by Rye Hart
Bella’s father coughed gently. “Your manservant is outside, waiting for you.”
“Will! Yes, of course; I told him to return in half an hour.”
“Were you so sure of me?” Bella demanded.
“Not at all. I intended to abduct you and ride to Gretna Green if you refused me. I merely needed to obtain your father’s willingness to accompany us.”
He kissed her tenderly. She would be his Duchess, the woman who had returned his sight to him. Blindness, he realized, was admittedly a physical condition. But sight was a choice as well, and Bella had offered him the choice to see for the first time, love.
Mystique
Chapter One
Marie Stevens was a good woman in a bad situation. That was always her story. She’d grown up in a small Southern town, and had a certain charm about her. Men fell for her left and right but she’d always been the type of girl who believed in “the one”.
She lived on a small farm with her parents in the mountains of Tennessee. The farm was never meant to be a source of income but she loved taking care of the animals. Marie had a special place in her heart for animals. She almost liked them better than she liked people.
Marie was always a quiet, studious girl who was dedicated to her schooling. She wanted to leave the small town and become a veterinarian. She’d always dreamed of spending her life helping animals.
Her dreams were big and she knew that she could achieve them if she put her mind to it. She could move mountains if she believed she could. People told her that she was meant for great things and she believed them.
While all the girls in her school were busy with boys and prom, she was studying and keeping her GPA near perfect. People made fun of her and the boys she turned down would accuse her of being a lesbian or some other claim that made the blow to their manhood more palatable. It was a ridiculous game, in her opinion, and so she refused to play.
The boys were drawn to her ethereal beauty. All the boys wanted her and the girls wanted to be her, even if Marie didn’t know it. She had long, curly blonde hair that glistened in the light and always seemed to lay across her shoulders perfectly without any effort. Her eyes were as big and blue as the ocean and when she smiled they shined brighter than stars. Her pale skin was never marred with blemishes and her round face gave her an innocent charm that drew people in.
Despite her beauty, Marie’s focus was never pulled away from school. She stayed the course and managed to ignore the advances of potential boyfriends and the pressure to go to parties. Her parents couldn’t have been more proud of her, but that was all going to change her senior year.
Robert had been so damn charming when they first met. His eyes were almost a golden amber color. The closest thing she could compare them to was honey. They were deep and rich and seemed to look right into her soul. She fell for him the moment they met.
Marie enjoyed fairy tales growing up and so she’d bought into the idea of love at first sight. It was how she’d wanted to meet the love of her life. She wanted the storybook romance that she’d read about for so many years.
She was inherently feminine and had denied herself the things that girls looked forward to for her entire life. Marie never went to school dances and she never put herself into the dating pool. She’d focused on more practical things, and as a result she was hungry for the very things she’d avoided.
Robert paid attention to every one of those desires. He made Marie feel like a princess and it was intoxicating to her. It was enough to drag her away from her books and away from her goals. He promised that he would take care of her for the rest of her life. She’d never have to work a day in her life. She’d just stay at home and take care of their babies.
The first time he’d told her that, she’d questioned if it was what she really wanted. She’d had her heart set on being a veterinarian for so long that she couldn’t imagine anything else. Robert convinced her that it wasn’t something worth pursuing. He convinced her that the only way they could build a life together was if she depended on him completely.
Those red flags should have been enough to wake her up. Marie should have run away from that fate as fast as she could, but she was too caught up in her own fairy tale to listen to reason. She jumped right off the cliff, expecting Robert to catch her. She would realize later in her life just how stupid of a decision that was.
Marie gave Robert something that she’d been told was precious. Her virginity. It was another thing she would look back on and scoff at. Her virginity meant nothing. It was something that society had put on a pedestal to keep girls from exploring their own sexualities.
At the time, however, it was a big deal. The first time they laid together she was expecting something wonderful. She expected her world to be changed forever, but it was much duller than that. A few sloppy thrusts and grunts and he came, leaving her unsatisfied and confused. She wasn’t even sure if it felt good, to be honest. It had happened so fast.
All of their encounters following that were pretty much the same. She wouldn’t have her first orgasm until a friend bought her a vibrator as a joke. She had been embarrassed at first, but it became a staple in her and Robert’s relationship. She kept it by the bed for all of those disappointing sexual exploits.
Their intercourse wasn’t completely unproductive. Right after graduation she found out she was pregnant with her first and only child. There was pressure for her and Robert to marry thanks to the old world views of their small town.
That pressure was more than enough to convince them to get married. It was a quiet affair that was put together quickly. Her parents wanted to preserve her dignity and so it needed to be done before she started to show.
It was the first of many disappointments that she would experience in her marriage. Her pregnancy left her unable to go to school and so Robert got the housewife he'd always wanted.
Robert went to work every day and left Marie at home, pregnant and terrified. She hadn't planned on having children for years. Some part of her still wanted to get out of her small town and see the country, and maybe even the world.
She would have to come to terms with the fact that she was a mother and a wife now and that would define her for years to come.
Chapter Two
The birth of Richard was one of the happiest days of Marie's life, but it was promptly followed by weeks of soul crushing depression. No one ever talked about postpartum depression and so Marie didn't know to expect it.
Her husband was present for the birth of their son but that was where his involvement stopped. Men were expected to work and women were expected to care for the children. There was little cross over.
Thanks to this archaic view, Marie was left at home with a screaming infant and no one to look to for help. Her mother would shake her head in disappointment if Marie admitted to being terrified of the baby or unsure of what she should do.
The gruff, aging woman would tell her to follow her 'maternal instincts'. As a nineteen-year-old woman and new mother, she wasn't sure she had the instincts her mother was talking about.
She felt like a failure as a mother and a wife, not realizing that there were other women around her suffering from the same affliction. They wouldn't talk about it for the same reasons that Marie did not. They were all too afraid of being judged.
Those first few weeks were hell but Marie pulled through and gained confidence as a mother. She felt she was a good mother, though her husband would tell her otherwise on many occasions.
She did her best to cook and clean despite the fact that she hated every second of it. She went to every PTA meeting and every hockey practice. She decorated the house for every holiday and gave out plenty of hugs and kisses.
It wasn’t an act. Marie loved her son. She loved him more than anything on the planet and she was thankful for his happy face every day. He looked so much like his father. He had his golden eyes and Marie’s thick blonde hair. His nose turned up when he smiled and Marie took all the credit for that
one. He was a beautiful boy and she adored him to no end.
Her husband, on the other hand, was a completely different story. She’d hoped for a fairy tale life but it didn’t seem like she was meant to live happily ever after. Her relationship with Robert fell apart soon after Richard was born.
The man was never around. He preferred the company of his coworkers at the bar to that of his wife and his son. No one batted an eye at it either. This was normal. There were few women in this small town who were in happy marriages. Everyone said they were happy but Marie knew it was a lie. She saw the same sad look in every woman’s eye that she had in her own. No one was happy, but you couldn’t admit it.
Divorce rates would have been through the roof if divorce had been acceptable. There were no legalities that kept women from divorcing their husbands, but sometimes social pressure held more power than law.
Like every other woman in town, Marie played with roll of the happy wife. She smiled at the other women in the grocery store and made small talk with them. She laughed at bad jokes and cleaned up after her drunken husband stumbled in from a long night at the bar.
Drinking wasn’t an uncommon hobby in these parts but Robert’s drinking habits got out of control, even by the lax standards of this small Tennessee town. He was soon known as the town drunk and their family was cast out from the social circles.
Richard went through high school without any friends, and the few women that Marie enjoyed talking to abandoned her. She was more alone than ever and so was her husband. Robert hadn’t ever been held accountable for his actions, so when he lost his job, his friends and the respect of everyone in the town, he took his anger out on his wife.
Robert would come home from his minimum wage job, raging and drunk from spending too much time at the bar again. Marie sent Richard to his room so that he wouldn’t bear the brunt of his father’s abuses. She was happy to take it for the both of them.
For a long time, it was just verbal. He’d scream at Marie while she cooked and even threw something occasionally, though it was never at her. He would break plates but he didn’t hit her for a long time, and the first slap was the last.
He came home in a particularly foul mood one day and started screaming at his now eighteen-year-old son. Richard had just graduated and was trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life. Robert had him cornered and was screaming at him about how he was wasting his life and Marie wasn’t about to let it continue.
She stepped in between them and before she could get a word out, she was slapped across the face. Her head snapped to the side and she could taste blood in her mouth. After a moment she wiped her lips and spit the blood onto the floor, rage boiling inside her.
Marie would never forget that feeling as long as she lived. It was soul crushing sadness mixed with an anger that made her want to wring his fat neck. The taste of blood made her all the angrier. Her breath was coming at a quickened pace and when she turned her head, he was already apologizing, eyes wide.
Apologies weren’t enough.
Richard had already run up the stairs and Marie told her husband that if he touched her again she would break his arms. Those were the last words she said to her husband that weren’t said through a lawyer or in a courtroom. She’d filed for divorce the very next day.
Chapter Three
While she was waiting for the divorce to go through, Marie had kicked her husband out of the house, forcing him to stay with his parents. He complied, hoping that this was a storm that would pass. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
As soon as the divorce was final, she packed up her things in a U-Haul and moved about four hours west to Nashville. She and Richard found a cozy little house in the suburbs that was being rented out and began their new life.
That had been two years ago.
Marie thought that leaving her drunken husband behind and getting out of that oppressive little town would solve all of her problems. She’d been severely mistaken. Moving to Nashville had been an easy choice but the life she was making there was far from perfect.
It was a struggle to keep her head above water and Richard didn’t make it any easier. Without any type of education beyond her high school diploma, it had been hard to find a decent job. She’d eventually started working at a local animal boarding facility. It was a large place with huge fields and a caring staff. She loved working there but wished it had paid a little more.
She’d started out as a handler but now worked as a manager over animal care. Her knowledge of how to train animals and her success rate made her an ideal employee. Marie liked her job at The Pet Palace but she wanted more.
Marie had begun taking classes at night in order to earn her Associate's Degree but it was slow moving and at thirty-nine, she thought being a vet might be too lofty a goal. She couldn’t give up without at least trying, though.
Richard wasn’t any help at all, either. He had inherited his father’s addictive personality but had chosen a much more damaging addiction. She never thought her bouncing baby boy would turn to drugs, but what parent did?
Heroine was Richard’s poison and when she found out, she’d kicked him out of the house until he got clean. He’d agreed to go to rehab and she’d helped fund the endeavor. His first stay lasted a whole forty-eight hours, and the last two times he’d managed to stay a collective month. Not near long enough to kick the habit.
With the threat of being homeless looming over his head, he’d returned to his mother and begged for her to let him back in. She was hesitant but couldn’t stand to see her son out in the cold. Now he was a bum living in her basement. He came out to get food and ask for money but that was all she saw of him. He spent most of his time in his room with one of his many girlfriends.
Her son's active sex life didn’t escape her notice. The thought of the type of girls he brought home disgusted her, but she’d given up on fighting him about it. He was going to do whatever he wanted and there was nothing she could do to stop him.
That wasn’t the only intimate matter that had gained her attention. She was getting older and her body was getting more demanding. She was surprised that her intimate desires only increased the closer she got to forty.
Marie’s life was busy enough with work, school, and caring for her addict son. She didn’t have time to date and she wasn’t really even interested in trying to find a new man. Her marriage had been so sour that the last thing she wanted was another one. Hell, she didn’t even want a boyfriend.
Now, casual sex sounded nice but she didn’t even know how to go about finding a ‘hook up’. She wasn’t a young girl who could just roam around bars and find men to take home. She had tried the internet dating thing and was put off with the type of men she found there.
She was still a beautiful woman, even if she was in her late thirties. Her full hair was still thick and lustrous and her eyes were starting to show her age but the only lines were smile lines. Her eyes were clear and big, and her lips still full without the aid of collagen or fillers. She’d protected her skin from sun damage and thanks to her adamant application of sunscreen, she had almost no wrinkles.
Because of her inherent beauty, plenty of men flocked to her profiles but what she found once she started talking to them was that they were all younger men, looking for something that they called a ‘cougar’ or a ‘MILF’. She did a quick Google search of the terms and was shocked at their meanings. She deleted all of her profiles immediately. She wasn’t interested in being someone’s fetish.
Her intimacy prospects were slim. Marie’s only options seemed to be men half her age that saw her as some weird sexual object or the man she worked with. She felt like she had settled for her husband and she wasn’t willing to do that again.
Marie sighed as she set her bags down inside the door and looked down at her phone as it buzzed. It was Rachel, one of her best friends. She’d met the woman through work. She was a teacher of human sexuality at one of the colleges in the area and sent her dog to the doggie
daycare Marie’s work offered.
She was an amazing woman and Marie loved her dearly. She sat on the couch and opened the phone to read the text message Rachel had left for her.
‘You and me. Lunch tomorrow at the new soup and salad place downtown?’
Marie couldn’t refuse her friend and smiled, sending a quick reply.
‘Sounds like heaven. See you at noon.’
Chapter Four
She never had to ask what time she was supposed to be meeting her friend. Even though Rachel was a bit of a wild card, she had lunch at the same time every day. Marie may have been the reason for that.
They were best friends but they were complete opposites. Rachel thrived in what she called 'creative chaos' and Marie needed order. It had come from years of not having control over her own life. Now that she was a free woman she liked to be in charge of as much as possible.
There was one other constant with Rachel. She was chronically late. She was never later than five or ten minutes but Marie could always expect her friend to run over to her, panting and apologizing for her tardiness. Most of the time it had to do with the school.
Rachel worked in the psychology department of a prestigious school in the area. She wore big round glasses that magnified her pretty green eyes and had short red hair with short fringe bangs. She showed her age more than Marie due to her high stress job, but she was still a beautiful woman.
She was petite and barely reached five feet. She always complained about how she was going to shrink in her old age and Marie always laughed. The thought of Rachel getting any shorter was pretty laughable.
Like any other day, Rachel was late arriving to lunch. She sighed and flopped into the metal chair, looking at her friend and grinning. She didn't always tell Marie why she was late, knowing that the woman understood.
She ordered an Arnold Palmer and finally turned to Marie, grinning brightly.
