DEEP IN the night, as she slept in her cushioned seat, the carriage stopped and Odette got out. She was aware and smelled her Fabian when he got in and sat beside her to pull her towards him.She buried her face towards where his neck and shoulder met, where she usually would in this position, or when they were sleeping in bed. She minded he seemed to have discarded some of the rough parts of his garb, so it was easier to place her arms around him to hug him. To get closer to him.“Hmm... are we close? Why are you here?”“We’re close, and I am here because I am missing you terribly, and I needed you beside me.”She smiled against the skin of his neck. “Thank you.”“For what?” He sounded puzzled.“For everything you did tonight, saving me again, missing me, and being here because I missed you so, so much, too!” She tightened her hold on him. He felt so real and so complete. If that wicked man hadn’t been drunk and a coward and had hurt him tonight because of her, she wouldn’t know what
WHAT IS IT now? It was still dark when Adalene was jarred awake by a commotion outside and by Odette clutching at her shoulder, shaking her awake at the same time, trying to see through a slit in the window what was happening outside.Odette’s frightened face turned to her. “Something is very wrong, My Lady. I think there are thieves outside an—”There was a scream that was abruptly cut, and we stared at each other, shocked and scared. That sounded like Olivie. She could now hear the sounds of swords clanging at each other and men shouting and fighting. She thought of Fabian fighting out there and she turned towards the door.“My Lady!”“We’ve got to get out of here, Odette. We have to hide. Thieves know we’re here and if they find us, we don’t even know how to fight!”She opened the door a little and looked out. Men were fighting outside and cursing, shouting. The other carriage was lying on its side with the horses neighing on the ground. Hurt. They’d hurt the horses.Where is
THE NEXT DAYS were hard for the battered Adalene. The bruises on her face and the cuts on her chest had to heal, and she had to force herself back from this unexplainable cocoon of numbness that seemed to have overcome her since my harrowing experience in the forest with the thieves.She was going to have scars, but at the end of that week, as she watched Odette in another of her bursts of crying, she realized that it was the hardest of all. If that horse had not reared and bolted and if the other woman had fallen on the ground with her, both of them would have been taken. No one would have pointed to Fabian and his men in which direction the thieves had gone with her, and if the men had not reached them in time… Odette and she would have both been r*ped.And she wasn’t completely r*ped, was she? Fabian and his men had stopped them, killed them all before they could finish what they’d started. They’d had their hands on her, and it would have just been a minute or two before—She moane
“I CAN’T BELIEVE this is happening,” Adalene whispered as she watched the gathering in the gardens from the window of her bed chamber.“What is hard to believe?”She whirled to find the Baron there, dressed in his finery as a groom—her groom. Her eyes warmed at the sight of him. She couldn’t believe he was going to be her husband.From that day they had started making love again, Fabian had earnestly toiled to get the wedding preparations underway. She had also since then found out that after that terrible night Lady Veronique had instigated—again—Lady Madeleine Clemence Gauvreau traveled back to the castle instead to angrily inform the Duke about the latest schemes of his cousin to hurt her nephew’s future wife. Fabian’s great-aunt demanded retribution.Since then, lady Veronique Moranville had been sent to Spain to marry a distant cousin from another family.And this was because Lady Madeleine and the Baron chose her instead to become part of their family.It felt like the world had
ADALENE BELIEVED NOW.But watching the activity below, it was hard to believe she would marry in such grandeur. She never imagined this could happen in her life. Never.Her family was shell-shocked.They had arrived yesterday, the whole lot of them, and they huddled together almost most of the day, watching everything in a frozen state, not sure where they belonged until Odette had them busy with things they could help with.They were relieved to find they could easily converse with other workers in the manor, and that the Baron didn’t care for anything other than they settle in. Her little nieces and nephews were so in awe of the knights that they would either laugh or cry whenever one would actually talk to them, but they seemed to be thawing as the men made an effort to smile, talk and play with them when they could.Her mother had just left with Odette after helping her get ready and was somewhat calmer now. But yesterday, she was appalled to see the fresh scars that peaked from t
ONE YEAR LATER.It was a fine afternoon as Adalene practiced in the shooting range built nearer the manor since she started training. When they started planning on doing the trips Fabian and Duke Philip Lornier privately discussed the first time she accompanied her husband to the Duke’s castle and court, she told her husband she wanted to learn how to shoot arrows and defend herself. As she expected, he thought about it instead of negating as it was unwomanly to do so, and only about if they had what she needed in their weapons room. It took more than a month after the wedding before he started teaching her himself. She could easily move by then as her wounds have completely healed, and he had tasked a favorite bow and arrow craftsman to devise a set for a woman of her build and height. So the first time they went on the trip to Italy to trade in the ports where merchandise arrived from the remnants of the silk road, she already knew how to shoot arrows. News about robbers on the
As soon as she entered the library and saw the additional books on the new floor-to-ceiling shelves installed yesterday, Adalene gasped in delight.“I got new books!” she exclaimed, to which her tutor reacted with a tsk-tsk. Fabian acquired a tutor to teach her the necessary Italian phrases in the language she needed for our travels. He would have wanted to get her another one for computing but she was already in good relations with his compter who helped her with understanding some accounts in books she found here. Besides, Adalene only needed to learn the numbers needed for accounts concerned with buying stock and inventory. The Baron—her husband’s people were very capable.But, anyway, the new hardbound books Fabian bought for her were the ones she had requested. She wanted a few books written in the Italian language so she could start reading them and understand more the context of what her tutor was teaching her. And for the next three hours, Adalene stayed in the library for her
“But I have something in mind now, too,” Adalene said.“No… you were busy with your book and I came over to distract you.”“And I am thoroughly distracted now. What are you going to do about it?” she asked in a throaty voice, pouting a little because she knew how that drove him crazy.And it did. The next moment, his mouth was devouring her lips, sucking them in and opening them so his tongue could probe inside and molest her tongue into a fight. And she did fight, tangling with him in tongue and limbs until she was pinned beneath him after he stood up and tumbled her to the couch. She had him inside her in one smooth stroke, stealing a groan out of both of them because of the sheer pleasure of that. And then he was thrusting slow and hard, her hips meeting each one, her skirts and underskirts bunched up her belly and her flushed bosom exposed to his eyes and mouth as he took her deliberately and with burning intensity because he knew this drove her crazy.She closed her eyes. She cou
THE couple’s first morning in the cabin arrived quite differently, with the husband’s cock sliding inside the wife’s mouth.Fabian first thought he was dreaming still, only to find out that his beloved had taken control of the dream and was pleasuring him with her expertise in handling his cock after more than a year of getting to know it.And he must say, she did it so well that by the time he moved and pushed her flat on her back, he was already crazy with the craving to slide into her sweet, wet, tight warmth.And when he did, he was gratified to hear her imploring whispers to thrust deeper, to make it harder, as she angled her hips for fuller penetration.Her face was flushed with her own need, her eyes rolling up as he angled his hips to make sure his cock slid against her clit, or that sweet spot inside that could always undo her.Oh yes, she wasn’t the only one who’d memorized the other one’s body so thoroughly because eliciting the other one’s excitement and pleasure was param
EARLY the next morning, Fabian and Adalene were loaded inside one of the carriages and they went their way to the cabin near her family. It took most of the day and it was almost dark when they arrived.Since her family had the cabin stocked with food and whatever else they needed to stay there for a week, they started right away with cooking dinner.Someone, probably one of her brothers, left fire and wood in the fireplace that might have been alight the whole day, and though there were only embers when they arrived, the inside was comfortably warm. Fabian added more wood and it was crisply hot when they sat down to eat that they stripped down to slips and undergarments.“You can cook!” Fabian said happily as he got his second filling of the beef stew.Adalene shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s my mother’s cooking. She left it in a big pot for me to heat up when we arrived. I can cook, but I haven’t done much for a long time… since I arrived in the manor, practically, so I am not sur
“What is happening?” the Baron asked in a voice rich with enjoyment.“I cannot!” she whispered.“What do you mean you cannot? You insisted.”Despite the freezing air, Adalene’s cheeks felt aflame. “I can’t do it. I can’t watch that. Mon Dieu, please let’s hurry back before they see us!”His laughter sounded so loud to her ears that it alarmed her that Sir Thibault could hear them, and she felt relief once they were back inside the manor. They went upstairs and she did not stop moving until she was inside their bedroom, and when Fabian entered the door, too, while pulling his cloak off, one look at him and she was seized with hysterical giggles.He shook his head and started helping her take off her cloak and the strings on her gown. There were nights when she didn’t require Odette this anymore because she and Fabian mostly went up to the master’s bedroom together and it had become a nightly routine to help each other off their clothes while they talked about the day, or start making l
As preparations continued for the next trip to the port of Rome, Adalene paid more focus on shooting her arrows more accurately and her knife-wielding skills. It did not lessen her efforts when Fabian welcomed the idea of hiring a small group of stragglers who looked like stragglers but had a reputation for being sound companions on the rough road toward Rome. They could go to places the knights couldn’t go to and get information that could help make travel less dangerous. In fact, this made her work harder. She knew she was the reason Fabian worried, but not one of his men who knew him would dare ask him to leave Adalene behind. They also never made her feel like she was an encumbrance and made a way out of their time to check on her progress and spar with her every day. Traders bring female members of the family to fairs and trade ports. The only difference to theirs was their trader was a baron, at the behest of the Duke of Burgundy, but only in whispers.There was one person who d
“But I have something in mind now, too,” Adalene said.“No… you were busy with your book and I came over to distract you.”“And I am thoroughly distracted now. What are you going to do about it?” she asked in a throaty voice, pouting a little because she knew how that drove him crazy.And it did. The next moment, his mouth was devouring her lips, sucking them in and opening them so his tongue could probe inside and molest her tongue into a fight. And she did fight, tangling with him in tongue and limbs until she was pinned beneath him after he stood up and tumbled her to the couch. She had him inside her in one smooth stroke, stealing a groan out of both of them because of the sheer pleasure of that. And then he was thrusting slow and hard, her hips meeting each one, her skirts and underskirts bunched up her belly and her flushed bosom exposed to his eyes and mouth as he took her deliberately and with burning intensity because he knew this drove her crazy.She closed her eyes. She cou
As soon as she entered the library and saw the additional books on the new floor-to-ceiling shelves installed yesterday, Adalene gasped in delight.“I got new books!” she exclaimed, to which her tutor reacted with a tsk-tsk. Fabian acquired a tutor to teach her the necessary Italian phrases in the language she needed for our travels. He would have wanted to get her another one for computing but she was already in good relations with his compter who helped her with understanding some accounts in books she found here. Besides, Adalene only needed to learn the numbers needed for accounts concerned with buying stock and inventory. The Baron—her husband’s people were very capable.But, anyway, the new hardbound books Fabian bought for her were the ones she had requested. She wanted a few books written in the Italian language so she could start reading them and understand more the context of what her tutor was teaching her. And for the next three hours, Adalene stayed in the library for her
ONE YEAR LATER.It was a fine afternoon as Adalene practiced in the shooting range built nearer the manor since she started training. When they started planning on doing the trips Fabian and Duke Philip Lornier privately discussed the first time she accompanied her husband to the Duke’s castle and court, she told her husband she wanted to learn how to shoot arrows and defend herself. As she expected, he thought about it instead of negating as it was unwomanly to do so, and only about if they had what she needed in their weapons room. It took more than a month after the wedding before he started teaching her himself. She could easily move by then as her wounds have completely healed, and he had tasked a favorite bow and arrow craftsman to devise a set for a woman of her build and height. So the first time they went on the trip to Italy to trade in the ports where merchandise arrived from the remnants of the silk road, she already knew how to shoot arrows. News about robbers on the
ADALENE BELIEVED NOW.But watching the activity below, it was hard to believe she would marry in such grandeur. She never imagined this could happen in her life. Never.Her family was shell-shocked.They had arrived yesterday, the whole lot of them, and they huddled together almost most of the day, watching everything in a frozen state, not sure where they belonged until Odette had them busy with things they could help with.They were relieved to find they could easily converse with other workers in the manor, and that the Baron didn’t care for anything other than they settle in. Her little nieces and nephews were so in awe of the knights that they would either laugh or cry whenever one would actually talk to them, but they seemed to be thawing as the men made an effort to smile, talk and play with them when they could.Her mother had just left with Odette after helping her get ready and was somewhat calmer now. But yesterday, she was appalled to see the fresh scars that peaked from t
“I CAN’T BELIEVE this is happening,” Adalene whispered as she watched the gathering in the gardens from the window of her bed chamber.“What is hard to believe?”She whirled to find the Baron there, dressed in his finery as a groom—her groom. Her eyes warmed at the sight of him. She couldn’t believe he was going to be her husband.From that day they had started making love again, Fabian had earnestly toiled to get the wedding preparations underway. She had also since then found out that after that terrible night Lady Veronique had instigated—again—Lady Madeleine Clemence Gauvreau traveled back to the castle instead to angrily inform the Duke about the latest schemes of his cousin to hurt her nephew’s future wife. Fabian’s great-aunt demanded retribution.Since then, lady Veronique Moranville had been sent to Spain to marry a distant cousin from another family.And this was because Lady Madeleine and the Baron chose her instead to become part of their family.It felt like the world had