Hellion (Seven Brides for Seven Bastards, 7)

by Jayne Fresina

  The seven bastard sons of Guillaume d'Anzeray are on a mission to find wives -- women to breed the next generation of a dark dynasty that many wish to see extinct.

  It won't be easy to find brides from among the Norman nobility, for the d'Anzeray are upstarts, their family's fortunes raised through bloodshed and violence. As one holy man and chronicler of their times has written, "From the devil they came and to the devil they will return". But these brothers don't care much for holy men or for what is written about them. Now, with the future of their bloodline at stake these mercenary warriors need wives and they have no scruples when it comes to claiming the women they desire.

  Hellion

  Seven Brides for Seven Bastards, 6

  The Final Wife

  by

  Georgia Fox

  M/F/M, F/F, ANAL SEX, ORGIES, SPANKING,

  CANING, BADLY BEHAVING WOMEN,

  BRANDING, AND PUBLIC EXHIBITION

  Twisted E Publishing, LLC

  www.twistedepublishing.com

  A TWISTED E- PUBLISHING BOOK

  Hellion

  Seven Brides for Seven Bastards, 7

  Copyright © 2014 by Georgia Fox

  Edited by Marie Medina

  First E-book Publication: July 2014, SMASHWORDS EDITION

  Cover design by K Designs

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2014, Twisted Erotica Publishing.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  To Mandi

  "They came from the bowels of hell to slaughter, ravage and pillage wherever they went. It was said they were descended from the daughter of Satan and I know of no man alive in their time who would doubt it."

  The words of Herallt, medieval chronicler, on the deeds of Guillaume d'Anzeray and his seven bastard sons.

  Prologue

  With his clawed, impatient hands, Herallt, the monk and chronicler, opened an unexpected delivery. The candles around his writing desk burned steadily, the flames stretching tall and unwavering on that calm summer's evening. But a change was in the air. As the contents of the parcel tumbled across his parchment, something wild also leaked out into being.

  For there, by the suddenly fevered, flicking light of breeze-blown candles, he found the bells once worn around the wrists and ankles of a whore he'd sent to assassinate his enemies.

  Jessamyn of Al-Andalus, otherwise known as "The Enchantress"—a dancer of purported mystical power— had fallen foul, it seemed, of the d'Anzerays' own wicked magic.

  The messenger who brought the parcel had fled already, and the monk was alone. The thick stone walls now closed in, their previously benign guardianship turning now to menacing imprisonment. The ink words across his page, which should have dried by now, began to run and drip into each other, forming grotesque faces with fangs. The still, quiet evening was no more.

  Tucked inside the package with the bells was a simple note.

  "The Enchantress is dead and gone. This is all that remains. She wanted you to have them."

  The monk exhaled a groan of fury, his fingers so tight around the bells that two of them broke and small, dried insect eggs, or seeds of some kind tumbled across his writing desk. They were not recognizable to Herallt, which was unusual as he had extensive knowledge of herbs and plants. Was it, perhaps, a poison in some form he'd never seen? It could be the method by which the Enchantress had planned to dispatch that family of devil spawn back to their maker.

  Now they had captured her and killed her instead.

  For all her pride and confidence, and despite that reputation for skillfully and speedily dispatching her enemies, she had failed.

  Ice-cold panic seized his gnarled frame, froze him to his bench.

  It was not for the dead woman that he had any concern, but he feared the wench might have told them who hired her.

  Struck by this bone-chilling thought, Herallt glanced back over his shoulder and glared into the darker corners of his chamber, his imagination finding shadows of peculiar, terrifying shape. He drew his robes tighter against the sudden brisk cold that was more fitting for the depths of winter than for this summer's evening, and bent over his work again. At least he could still continue his chronicle— the bloody story of Guillaume d'Anzeray, an uncouth, uneducated, lawless, faithless peasant who rose up by the sword and sired seven bastard sons. All of them, thieves, rapists and murderers.

  Even worse— they were heretics, unbelievers of the true faith.

  Herallt would ensure their name went down in infamy as the most evil and despised of all men. It was the least he could do. This would be his vengeance.

  But as he swept those strange seeds and broken bells aside, preparing his quill in the ink again, a hard, howling gust of wind came out of nowhere. Abruptly his candle was snuffed.

  Plunged into darkness, Herallt sat very still. All was silent, but for the distant scratch of mice under the floor and bats in the rafters. He closed his eyes, muttering a hasty prayer. Perhaps those shadows creeping around him had not been drawn by his imagination. Perhaps the d'Anzeray flew like bats at night and gathered around him now.

  Something laughed in his ear. Something else tugged on his sleeve. Something pinched his nose.

  Gripped by an unearthly, blood-chilling power, Herallt could do nothing. The quill fell from his fingers, and he heard the nib scratching away without his direction.

  Chapter One

  Summer, 1077

  Salvador d'Anzeray watched his brothers on the training field with the other soldiers and decided they were all getting fat and slow. He blamed it on the acquisition of six wives. The wives liked to cook, and his brothers liked to eat. His brothers also had taken to spending more time at the castle in the company of these women, instead of exercising in the tiltyard or the field with Salvador. Their soldiers, likewise, were slacking off in these times of relative peace.

  This was not good. What if their enemies came one day and caught his younger brothers being lazy, playing foolish games with the women, or their soldiers napping at the gate? Salvador had great confidence in his own abilities as a warrior, but even he didn't believe he could single-handedly fight off an attack against their father's castellany.

  Even his brother Dominigo, previously the most thick-headed giant ox who breathed, ate and slept battle, had begun to read poetry. And had been seen — Salvador could hardly bare to think it—picking flowers for one of the wives, weaving them through her hair.

  Where would it all end, he thought grimly.

  He'd never been completely behind this idea of their father's that all seven brothers should bring home wives to share and build the next generation of d'Anzeray. Women were difficult. Let one into your life and that was trying enough. Let more in and a man was asking for trouble. But, as the eldest son, he'd gone along with it, dutifully abiding by his father's will. On the surface at least.

  So far, however, he had not contributed a wife to the collection.

  Salvador had thrown his energies instead into building his own fortress, just a few miles away over the valley and on the next rising hill. It would take a few years yet until it was finished, but the sight of those stone towers pushing up proudly into the sky was gratifying in a way that few things were these days for him.

  He spent his time traveling back and forth between his half-built fortress and his father's castle, keeping their soldiers in line as
best he could, trying to remind his brothers that life wasn't all about merry wives and fucking.

  "Sal," his youngest brother Ramon had said to him recently, "put your spurs up for a while and learn to enjoy yourself. What's the reason for all this hard work and fighting, if we never take time to benefit from what we've achieved?"

  And rest on his laurels? Never. There was always someone, somewhere looking to steal from him. To move a wall a few inches, for instance, and slyly lay claim to a bit of grass that was his. Oh yes, he kept an eye out for the villains. Or villainesses.

  "You're always in such a grim mood lately," another brother, Alonso, had remarked. "I mean to say, even more sour than usual. What's put a wasp down your breeches? Or should I ask whom?"

  "Nobody," he'd snapped immediately, before downing an entire flagon of ale to keep his lips from the temptation of saying anything further about a certain vexing widow on the other side of his hill.

  "You spend more time at your fortress than you do here with us," Alonso had added slyly. "You can never wait to get back there." He laughed. "We miss your cheery face, brother."

  Sal burped and gave a half sneer. "Yet you seem to manage well enough without me." Gesturing around the hall with his empty flagon, he muttered, "These women keep you busy." And too tame, he thought.

  At least his brothers had stopped asking him when he meant to find a wife for their harem. Six women, in his opinion, was enough. Even their father hadn't asked him about it for a few months now, content with the brood of grandchildren he already had.

  Sal saw no reason to find a seventh wife when the six they already had were in danger of making too many changes. His father's castle was now decorated with tapestries and a profusion of fat pillows that got in his way when he tried to sit down. There were candles everywhere, curtains to keep out supposed drafts that he'd never felt, and bowls of dried petals that made everything smell like an expensive whore's petticoat. And minstrels.

  Bloody minstrels.

  He never could understand the need for that caterwauling while he ate his supper.

  As for other needs, when he required exercise for his cock he found it with his brothers' wives and that kept him content, all his parts functioning well.

  Everything else that came with the wives was, in his opinion, superfluous and likely to cause more trouble than good. Even the children they'd produced so far were noisy, naughty, ill-disciplined brats.

  "They're only babes," first wife Princesa had laughed at him. "You expect too much of them yet."

  "They're rude and insolent and impertinent," he'd grumbled in reply. "And that one just threw food at me."

  "He's not even two yet, Salvador."

  So? Sal was quite certain he knew how to behave at any age. If he hadn't he would have received a swift slap from his mother to correct him. Apparently children these days were allowed to run wild.

  Like certain women.

  Yes, that was another thing, he thought morosely as he watched his brothers fooling around on the exercise field. Women were getting far too loud these days and opinionated. And not just the women they'd married. But argumentative, annoying women who were widowed and thought they could still manage property, could still run a manor. Could keep moving fences around, stealing animals and playing sly tricks on him the minute his back was turned.

  He removed his helmet and with eyes narrowed against the sweat that trickled slowly in fat rivulets down his brow, Sal glanced over in the direction of his own half-built fortress. Again he thought of the infuriating woman living on the other side of it. No doubt she'd been up to something sneaky again while he visited his father.

  With a woman like her around he needed eyes in the back of his head. Mayhap he'd been away long enough. Time to go home.

  Chapter Two

  "He's back, my lady." The look-out had come all the way across the yard to tell her, but cognizant of his failure to bring good news, the poor man's steps dragged and his demeanor drooped accordingly.

  She sighed. There, once again, went her hopes of Salvador d'Anzeray's demise.

  "I just sighted him over the hill, my lady. Heading this way."

  "Let joy be unconfined," she replied flatly.

  Whenever her ill-tempered neighbor rode off to visit his father in the next castellany, she held onto a thin sliver of hope that he might not return. Something might occur to keep him away longer so she could live in peace for a while.

  Alas. He kept coming back.

  Bad enough that she was a widow, a woman struggling alone to maintain property most people thought she had no right to manage without a man, but Helene de Leon Calledaux had to share a border with that uncivil beast.

  She nodded to the guard and finished drawing well water, determined to go on with her day and her chores as if Salvador d'Anzeray did not exist. He must take her as he found her; she would make no special effort for that bastard.

  A lady might usually be expected to face her neighbor in a clean gown with nothing more strenuous than sewing in her hand, or a bunch of stupid flowers, but putting on airs and graces to greet this man would mean granting him more respect than he deserved. Whenever he turned up at her gate, intent on berating her for something he thought she'd done, she was always in a state of most disarray— up to her elbows in pig slop, or covered in soot from putting out a barn fire. Helene was a woman who liked to get her hands dirty. She did not believe in asking others to do a task she would not do herself. Primarily because she was too damned impatient.

  And she'd long since given up trying to remain tidy for anyone.

  She turned the pulley with both arms and an angry force, throwing in a loud grunt for good measure. Why couldn't her wretched neighbor meet a grisly end, as her husband had predicted he would?

  "Fret not, Helene," Robert had said to her many times, "the d'Anzeray have countless enemies and his occupancy of that piece of land is temporary. Someone is bound to do away with him eventually."

  Eventually was a long time coming.

  She'd been tempted, several times, to ask Robert why he did not take matters into his own hands and dispatch the pest himself. But that would have been impertinent and unladylike. It might have suggested her husband lacked courage, or was too lazy to act. God forbid.

  "Right will prevail," Robert would say calmly. "This venison is very well seasoned, is it not?"

  Now her husband was dead and she must suffer their grim-faced neighbor's constant complaints about walls and boundaries he claimed kept moving, or sheep that disappeared from his fields. Or even a peregrine he accused her of stealing.

  For six months she'd put up with his stern, forbidding frowns whenever he rode by to deliver another churlish comment about how a woman should never be left to manage such a large property. Twice, within her hearing, he'd threatened to petition the king and have her shut away in a nunnery. It was well known that the d'Anzeray had no sense of humor so he could not be speaking in jest.

  When he first claimed that land adjoining his own father's, about five years ago, and started building a fortress, Helene's husband had complained to the king. Some of those fields Salvador d'Anzeray boldly took for his property had belonged to Helene's father, Arnoul de Leon, and so they were part of her dowry. At least, they were supposed to be.

  Arnoul had not lived long enough after the Battle of Hastings to enjoy his war prize from King William—not to lay more than one bloodied eye upon it— but when the Calledaux family negotiated a marriage to the dying warrior's only child, they were sage enough to make certain that the parcel of land, in its entirety, was included in the arrangement. Helene, therefore, was "sold" as part of the property.

  Thinking of it now as she turned that pulley with increasing passion, it felt like a hundred and one years ago, not merely eleven, since she was that plump, plain little girl standing in a drafty, mud-spattered tent. There, in the midst of an encampment of soldiers, she was told two life-altering things in the same sentence: her father was dead, and she was getting
married.

  They had sent Arnoul's scribe, a short, harried fellow, to tell her, "I have bad news, Lady Helene, but I also have good."

  After he'd relayed his message briskly and ducked out of the tent again, thirteen-year old Helene was left to wonder which news was meant to be which.

  Her father had been a stern, uncompromising, impatient man who barely spoke to her, except to mutter occasionally that he wished he had a son. They were strangers in many ways, but that was typical of her family. Affection was considered a weakness, and she had learned not to seek, or want it. So she was not surprised that her father's scribe, rather than a relative, was the one who brought her this news. It was fitting really. She was only surprised they bothered to tell her at all.

  Thus she was wed, there and then, to Robert Calledaux— by proxy, as he was still in Normandy and too sick to travel at the time. It was a few years later when they finally met and consummated the union. Robert's first words spoken upon seeing his young bride for the first time were, "The land deeds are in safe-keeping, are they not? My father told me I must be sure."

  He was dutifully assured they were indeed safe. And he relied upon those words, while his father had quite probably meant for him to check with his own eyes.

  But somebody, somewhere, got it wrong.

  The parchments granting that land to Arnoul de Leon had mysteriously "disappeared", and when, a few years later, Robert protested to King William about Salvador d'Anzeray stealing some land that should be his, he got short shrift for his trouble. The king, struggling to subdue the newly conquered land, needed those ruthless and mercenary d'Anzerays on his side and let them get away with a great deal. Their thieving behavior went unchecked.