Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

Not an immediate punishment, of course—Marie-Laure knew that whatever penalty she’d incur would have to wait until Joseph was safely married and the dowry signed over in its entirety. Until then, the Gorgon wouldn’t risk angering him by mistreating the girl he’d chosen to amuse himself with. Marie-Laure’s whipping or her dismissal—or perhaps both—could wait until after he left…

  She drew a sharp, whistling breath, suddenly noticing a nasty bit of burned-on grease that had been entirely invisible the moment before. It seemed to taunt her, to grimace at her. Furiously, she tried to rub it away. The spot became her mortal enemy and there was nothing more important than making it disappear.

  But it hadn’t been the fear of punishment that had disrupted her reverie, or even the possibility of being thrown out without her twenty livres.

  She’d been jolted back to present reality by the horrid phrase that had crept into her thoughts.

  After he left.

  Yes, that was enough to shake her free of her fantasies and leave her with the bare facts of her situation: an aching back, a pile of unwashed pots, and a crust of grease that refused to be loosened by any amount of scrubbing.

  He’d be leaving for Paris a week before the Feast of All Saints. The date was immutable, signed and sealed within the provisions of the betrothal contract. It would happen whether she broke a teapot or not.

  Well, if she couldn’t change it, she simply wouldn’t think about it. Wouldn’t count the nights remaining to her—there were too few of them anyway. She’d live in the present, finish the pot (the grease spot had finally yielded to her efforts), and concentrate on whatever way she could affect her circumstances. If she couldn’t have him forever, she’d have him as completely as she could in the time left to her.

  She knew that physically he wouldn’t hold anything back from her. But she wanted more. She wanted to know him: his moods and secrets, not to speak of those mysterious papers on his desk—the ones he would take a final hurried scribble at and then sweep under the blotter when she entered the room.

  Looking up from whatever he’d been concentrating on so passionately, his eyes would need a moment to focus upon her. She was sure he was writing something fictional: he had the bemused look of someone returning from a distant place in his fancies. He’d gaze at her as though surprised that she was there in front of him instead of in whatever fabulous principality he’d dreamed up. He’d peer at her curiously and she could tell he was considering whether he’d gotten it right.

  Gotten what right?

  And then he’d smile—a wildly provocative smile that seemed to bridge the realms of the fantastic and the physical. His smile would turn to a delighted laugh; he’d leap up, reach out for her, and draw her to him.

  I’m quite mad, she thought. He could be writing about anything at all.

  It’s only a reader’s fancy, she told herself. The fancy of a reader in love.

  Madness or fancy—she was nonetheless certain of it. Whatever he was writing had something to do with her. It was about her.

  She’d demand to know what it was.

  Ridiculous! Joseph told himself. He never blushed. But right now he could feel the blood rising to his face.

  And there was no way to hide it, for Marie-Laure was looking straight at him, sitting up alert against the pillows, her eyes shining and her breasts still heaving from the last hour’s lovemaking.

  “So you still want to talk about writing,” he murmured, “even in our current situation.”

  “Of course I do.” She laughed. “But you don’t have to tell me. If you think it’s too…ah, racy for me, too scandalous for my innocent ears…”

  He took a quick nip at her left earlobe. “I adore your innocent ears.”

  “Then tell me,” she said. “What are you writing?”

  Why not? He’d read it aloud to Madame de Rambuteau. He’d even pretended it was about her. But it was different, somehow, when a story really was about someone. When someone had seized your imagination and taken you to new—and yet hauntingly familiar—places…

  “It’s a fable,” he said. “An oriental fable. They’re popular at Versailles, you know.”

  She nodded. “We sold a lot of The Arabian Nights in Monsieur Galland’s translation. People liked the genies and the dervishes, and…and the harem scenes, too.”

  “This one has harem scenes,” he said.

  It was about a sultan, he told her. A young, very rich and powerful sultan, who possessed everything he might desire and a thousand wives and concubines—so many that he hadn’t even had them all yet. Some of them had been gifts from political allies, others the spoils of war. Or he might buy one, on a whim, while passing through a slave bazaar, have her sent home to the palace, and forget about her for months.

  Like the young woman, naked up there on the block, who’d stared boldly at him, with piercing gray eyes.

  “Gray eyes?” Marie-Laure asked.

  “Gray eyes, with not a trace of blue in them. So you see, it’s completely a fiction. Of course, the girl in the story is rather petite in stature, with round little breasts…” He dropped a kiss on each of hers.

  “And when she’s angry—for she does become angry at him, though she’s forbidden to show it—she stands with her back very straight and her chin very high. She has a will of iron, you see.”

  He looked away. And when he spoke again his voice was very soft.

  “He puts her through some rather extreme ordeals. I’m not sure why. To prove that he can, I suppose. But in the end, he’s as much her slave as she is his.”

  She’d crept into his arms and was planting tiny kisses on his chest. Her tongue flicked against one of his nipples.

  He tightened his arms’ hold and rolled over so that he was lying on top of her. She was kissing his throat now. He sighed and felt himself tighten between his legs. Between her legs now, for she’d opened herself to him. She’d arched her back; he could feel her reaching for him.

  “I…will read it to you,” he managed to say. “A-another time.” But his words were swallowed up in a kiss and for that night, at least, it seemed that they were done with literary conversation.

  He read it to her a few nights later, when they’d summoned up enough self-control to allow them to get through it. After several unsuccessful attempts, they’d decided that both of them needed to get out of bed and decorously put on their dressing gowns.

  For she had a dressing gown now—shell-pink velvet with a bit of Venetian lace at the sleeves. He’d posted an order to a dressmaker in Aix and sent Baptiste in a donkey cart to pick it up a few days later. She’d protested, “I don’t want anything from you but…you.” But he’d insisted, “It’s for me, not for you. It’s so I don’t have to unlace you and then lace you up again every night.” So now when she visited him she came to him in the most beautiful thing she’d ever worn. And if Louise wondered why Marie-Laure was making her nightly visits in such gorgeous semi-undress, she never said a word about it.

  Smiling shyly, he sat down in his armchair, manuscript in hand, and cleared his throat.

  She took her old place in the window seat, tucking her bare feet under her as she listened with parted lips to his story. It was salacious: the sultan did put the harem girl through some cruel and fascinating ordeals. And then, just when Marie-Laure had begun to wonder what he could possibly do next, the story took a marvelous reversal: the sultan’s kingdom was besieged; the ruling family overthrown; the harem girl rescued and restored to her rightful position (for she was, in fact, an English lady of quality), and…

  “Well, it’s not finished yet,” he murmured. “But what’s going to happen is that he stows away on a ship, comes to England, and gets the humblest of jobs in her service…”

  “And is she cruel to him?”

  “Yes, rather, for a while…”

  “Does she demand that he take off his dressing gown and come to her on his knees?”

  “I’d rather thought of that, though I don’t know if he has a
dressing gown…”

  “She buys him one.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “After all,” she told him, “she wants him to look his best when he comes to her. Because she so, so loves to look at him.”

  She leaned back on the pillows, watching intently as he rose to his feet and dropped his robe to the floor. And this time she could match the easy delight and frank carnal appreciation with which he’d gazed at her, their first night.

  She could even pretend to be the heroine of his story—the “English lady of quality” who had the deposed sultan completely at her service.

  Well, she could try to pretend. Though she wasn’t very good at being anyone but herself.

  Perhaps for a moment, though. It was just a matter of playacting after all. Surely she could do that.

  Timidly, she attempted a curt, proprietary nod in his direction.

  He sank to his knees immediately. The rush of power was thrilling; she tried not to show how much she’d enjoyed it.

  She nodded again, this time a bit more boldly, and he shuffled forward to her, still on his knees. His eyes were meek, his lips slightly parted. She untied the sash of her robe, feeling his warm breath in the space between her breasts.

  She opened her mouth to give the next command…

  Oh dear. This business of giving orders wasn’t as easy as one might think. At least when one wasn’t used to it.

  A smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. “And if my lady will allow me…”

  He dipped his dark head between her thighs. She reached down to touch his neck, his shoulders, his silky hair, while he nibbled at her, nuzzled at her, and then quickly parted her with his tongue.

  He’s as much her slave, Joseph had said of his sultan, as she is his. How like him, she thought, to turn complicated desire into provocative conundrum.

  But she’d puzzle it out some other time.

  Because right now she could barely think at all. Right now there were no more words, no more stories—nothing but the ragged fabric of her breath and the slow, insistent movement of his mouth.

  She closed her eyes.

  His tongue was light, delicate—almost not there at all and yet inescapable, a tiny torch flickering in the darkness, a glowing brand, a white-hot iron.

  His hands had crept up to her hips; he held her firmly, gently, while she writhed, shuddered, screamed for release and prayed that it would never end. How long, she wondered, can I bear these feelings?

  But there was no time, no duration, only a shimmering, ever-changing now.

  Now, while her center exploded into a million tiny lights, like the night sky over Provence, and she tumbled from a great height through crystalline darkness.

  Now. If she couldn’t have forever, at least she had now.

  He raised his head, kissing his way upward—her belly, her breasts, her throat, and then her lips. She could taste herself in his mouth.

  She leaned back in his arms as he carried her back to bed. They held each other tightly; stretching her body against his, she tried to touch him with every inch of her skin.

  As though their bodies were the world and the present moment the entirety of history. As though now was the only word in the language.

  Well, now was all she had, anyway.

  Now would have to be enough for her. And—for the rest of that evening, anyway—it almost was.

  Chapter Fourteen

  She really didn’t know, Joseph thought a few days later, just how astonishing these past weeks had been.

  And as she had nothing to compare them to, it was quite reasonable that she’d think lovemaking was always so wonderful.

  Well, he wouldn’t enlighten her on the subject. She’d find out the truth for herself one day, when the man who deserved her finally made his appearance. No doubt he’d be a hardworking, high-minded sort of fellow; in truth, Joseph felt a bit intimidated by the exemplary personage he’d dreamed up. Marie-Laure’s future husband would be worthy of her in every way, with not a hint of petty spite or shallow self-regard in his fine, upstanding character. Still, Joseph consoled himself, this paragon of virtue would quite likely be rather a bore in bed.

  But no more tormenting himself, he decided. Far more pleasant to devote his imaginings to her—as she’d looked last night, her hair like flame against the purple velvet bed curtains, skin glowing pink beneath the freckles…

  Merde, his thoughts would take that turn just at the moment when Baptiste was trying to button his new breeches for him. The valet gave a low whistle.

  “That’s enough,” Joseph said.

  Baptiste assumed an air of exaggerated respect while his eyes shone wickedly. Holding out his arms for the sleeves of his new coat, Joseph scrutinized his reflection in the mirror.

  The suit was rather becoming, he concluded. The black brocade had violet threads subtly woven through the background of the pattern: rich yet suitable for mourning. He moved slightly to the right and the left as Baptiste tugged it here and there, smoothing it down over his flanks until it followed his torso like a second skin.

  A distant echo of Marie-Laure’s voice wafted through his memory.

  …she so so loves to look at him.

  The little phrase had been hovering at the margins of his thoughts for three days now, light as a hummingbird, piquant as a whiff of lavender.

  He loved the way she looked at him. So hungrily and yet so trustingly. There had only been one other woman who’d ever looked at him that way.

  He shuddered.

  Well, in any case, he thought hastily, Marie-Laure would see him this morning. She’d be in the courtyard for the ceremony, along with the rest of the household, captive audience to Hubert’s public ascension to his title.

  The formal name of the thing was “Homage to the New Lord.” Hubert and Amélie had decided to do it in a tedious style that no one used anymore. It would probably take hours.

  No matter. He could spend hours simply thinking of her. And if anybody happened to notice that the front of his breeches wasn’t as smoothly decorous as it might be, it was no concern of his.

  “It’s in the worst of taste,” Nicolas had told the group in the dessert kitchen. “They’re intending to stage the ceremony in a way that’s been obsolete for almost a century.”

  “Nowadays,” he continued, “when a nobleman comes into his estates, he just goes down and signs a notarized document. Actually, it’s good enough simply to send a proxy.”

  But not good enough for this Duc and Duchesse.

  The October weather had turned cold, too.

  So for several chilly, boring hours, Marie-Laure had stood shivering with the rest of the servants in the chateau’s courtyard. Clutching her shawl about her, she gazed at the unprepossessing figure of the new Duc de Carency Auvers-Raimond, seated in a large, throne-like, ceremonial armchair while a priest blessed him and little armies of village children presented him with bouquets of late-blooming flowers.

  Dressed in a velvet suit, mink-lined cloak, and tricorne hat trimmed with marten, the Duc Hubert accepted each new expression of fealty with a befuddled look. He was too small for the chair; his feet had dangled like a child’s until someone had been sent for a footstool. When he’d sneezed, upon being handed a particularly large bouquet, the Duchesse had scowled at the few giggles that broke out in the crowd. Marie-Laure felt unaccountably mortified for her, depressed by the spectacle, and grateful to have Joseph to look at instead.

  He stood at easy attention behind his brother, in a lovely black suit, with a blank, distant expression on his face. As though, Marie-Laure thought, in his mind he wasn’t here at all, but (perhaps) back in his bedchamber, where…

  …he’d drawn the purple bed curtains closed around them like an oriental tent. And then he’d nodded. The nod had been almost imperceptible, but somehow—for it seemed that they’d begun to share a secret language of command and consent—she’d known exactly what he’d wanted. Somehow he’d made it absolutely clear that she should p
osition herself at the center of the bed on hands and knees.

  A loud sigh escaped her lips. Vainly, belatedly, she tried to turn it into a cough, shrugging her apologies when Monsieur Colet turned to her with a questioning look. Pardon, Monsieur. No, nothing wrong. Nothing at all.

  Nothing except the sudden throb between her legs, the poignancy of her body’s memory…

  …of what it had felt like to be so open, so docile—vulnerable as an animal that allows itself to be taken from behind.

  She’d thought that Joseph would enter her immediately. But he’d simply let her wait.

  Untouched.

  For a minute, perhaps?

  It had felt like an eternity.

  And then he’d stroked and squeezed and played with her breasts until she’d thought she’d go mad with wanting him inside her…

  Ah, there she was, Joseph thought, half hidden behind the man in the chef’s toque.

  But how visible, how utterly available and present she’d been last night. His to do what he liked with…

  For now he knew the meaning of his oriental fable. It was about the intricate pleasures of power and submission, the joys of mastery and the willingness to be enslaved by your own desire. He’d conceived the story in an unreasoning haze of frustrated yearning, at a time when he’d thought he’d never see her again. But it was only in the past few weeks that he’d begun to understand what he’d been trying to say.

  Ironic, he thought, that he’d called Monsieur X’s book A Libertine Education. His real education had begun with Marie-Laure.

  She’d said that he needed to teach her about lovemaking and he’d responded that he’d be honored to do so. But they’d both been wrong: the truth was that each of them needed the other’s help—to understand what was happening, to give shape to the passions that threatened to engulf them. They were still discovering things, still teaching each other the pleasures of offering and giving—and of demanding and taking.

  He hadn’t been surprised that he’d needed to learn to give; for him the big revelation was that taking wasn’t so simple either. There was something shamelessly intimate about it, something deliciously humbling about revealing exactly what you wanted. Even—or especially—when you wanted something as subtle, as ephemeral as an inch of elastic flesh.