The Very Best of Kate Elliott

by Kate Elliott

  Ami pushed a hand over her hair, a gesture that looked habitual. “If we’re discovered with a man in the women’s quarters, we will certainly both be turned out bare ass naked in the snow. The sensible thing to do would be to have him turn into a cat and jump back out over the wall.”

  “Darling,” said Fee in a coaxing voice like a child begging for one more piece of cake, “you can hear that the watch is changing, so he can’t go right now in any case lest the soldiers spot him. Anyway, there’s no telling if he can get back out the way he came in. Let’s get him clean, and sort it out after.”

  “I like to be clean,” said Rory with what he hoped was a grateful smile that wasn’t too begging nor too eager. “It’s especially nice when others lick me.”

  The two women exchanged a glance fraught with an emotion he felt as a hand caressing his skin. His body reacted predictably, even though his feet were terribly, terribly cold.

  “After heating and hauling that bathwater,” added Felicia suddenly, “I should hate to see it go to waste.”

  “Yes,” said Ami decisively, and to his surprise, both she and Fee giggled in a girlish way that made his loins grow hotter and his ears burn as with whispered promises.

  “I’ll carry the dog,” he added, thinking it a polite gesture that they might appreciate. “I’m already bloody.”

  He picked up the flaccid leavings. Fluids mottled the linen. Ami swept the stone with a branch broken off from an evergreen shrub, then wiped up the last of the spume with her sleeve. Rory followed Felicia inside, as quiet as if he were stalking unsuspecting prey. In a way he was.

  Inside and up the steps, the floor was remarkably warm, oozing pleasure into the soles of his feet.

  “Ahh, it’s so much better to be inside than outside!” He brushed a shoulder along Fee’s.

  The touch brought her to a halt as she looked at him sidelong in a marvelously delicious way. Fee blushed, and chewed on her lower lip as if she were chewing on him. He sniffed. Dog scent drenched the chambers. Streaks of dried urine stained chair legs, table legs, and the lowest span of the brightly painted wallpaper where the dogs had marked where they wished. Their dribblings spotted the fine carpets like a series of tiny ponds long since dried into rancid swales. The highness’s fraught moans echoed through the linked chambers like labored grunts. Her bed chamber lay to the left through a series of closed doors. He smelled blessedly hot water in the opposite direction.

  Fee’s hand brushed his elbow. She pulled it back nervously, then with a delightfully skittish grin let her wonderfully plump fingers tickle on his forearm. His hair tingled at the touch, and she inhaled in a way that made him quite amorously inclined.

  “Come with me,” she whispered.

  He dipped his head down to brush his cheek against her soft one. “I’d like that.”

  She let go of him so fast he thought he had offended her. Yet with a teasing backward glance and a provocative swish of her lushly rounded hips, she hurried off toward the bathing chamber.

  From behind a curtained alcove, a dog whined with thwarted anger. Rory pulled the curtain back and glanced into the chamber beyond, a spacious room furnished with gold-painted wallpaper and two gilded beds covered with dog hair. In dimness, the noble Ramses huffed indignantly. Ami had indeed deposited Ramses on his bed and pulled away the steps so the ungainly creature could not descend unless it leaped. Rory was pretty sure it was too fat to leap, and in any case too accustomed to its privileges to make the attempt.

  Cornered and trapped, the little thing growled shrilly at him, quivering all over.

  Ami slipped up beside Rory and slapped him on the ass.

  “If he starts barking, we’re all in,” said Ami. With her free hand she tossed a hank of bread that landed neatly right in front of Ramses. His growls turned into slobbering as he set to gnawing on the crust with the sort of gluttonous lack of fastidiousness common to dogs. Meanwhile, Ami’s fingers strayed along the curve of his ass before darting up to grasp his elbow. “Come along, Rory.”

  He followed obediently through a set of linked sitting chambers lit by handsome gold lamps molded in the shapes of overly fed hounds so unlike the lean, cruel beasts he knew in the spirit world that at first he thought they were meant to be cows. Behind a pair of carved doors lay a small stone room painted with a mural of cavorting mermaids and dolphins engaged in unexpectedly acrobatic water games and fitted out with a large brass tub brimful with hot water. Six full buckets and two large brass pitchers suitable for pouring sat on a stone bench alongside. There was also a rack to hang a robe or dress or other clothing, and a closed wardrobe. At a side table with a basin, he washed the blood off his hands.

  “These aren’t the real baths,” said Fee, who was waiting beside the tub with her gaze fixed shyly on the floor. “The maidservants wash here. But the highness likes us to bathe her here. She likes to pretend sometimes she’s a lowly servant cavorting among her friends.”

  “You just bet she does,” remarked Ami. “Since the prince never touches her, we’re the only ones except her hired lovers from whom she ever gets a stroke. We do it to keep her temper under control. If she weren’t such a misbegotten tyrant, I would almost feel sorry for her. But she is, so I don’t.”

  She began to strip off her clothes.

  “Ami!” breathed Fee, turning pink.

  “You know what I think of her!”

  Fee gestured to a now mostly naked Ami. “Not that. Your clothes . . .”

  “Oh! Well! He can’t be expected to wash himself, after everything he’s gone through, can he?”

  “He can’t!” agreed Rory. “After everything he’s gone through? Certainly not! What do I do with—?” He held up the damp cloth that veiled the oozing corpse. He was so distracted by Ami’s long, dark limbs and firm breasts that he took a step back and set the dead dog beside the door, to one side, before turning back to the women with his slyest smile. The shawl slipped off his body. “Where do I get in?”

  “Do you say such things for their double meaning, or are you just that charming?” asked Ami with a laugh.

  “I like to let people wonder how tame I am. Until I eat them up.”

  “You are the worst flirt I’ve ever met,” said Ami appreciatively as she slipped out of her drawers.

  Such soft pleasing undergarments they were, too. He took them from her before she could drape them over the bench and held them over his hips.

  “Do you think they would fit? My sister says I’m not to wear women’s undergarments because I’m male, but I think that’s not fair. What do you think?”

  Ami was as bold as Fee was shy. She pressed herself against him, naked chest to naked chest, and looked him right in the eye, for she was quite tall. She spanned his hips with strong hands. “I think they would fit you, but you’ll look oh so much better handsomely clad in a dash jacket and well-fitting trousers, don’t you think?”

  “Whatever you think is what I think,” he murmured into her ear, and then he nibbled at the lobe.

  She had such an air of command that the way her breathing grew unsteady made him most pleasantly excited.

  She steered him toward the tub. “Now you’ve gotten me dirty, too, you wicked beast. We’ll have to both go in the tub. Darling Fee, what are you waiting for? I know you’ve seen naked men before. And Bright Venus knows we’ve been in that tub together before.”

  His ass came into contact with the tub.

  “In you go,” said Ami, wrapping an arm around him and tipping him backward.

  He grasped her just as tightly, and together they fell in with a huge splash that soaked the front of Fee’s gown. The wet fabric clung to her generous curves, and displayed the rounded curve of her breasts and her erect nipples in a most marvelous way.

  “Now I’m wet,” said Fee in a tone whose astonishment made Ami laugh.

  “Milady Aminata?” A mouselike girlish voice murmured from outside the closed doors. “Milady Felicia? I don’t—I mustn’t—I’m sorry—”

/>   “Angry Jupiter,” muttered Ami, sitting up in the bath and pushing Rory behind her. He found that he could curl his naked body around hers in a very amorous way and keep his head hidden by pressing kisses between her shoulder blades. “What is it—? Ah! Mmm. What is it, Aurea? Aren’t you attending Her Highness?”

  “She sent me to look for Coco,” came the plaintive voice. “The mistress is wanting him.”

  “Is she up?”

  “No, she is sleeping.”

  “Well, then, child, we’ll sort it out later. We’re just warming up in here. We were so cold searching outside that I thought our toes would—Stop that!—freeze off. You had best go to the kitchens and try the yam pudding to make sure it is fit for when Her Highness wakes up. And the biscuits and the rabbit, too, for you know how Her Highness likes her food just so. Make sure you try everything, and not just a spoonful, either, enough so you—Ah!—so you can make sure it will be to her liking. Go on. She won’t wake for another hour.”

  “But I can’t. Her Highness ordered me to look for Coco.”

  “Felicia and I will look for him, I promise you. As for the other, I command you, for I am senior to you, so you must obey me.”

  “But I’m not allowed—”

  “I’ll obey you,” murmured Rory at the same time, exploring the part of her that rested under the water.

  “Ah! Stop that, you beast!”

  The little voice quavered. “Milady, did I displease you?”

  “Yes! You displease me by not eating enough to keep up your strength and feed your appetite. I have changed my mind. You must eat two bowls of yam pudding first, at my order, and then try all the other foods. Is that clear, Aurea?”

  “Two bowls?”

  Rory discovered how well his two hands could fondle Ami’s two breasts. Her head sagged back against his, her hair caressing his two lips.

  Fee had been standing mute and damp, looking from tub to door and back to tub. “Yes, you must eat two bowls of yam pudding for supper every night, Aurea,” she said with unexpected decisiveness. “Besides the rest of your meal. That is an order. Go right away, so you can eat as much as you wish while the highness sleeps. And then take a nap until we call for you. Go!”

  The scuttling footfalls of the girl faded.

  “You’re feeling frisky,” said Rory with a laugh.

  “So I am,” she said as she stripped off her gown and gathered up a thick bar of soap and a sachet of herbs and leaned over the tub.

  So she was, and Ami, too. They frisked quite delightfully and energetically in a way that splashed a great deal of water over the floor. Eventually, they ended up on the floor on a pile of lovely thick towels. They took their time, indeed they did.

  But really, considered in the greater scheme of things, it was all over far too quickly. He was granted the merest scant interval of lying, spent and satisfied, with a woman on each side nestled cooingly against him, before a high light bell sounded.

  Ami sat up. “Curse the old bitch with boils and an itching arse.”

  A great deal of shouting and bellowing rose from the princess’s rooms. A bird-like scratch scraped the door.

  “Lady Aminata. Lady Felicia. Her Highness is awake and looking for you. She’s rousted the gardeners to search the ground. I didn’t tell her yet where you were, but . . .”

  The one truly impressive thing about the highness was her voice. “Aurea! Where is that useless bit? Why is she not here by my bedside?”

  Although Rory could tell she was no where near, her shout carried marvelously, like warning of a distant storm that would break over them at any moment.

  Ami went to the door and cracked it open. “Aurea. Go tell Her Highness we’re outdoors looking still. That will give us time to make sure she doesn’t find us here. Hurry.”

  The girl scuttled off as Ami closed the door and turned to regard first her naked companions and then the messy linen that wrapped the remains of darling Coco. “We have to get you out of here,” she said to Rory. “The problem is that men are not allowed in this wing. The moment you’re seen, they’ll know something is up.”

  “Will you be punished?” he asked.

  Her frown had a grim cast that chased all thoughts of dalliance out of his mind. His lazy languor burned off at the thought of these delectable females being punished, especially because he would have been responsible and they left to accept the blame. His mother always told him that if there was anything she hated, it was males who let the women do all the work. “I would rather give myself up to spare you that. If I become a cat again and run back through the garden, they’ll never know you were involved.”

  “The soldiers will shoot you!” exclaimed Ami with a look of real alarm.

  Fee planted a firm kiss on Rory’s lips, but then rose. “I know exactly what to do.”

  She flung open the wardrobe and rummaged around until she found what she wanted. “Here.” She dropped men’s trousers, shift, waistcoat, and a sober green dash jacket onto Rory’s lap. “Get into these.”

  “But Fee—?” Ami’s protest died as Fee tossed a clean gown at her and shook out a second gown, one cut to fit Fee’s more generous figure.

  “He’s got no beard. We’ll dress him in a gown, veil his face in a shawl, and tell the guards at the gate that he’s my cousin come to visit me for the day and leaving now for home. His hair is long and beautiful enough to be a woman’s. Once he’s outside he can take off the gown and go about as a man, although it will be cold without a coat.”

  “My sister will find me a coat,” he said, much taken with this idea as he swiped Ami’s drawers from the bench and pulled them on, covering them quickly with the trousers so she wouldn’t notice and thus object to his stealing them. So soft!

  “You’re brilliant, Fee!” breathed Ami in a voice so tender and admiring that he paused while buttoning up the front flap of the trousers. They were gazing at each other as if they wanted nothing more than to lick each other, and he abruptly felt that while this had been a pleasing dessert for them, he wasn’t truly necessary to their repast.

  After all, he was leaving, wasn’t he? He had to return to his family, and they naturally would make their own little pride in the territory where they roamed. A sigh escaped him nonetheless.

  “Dearest Rory!” said Fee at once, rushing over to him. “You’re so honorable and good.”

  “Am I?” he asked, not to demand their agreement but because he wanted to be honorable and good. That was what males were meant to be, wasn’t it?

  “You are,” she assured him. “Let me help you with those buttons.”

  Ami dressed also. “I still don’t know what we’re going to do with darling Coco,” she said as they all finished dressing and the women helped sort out the gown so the drape and flow did not reveal the men’s clothing beneath.

  “I have an idea,” said Rory as they wrapped the shawl around his head in way that made him seem a modest woman who did not wish to be stared at on the street. “A very cunning and devious idea. But you can’t know, and you mustn’t watch. Wait here.”

  “You can’t let anyone see you!”

  “There’s no one outside right now. The highness is wailing in her bedchamber and the servants are either waiting on her or shivering about out in the cold.” He gave them his sternest look, the one he reserved for moments of extreme danger or when he really had to convince his mother not to swat him after he had played a trick on his spoiled and obnoxious little sister, the other one, not Cat. To his surprise, they opened the door enough for him to slip through. He picked up the stinking remains and sneaked out.

  Stealthy as only a cat can be, he sought the den of the foul beast, behind the curtained alcove.

  Then he returned to the women.

  “It’s taken care of,” he said with a smile. “Trust me.”

  The voice shook the walls. “Where are those sluts? Where is my darling Coco?”

  “Hurry.” Ami dragged him out of the bath chamber and along a servants’ n
arrow hall by the light of the lamp Fee carried. A pair of lamps marked a door barred from the inside. Ami pulled open a square view hole and peered out.

  “Who’s out there? Ah, Captain Gaius, it’s you. Open up. Lady Felicia’s cousin has to get home. She was visiting, but Her Royal Highness is in a pet.”

  The soldier standing at guard laughed. “Are you telling me that’s something new today? I reckon I’m glad I’m out here and you’re in there tending to her fits and starts. Stand back, girls.”

  Ami slid shut the view hole and then gave Rory a sound kiss. On the other side, the guard fiddled to unlock a mechanism, for evidently the door was barred on both sides. Fee unbarred the door. As it swung in, the captain raised his lamp to take a good look at them with a proprietary air that made Rory want to claw him. But he knew better than to pick a fight and draw attention. So he smiled winningly instead. The man was rather good-looking, with the bluff, muscular build of a fellow who spends a lot of time wrestling and running and hacking at helpless objects. His broad hands looked as if they might be very adept at squeezing and kneading. His gaze was certainly probing.

  “Who is this lovely? I’ve not seen her before, and I know all you girls by sight and by that lovely sway of your ass, Lady Felicia.”

  Lady Felicia was not, perhaps, as enamored of Captain Gaius as Rory thought he could be, given the chance.

  “This is Rory,” she said in a cool voice far removed from her passionate utterances not long ago. “She’s not a serving woman to the princess, Captain, so you must show her respect.”

  Ami added, “She’s really a saber-toothed cat dressed in a man’s skin and wearing a woman’s clothes.”

  “I have very nice man’s skin,” said Rory helpfully. “Do you want to see it?”

  Captain Gaius laughed, slapped Rory on the ass in a most gratifying way, and then, unfortunately, stepped back. “You women and your jests. Go on. There’s a commotion brewing, for I heard the wall captain call up half the men. If the old bitch finds me chatting up you lot, she’ll have my balls. Get out of here.”