Book 4: The Queen's Musketeers, #4

by R. A. Steffan

  Tears were flowing down her cheeks as she launched herself into his lap, pressing their lips together in a clash of teeth and tongues. He caught her with an arm around her ribcage, steadying them both at the top of the staircase. She groaned frustration into the kiss, scrabbling at the ties of his shirt one-handed even as he dragged her chemise down over her arms to expose her breasts. When she broke the kiss and leaned back to pull her arms free of the sleeves, he grunted and shifted beneath her.

  “Your leg?” she asked anxiously, reality briefly piercing her tidal wave of need.

  “To hell with my leg,” he said, repositioning the offending body part more comfortably, and with that low, growling tone of voice she was instantly dragged under again.

  Heat pooled in her belly and she ground herself against his lap, feeling him grow stiff and ready within his braies. The callused hand that wasn’t splayed against her back lifted to tangle in her riot of wet curls, guiding her into a graceful arch that lifted her tight nipples to within reach of his mouth. He bent to drag his tongue roughly over one pebbled point. She gasped, and then moaned when he drew back to blow a soft breath over the damp flesh.

  “So beautiful,” he said, as she stared up at the white plaster and oak beams of the ceiling, panting with desire. “My fierce, beautiful wife. How could you ever believe I would forsake you.”

  Tears tried to claw their way up her throat again, but lips and teeth closed around her tender nipple and transformed the sob into one of pleasure. He suckled, drawing deep and slow, the sensation pouring downward from her breast, through her ribcage and belly to settle in her cunt like warm water poured from a pail. A pulse of that warm wetness leaked out of her body, dampening the flimsy linen barrier that separated them. She tried to rut against him, but strong hands held her in place, stymieing all but the lightest, most maddening of contact.

  “I need you,” she said, voice rough. Begging already, though she’d long since stopped being ashamed by it.

  “You’ll have me,” he promised, “but not until I’ve made a feast of you first.”

  “It’s been so long,” she rasped, trying to thrust against him again. The lips of her sex dragged along the laces of his smallclothes, and the hard length underneath.

  He caught his breath at the sensation, but his voice was still mostly steady when he replied, “Then a few more minutes will surely make no difference, will it?”

  She groaned as he returned his mouth to her breasts, sucking biting kisses across the tops until she keened softly. When she was panting with need, he relented, moving to tease the painfully hard points of her nipples with barely-there flicks of the tip of his tongue. She grew alternately tense and lax in his supporting hands, more moisture soaking into the soft material of his underclothes.

  Her chemise lay pooled around her waist, obscuring the place where they joined, but she could feel the hard twitches of his cock in response to her growing excitement. They had seldom gone so long at a stretch without having each other—perhaps only when she had become ill with the plague, and when she had needed to recover for a few weeks after Charlotte’s difficult birth.

  Now, Milady’s body contained such a surfeit of pent-up desire for her husband that every touch of lips and tongue to her sensitive breasts drew her closer to the edge of the precipice. Olivier knew it, too—the bastard—and slowed his movements, drawing the process out... finding the highest, steepest part of the cliff and pulling her there, unresisting. When she was clinging to him with shaking arms, dizzy with the rush of being dangled so long over the pit of her impending climax, he sucked the very tip of one aching nipple between his teeth... and bit down sharply.

  She cried out and gushed her release into his lap, her empty channel and womb grasping rhythmically around a cock that wasn’t there.

  “Need you,” she said into the juncture of his neck and shoulder as he guided her to rest against him. Her good hand grasped at the loose folds of his unlaced shirt with slow, uncoordinated movements. “Need you inside...”

  “Anne,” he growled, abruptly reaching between them to unlace his soaking smallclothes with one hand. She watched hungrily as he hooked himself out of the confining material, his essence already leaking in a steady dribble from the slit. As soon as his prick was free, she was moving, batting his hand away so she could kneel up and ease down, greedily taking him in to the hilt.

  She bottomed out, and they both shuddered, Olivier’s breath fluttering against her ear. She’d had so many men in the scant years between her sixteenth birthday and her marriage, but none could ever fill her so perfectly as he. Now that he was finally home inside her body, all desperation fled, leaving contentment in its wake. She sank into his embrace, tilting her head down to slide their lips together in a languid kiss. His mouth opened under her, allowing her entry, and she slid her tongue along his... filling him up as he was filling her.

  Taking control now that she finally had what she’d needed so badly, she cradled the back of his head with her good hand, letting her fingers slide through his thick hair and using the grip to angle his head so she could kiss him even deeper. Rather than move against the cock stretching her open so deliciously, she settled on his lap and squeezed the hot length with her inner muscles, feeling him twitch and jerk inside her in response.

  She held the kiss, giving no quarter until they were both dizzy with the need for air. When he wrenched himself away with a gasp, it was only so he could grab her hips and slide her up his length, lifting her as if she weighed nothing.

  “God’s teeth. Move, before I go mad with it,” he implored, and slammed her down on his cock, forcing a rough groan from both of them.

  She braced her hands on his shoulders and took over the motion, rising and falling over and over with a devious twist of her hips on every down stroke. Neither of them were destined to last long under the circumstances, and when he angled her back and leaned down to suckle once more at her oversensitive nipples, she clenched and came within seconds. In response, he moaned his own release into the pillow of her breast, going tense and still as spurts of his hot seed bathed the neck of her womb.

  As ecstasy gave way to warm lassitude, Milady felt every muscle in her body loosen and go slack in turn, leaving her fully relaxed for the first time since the damnable poppy tea had nearly dragged her into insensibility on the huge, ridiculous bed at Mme Sévigné’s salon. Even her injured hand thrummed pleasantly with renewed blood flow as her surging heart pumped life through her veins.

  “Never doubt this,” Olivier said quietly, settling her in the circle of his arms, his softening flesh still nestled inside her body. “Please, Anne, promise me you’ll never again doubt... us.”

  She lay in his embrace, hiding her face against his shoulder, and wondered if that was a promise she would be able to keep.

  Chapter XIII: December 20th, 1640

  AT TEN O’CLOCK the following morning, a messenger appeared at the door with a summons to the Louvre from Cardinal Richelieu. Constance, who had arrived half an hour earlier to check on them and help with the household chores, stood staring at the missive after the boy took his leave, a frown marring her smooth forehead.

  “Surely he could have given you more time to recover first,” she said, sounding offended on their behalf.

  Milady plucked the paper from her fingers and read it over quickly. It offered no details, not that she had expected it to. The meeting could be about anything from an apology over Olivier’s threatened execution—admittedly unlikely—to a chance for His Eminence to berate them over the loss of a valuable political hostage in exchange for a child.

  “The Cardinal is not known for his patience in such matters,” she said. “Olivier and I will have to attend. Do you have time to come as well? You could take Charlotte to visit the King while we are otherwise detained.”

  Constance nodded. “Yes, I’d be happy to. D’Artagnan is not slated for duty until tomorrow, so he’s at home with the children today. I think it would be good for Charlotte
to spend time with her friends as much as possible. She’s been through so much...”

  The words were completely innocent, but they still pricked the guilty place in Milady’s heart. Knowing Constance did not intend it as censure, however, she merely nodded.

  Fortunately, the Cardinal had deigned to offer a carriage, since their own horses were still lodged in the royal stables and Olivier was hardly in a position to walk to the palace. Perhaps she could see about bringing their animals back with them after the meeting—the carriage team, at least. She and Charlotte would have to care for them until new servants could be found, but she did not like being without transportation.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll inform Olivier and help him ready himself, if you wouldn’t mind getting Charlotte prepared to travel.”

  * * *

  The Cardinal’s carriage arrived promptly at noon, the wheels throwing up gobs of slushy snow as it pulled to a stop in front of their door. Olivier had insisted on dressing properly, his splint hidden under a pair of breeches and encased in a soft leather boot. Getting it on had not been too terribly difficult, but Milady hoped that its later removal would not prove problematic. Charlotte chattered away happily during the short journey, her excitement at the prospect of seeing Henry blinding her to the adults’ contemplative silence.

  When they pulled up in the square courtyard bounded by the walls of the palace, Milady sent Charlotte along with Constance to visit the royal apartments, guessing that Their Majesties would have retired there at this time of day for a midday meal. She kissed her daughter softly on the forehead, and tamped down on the irrational pang of worry at letting the child out of her sight. Beside her, Olivier was watching Charlotte with a hawk’s gaze as she walked away hand in hand with Constance, and she was comforted that she was not alone in her newly overprotective tendencies.

  Now, though, His Eminence awaited them. Olivier dragged his eyes away and settled the wooden crutches under his arms. In another concession to her husband’s condition, the meeting was to take place in a room just off the entrance to the Lescot Wing, on the ground floor of the palace. As the carriage had deposited them close to the doorway, it was not an insurmountable distance, though certainly farther than Olivier had managed under his own power in the weeks since his injury.

  For this reason, their progress was somewhat slow, and before they were halfway to the appointed meeting place, a familiar voice hailed them.

  “I seem to recall saying something about not overdoing things. I believe it was only last night, in fact. Apparently, I might as well have been talking to a post...”

  Milady turned to find Aramis approaching them.

  “Take it up with the Cardinal, since it was His Eminence's idea,” Olivier said without turning or interrupting his slow forward progress. “I gather that’s also where you are headed?”

  The priest fell in alongside them, dipping a brief nod of greeting toward her as he did so. “It is. I received a rather pithy summons a couple of hours ago. As, I perceive, did you. Apparently my poor students’ verbs are doomed to remain un-conjugated for another day.”

  “Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit,” Olivier quipped, his voice dry.

  Aramis let out a short bark of laughter. “Unfortunately, they’ve hardly had a parvum of instruction to share between them in the last three weeks, so that might be a bit of an optimistic assessment at this point.”

  “I have no doubt that you’ll whip them into shape now that the crisis is behind us,” Milady said, amused.

  “I suppose I shall have to,” said the priest. “Speaking of our crisis, how is Charlotte faring today?”

  “She slept well last night, and is currently visiting with the King,” Olivier said.

  “A fact about which she seemed quite excited, on the way here,” Milady added.

  “That surely bodes well,” Aramis said. “She is a strong child—how could she not be, given her parents? And she is surrounded by people who adore her. No doubt she will carry the burden of her abduction for some time, but she will not let it define her.”

  Milady nodded, appreciating the honest assessment.

  “She is home and safe,” Olivier said. “That is the important part.”

  Ahead of them, a pair of servants bowed and opened the large double doors leading to the meeting room. Aramis gestured for Milady and Olivier to precede him. Once he had followed them inside, the doors closed behind them quietly. Cardinal Richelieu was seated behind a large desk at the other end of the room, but rose and approached upon seeing them.

  “Your Eminence,” Olivier said, “we are here as you requested.”

  “Monsieur le Comte. Milady,” replied the Cardinal. “Father d’Herblay.”

  Aramis stepped forward and went down on his left knee to kiss Richelieu’s ring; Milady followed and did the same. Olivier’s injury forced him to merely bow at the waist as he pressed his lips briefly to the blood red ruby. If the Cardinal felt any discomfort at receiving such a gesture from the man whom he had recently attempted to execute—not to mention whose wife he had once paraded before the court as his mistress—he showed no sign of it.

  “Please,” he said, indicating three chairs set before the desk, “be seated.”

  When they had done so, he returned to his own chair and leaned forward, steepling his fingers together in front of his lips.

  The last decade had not been kind to the Cardinal. The pressure of rebuilding France after years of plague and upheaval had carved away everything inessential and soft, leaving Richelieu a gaunt, pale hawk of a man with thinning silver hair. Deep lines chiseled by the weight of responsibility marked his face, but his light gray eyes burned brightly with intelligence and righteous patriotism.

  “I have sent for the three of you because you are, through no fault of your own, now arrayed at the forefront of an undeclared war,” he said, his eyes raking over each of them in turn. “France is beset on all sides by her enemies, who circle like wolves around a weakened hind in the forest. She does not have the resources to fight them.” Here, he paused meaningfully, before continuing, “At least, not in the traditional sense.”

  “It was England that first backed King Louis’ brother during the coup fifteen years ago,” Milady said, settling back in her chair. “Surely it comes as no surprise that they still wish to see France destabilized.”

  Richelieu raised an eyebrow. “A surprise? No. However, a workable plot to coerce France and Spain into open warfare represents a new level of audacity. It indicates that Henrietta Maria’s influence over King Charles is waning.”

  Henrietta Maria was the youngest sister of Louis XIII, and had married the King of England, Charles I, during a brief turn in the political tides before England set itself firmly against France during the initial outbreak of the plague. Though she and King Charles had forged a close relationship, her nationality, combined with her Catholicism, made her position in her adopted country a precarious one.

  “And what, precisely, does this have to do with us?” Olivier asked, cutting to the point.

  Richelieu’s sharp gaze settled on Milady even as he addressed her husband. “My operatives were monitoring the movements of your acquaintances after your imprisonment, Monsieur le Comte. After your wife’s return, it became obvious that the fastest way to unravel the plot surrounding the death of the Flemish ambassador was to have her followed at all times, along with Father d’Herblay.”

  Aramis leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “If you had men tracking us, it might have been nice if they’d waded in to help on those occasions when we were in imminent danger of being killed,” he said mildly.

  Richelieu looked down his nose at the priest, his expression disdainful. “They were spies, not soldiers. Surely an armed musketeer was better suited to dealing with such matters.”

  “Former musketeer,” Aramis corrected, a hint of hardness creeping into his normally urbane tone.

  “Well, quite.” The Cardinal's words were dismissiv
e.

  “This still doesn’t explain why you wished to meet with us regarding foreign affairs,” Olivier pointed out.

  “I wish to recruit you,” the Cardinal replied, “As spies. For some related matters that may soon arise between France and England.”

  “No,” Milady and Olivier said in unison.

  “What sort of related matters?” asked Aramis, and the two of them turned to glare at him.

  “The sort which require spies intelligent and resourceful enough to act independently under rapidly changing circumstances,” said the Cardinal. “You and the comtesse have demonstrated such an ability. And, of course, the comtesse speaks fluent English.”

  “Aramis...” Olivier said in a warning tone.

  “My friends only recently regained their young daughter after becoming embroiled in just such a matter,” Aramis told the Cardinal, “as Your Eminence is well aware. They have given you their answer. As to my answer—I am willing to meet with Your Eminence and discuss the situation in more depth.”

  Richelieu narrowed his eyes and studied Aramis closely. “Very well, then. I will not detain the three of you any longer. Father d’Herblay, someone in my employ will be in touch with you in the coming days.”

  With that, he made a dismissive gesture and returned his attention to the pile of papers on the desk before him. Milady, Olivier, and Aramis rose and bowed. Aramis helped Olivier regain his crutches, and the three of them left the room.

  “Aramis—“ Olivier said again, but the priest shook his head.

  “Not here,” he said.

  He led them back to the carriage, which was waiting to take Milady and Olivier home. Grasping the need to speak only once they were away from listening ears, Milady called up to the driver. “Our daughter is visiting with His Majesty, King Henry. Please see that she is sent for, that we may depart.”