He took her.
What horrified her above all was how little it hurt. That
honor she had guarded so long, that precious and unique token she brought to
marriage, that thing which had ruled and defined her life—it was gone in a
moment, with a hot, tearing flash. The pain was
nothing
, nothing
compared to the agonies Severin had put her through for so long. Her tight
passage was no match for the hardness of his cock; soon he was inside her and
he was working her farther and farther down on to it with every thrust of his
hips and every rub of her clit. She could feel his panting breath in her ear
and feel the sweat slicking their skin where they touched. Her whole body was
trembling with strain, but the effort was all his. Her breasts quivered and her
hips writhed and the soft cheeks of her rump ground against his crotch.
She burned to cry out—it was not approved of. She wanted to
speak—it was not permitted. Nothing about her was of any import but her open
cunny. She felt herself begin to dissolve on the impaling stake of his cock, on
his slithering fingers. All of a sudden she was falling apart. The armor she
had worn close about her soul for so long, which had kept her whole—the armor
of her blind and desperate determination—fragmented into a thousand molten
shards. Orgasm was jagged and ugly and completely unstoppable.
She bit down on her cry.
She was stronger than she realized. In her throes she
wrenched out of Severin’s grasp and pitched forward onto her elbows, face to
the coverlet. His thrusts did not let up, in fact he was ramming deeper into
her now, leaning over her. As she drew her first breath the words trapped in
her throat and breast for so long burst out—but not as words, for with long
captivity they were formless and broken too—and she began to sob.
Chapter Two
Eloise had met Baron Severin de Meynard for the first time
almost nine months previously, when he came to escort her—the King’s
betrothed—to the mainland for her wedding. She was to be Queen of Ystria, and
all the little earldom of Venn rejoiced that its lady had been raised to such
favor.
What she herself felt about the subject was something she
could hardly decide from moment to moment. Pride, certainly, at the honor done
to her father and her isle. Excitement. A great deal of trepidation—and some
puzzlement. She couldn’t help wondering if the King of Ystria had somehow made
a mistake and meant to pick someone else altogether.
Eloise had met King Arnauld himself only once, a few months
previously during the Spring Ball arranged in honor of his twenty-seventh
birthday. She had seen him several times from a distance, of course, but her
only personal contact was a single dance at the ball in the palace of
Kingsholme. He was, in her opinion, a pleasant, handsome man. He’d made small
talk and shown no sign at all that his interest extended to the matrimonial.
That decision had been laid upon her father by vellum letter at a later date.
Undoubtedly it had had little to do with Eloise’s prowess at dancing, because
she’d been so flustered that she’d fallen over her own feet.
Severin de Meynard’s talents did not extend to dancing, or
to small talk. He was by all accounts a man of great reserve. He stood proxy
for the King during the betrothal ceremony in the chapel of Venn Keep, and his
black eyes rested on Eloise briefly as he slipped the ring upon her finger,
without emotion or interest. She squirmed inwardly then, all too aware that she
was holding the hand, and pledging herself in the presence of, the wrong man.
Of course she knew about him. His reputation among the upper
echelons was considerably less charitable than simply one for being taciturn.
Everyone knew he wasn’t of noble breeding but of merchant stock and foreign
blood to boot, yet he’d found favor with Arnauld as a childhood companion and
been granted a baron’s title. Certainly, in a land where the men tended to fair
and ruddy countenances his sallow looks marked him out. The hair that hung to
his collar was absolutely black, as was the small beard that framed his mouth
in the fashionable style. His clothing was all somber grays and the frock-coat
that brushed the back of his ankles was the color of midnight. He had a habit
of standing with his arms folded across his chest—to hide, said his detractors,
the hole where his heart was missing. He was the King’s own man—a deal-maker, a
messenger, a voice of warning and, when necessary, a ruthless assassin. It was
de Meynard who had arrested the Earl of Arrendale for treason, and de Meynard
who had caught up with Arrendale’s fleeing son and had him butchered on the
spot, along with all his party. He had Arnauld’s absolute trust. Others called
him the King’s Viper.
Eloise didn’t think that he was quite as offensive as he had
been painted by the Court gossips. While certainly possessed of too much
gravitas, at least he didn’t irritate by bragging or ordering people about, and
while the betrothal feast roared to its height he remained sober. He was
handsome in his own saturnine way too. It was his coldness that repelled
people, she thought—an aura of palpable disdain and disinterest. Who could tolerate
being looked at like that? His smile—which was rare, and cynical—was marred by
eyeteeth that were noticeably pointed, giving him a predatory air. And he used
his eating knife in his left hand, which was markedly inauspicious. Most people
with sinister leanings did their best to hide the fact, not flaunt it.
The King’s Left Hand—that was the other name they had for
him. The right hand of a man was open and honest, whether in war or in
friendship. The left hand did things one did not boast about, in secret.
She sought him out briefly before the ladies’ official
retirement from the hall. He was listening to a message relayed by a pageboy,
and nodding his approval.
“My lord baron?”
He diverted his attention to her, dismissing the lad. “Good
news, my lady. Our ship is readied and the captain says she can sail on the
high tide at noon tomorrow.”
“So soon?” She was dismayed, though the betrothal feast had
been days in preparation and she’d had sufficient time to pack such of her
trousseau as would not shame her in Kingsholme. But now that the day was upon
her, she was nervous at the thought of leaving Venn and all that was familiar.
“There’s bad weather coming down from the north, apparently,
and the captain wants to be home before it strikes.” His gaze was already
wandering out across the assembly.
“I see. I must bid farewell to my father then.” Earl Ailwyn
would not be sailing with them to the wedding, but following in another vessel.
A seafaring people, the Venn islanders had long established it as a rule that the
earl and his bloodline heir should never travel together by boat, for fear of
losing both together—even if that sole heir was only a woman.
De Meynard nodded.
Eloise waited for him to make some compliment about how well
he had enjoyed his time on Venn, but realized it was not forthcoming. “You
said…you had a private letter for me from the King?” she asked after an awkward
silence.
“Ah. Yes.” He reached into his coat, next to his heart, and
retrieved a folded piece of paper. For a moment in her hand it still carried
the heat of his body. She glanced at it, noted the royal seal and cracked the
wax with her thumbnail. Scanning the first line, she read,
My most esteemed
and beloved lady Eloise, inasmuch as it has fallen to me to make this choice—
It went on in the same vein for some time, thick with
politesse but devoid of content. “Why did he choose me?” she asked. The general
hubbub afforded them a space as private as silence.
“Pardon?”
“You’re close to his majesty, they say. What made him choose
me for his queen, out of all the women at the ball?”
“Your beauty enchanted him, my lady.” He said it dutifully.
“You flatter me.” Her words came out sounding more
disbelieving than modest.
De Meynard blinked, perhaps surprised. “And the Isle of Venn
will revert to the Crown upon your father’s death,” he answered baldly.
“Ah.” Eloise bit her lip.
“In addition, you’re young, you’re not ugly, and you will
be—he hopes—as fertile as your lands. He desires above all an heir.”
Not ugly?
Eloise felt the blood rise in her cheeks,
despite her professed abhorrence of flattery. De Meynard lifted an eyebrow.
“Although your father rather gives the lie to that theory.
Which was not mine.”
Was that intended to be an insult? She felt the urge to
defend the earl and snapped, “My mother died very young.”
“Then he should have remarried,” de Meynard said, then
added, “Though he must not now, of course. That would be a terrible mistake. No
matter how much he misses his only daughter.” His unblinking eyes, as black and
empty as those of the sharks Venn’s fishermen occasionally hauled out upon the
docks, coldly drove the point home.
“Of course,” Eloise muttered. She could feel hot anger
rising in her breast, but she didn’t want him to see it. “I will make sure he
knows that.”
He nodded, and a half-smile crooked his lips. “You are a
dutiful daughter, my lady. May you make as excellent a wife and queen.”
* * * * *
By the time they sailed the seas were choppy and running
swift under a north-west wind and a gray sky, and the Kingsholme captain was arguing
with local men as to the wisdom of putting out into open water. Half a day
later the storm-front hit them, driving them south into gathering darkness.
* * * * *
Eloise was clinging to the pillar that ran through the
center of her cabin, wondering if she was going to be sick again before she
drowned, when the wood shuddered against her and a great grinding squeal ran
through the timbers of the ship. The boards that had been heaving beneath her
feet went still, and just for a moment it was a relief, until the significance
struck her storm-addled mind.
They had run aground.
Moreover, the pillar was the foot of the foremast. Even
though the sails had been reefed, there was a good chance now that it would be
toppled by the wind. Quickly she turned to the womenservants huddled miserably
in the angle of the narrow room.
“Get up on deck,” she gulped. “It’s not safe down here.”
The ship shuddered again.
“Get up!” she shouted, regaining her voice. She swayed
across the room and began to pull at their wedged bodies. Just then the cabin
door flew open and Severin de Meynard fell through. There was a brandy barrel
under his arm.
“We’re on rocks.” His voice was forceful but cold. “Get
upstairs.”
Eloise cast one look at him and then went back to pulling at
the women who’d served her all her life, and now seemed incapable of anything.
She didn’t realize he’d closed on her until his hand gripped her arm hard
enough to make her cry out in pain.