AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN FICTION: BWWM ROMANCE: Billionaire Baby Daddy (Billionaire Secret Baby Pregnancy Romance) (Multicultural & Interracial Romance Short Stories)

by Carmella Jones

  What if she discovered something that could help her position? What if there was something she could report to the king that would have her husband punished? Would she then be free?

  Anne did her best not to answer these questions, but only to listen.

  “He wouldn’t ever find out, though,” her husband was saying. “Not unless someone told him, and no one would know other than the two of us. I don’t think of you as such a dumb man that you would betray my trust over such a trivial matter. You know what the consequences would be.”

  “Yes,” the advisor said more quietly, and after a long pause. “But there are those who know what tax increase he requested, and who would also be able to see the increase in taxes you levied. Any of these people would be able to tell that you were not doing as instructed, and pocketing the difference. Besides, the taxes you are proposing are considerably more extreme than the king has said. I do not think that the people you rule for him would even be able to pay them, not without severe—”

  “ENOUGH!” her husband nearly shouted, causing Anne to jump in her skin. She did not hear the rest of what he was saying to his advisor. She was reminded by his voice, and the threats he’d already made to his advisor, how cruel the consequences of upsetting him could be, and it put an end to all her hopes. She crept, as quickly as she could, back to her bed, and did the best she could under the circumstances to try and sleep. If things were different, she thought, perhaps what she had learned tonight would be an opportunity. But if the three long years she had been married to the duke had taught her anything, it was that hope was an illusion, and illusions were best disposed of as quickly as possible.

  -

  The next morning, Anne pretended to be deeply asleep as the duke woke and hauled himself out of their bed. His beer-steeped breath still felt hot on her neck from when he had come in the night before, and she could not bear to look at him now in the morning. She was relieved when she heard the door shut and she could sit up, look out the window, and survey the day.

  Anne’s morning ritual was considerably less intense than her nightly one. The duke didn’t much care to see her during the day, so he didn’t prescribe anything other than that she should be presentable as a woman of her position. So it was only Sarah who came to her, to help her tame her wild hair and encase herself in whatever viselike structure of dresses the day’s activities required.

  Sarah always did this gently, and Anne was grateful. It took her some time to recover from the night spent next to the man she hated so deeply who commanded her complete respect. But this morning, Anne wanted to talk and Sarah obliged.

  “Do the people pay much in taxes here?” she asked her, and was surprised by a robust laugh.

  “Is that a question, milady? They pay more taxes than they are able to, truth be told.”

  When Sarah had first come into Anne’s service, she had been cautious and very concerned with etiquette. But now that they had grown comfortable with one another, her manner had loosened considerably, to both women’s pleasure. Now she often tacked on the proper titles of address, but only as an afterthought, and only for the benefit of anyone who might overhear.

  “Then the taxes are high, I take it?” Anne said, her fears confirmed.

  “Yes, milady.”

  Anne had suspected as much. If even her husband’s advisor was saying the new taxes he intended to levy were excessive, then surely they were beyond even that.

  “I wish I could see. I wish I could hear people saying these things for themselves,” Anne said. It was a thrown away comment, and the sadness in her voice perhaps betrayed this. Sarah wasn’t offended, and didn’t think that Anne was doubting her.

  “You hate this palace,” she only said, knowingly.

  Anne nodded. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes, but she held them back. She had practice. Then an idea struck her.

  “What if I did?” she asked, almost not daring to say the words out loud, for fear Sarah would crush the idea, as Anne suspected she rightfully should.

  “Go out and see the people? But how would the duke react?”

  A smile played on Anne’s lips.

  “The duke wouldn’t need to know.”

  Sarah was resistant. She kept saying that it was too great a risk, and that she understood Anne’s frustration, but she shouldn’t do anything that would endanger her so. But Anne was determined, and eventually Sarah agreed to help.

  Sarah would stay at the palace and do all she could to avert suspicion. There had been days in the past, not long after she first married the duke, that she had been inconsolable, and spent days at a time shutting herself of from all who might want to see her. Those who had fought their way through found her so despondent that they no longer asked to. All Sarah would need to do would be to insist to any and all who asked where she was that the darkness she’d previously suffered had returned to her.

  For Anne’s part, she looked like a commoner. It had taken a little bit of time, and Sarah still laughed a little at her attempt at a commoner’s manners, but she was eventually satisfied. And so Anne went, slipping out of a servants’ entrance that Sarah told her was only very infrequently used, and made her way to town.

  She felt so free! She hadn’t realized the weight that being in the palace had placed on her shoulders until it was lifted from them. She found herself laughing like an idiot on the road, and attracted more than a few strange and suspicious looks. She told herself she should stop being so conspicuous, but though she could stop laughing, she could not stop the smile.

  When she had spent some time in town, however, the smile faded of its own accord. Sarah’s earlier laughter made more sense. Anne had been worried she would not be able to really gain a good understanding of the situation, as she would not be able to get people to speak to her about the trouble they were in with the current taxes, but she needn’t have worried. The topic was never far from anyone’s mind, it seemed.

  Anne’s enthusiasm for her day of research and freedom was failing. She’d wanted to know how bad the taxes her husband intended to levy would be for the common people of his duchy, but she realized now the information was useless. And now that she knew, now that she understood, what could she do about it? The possibility of reporting it somehow to the king was still a proposition with unbelievable risks, and even if he were to punish her husband, what would that do? The taxes here were already too high, and while the king did not want to raise them by as much as her husband did, he did still intend to raise them.

  Perhaps it was the sour mood that came over her, but Anne quickly found herself lost. She’d never spent any time in the village nearest the palace, and though she’d tried to keep careful track of her twists and turns, she discovered that as the afternoon began to wane, she was unable to get herself back out to the main road.

  She had thought she would be able to see the palace from all of town, and was surprised to find that was not the case as she went further from it. The land was lower here, and blocked by buildings, and to make matters worse, the streets seemed to be emptying.

  Anne never needed to know much of holidays. She relied on Sarah or her other handmaidens to tell her where she needed to be when, and what she should feign excitement over. But she realized now that she had been told something about the next day. Sarah had told her she should get back to the palace well before dark, as people would be heading home in the afternoon to make their preparations for the next day.

  So Anne found herself wandering empty streets, feeling far more conspicuous than she would like. She wanted to ask someone, but was afraid that her manner would give her away, and by the time her fear of being stuck in the village after dark and being discovered because of that overwhelmed her fear of arousing suspicion from the villagers, there was no one around to ask.

  So Anne kept wandering, hoping desperately that someone would show her the way.

  She turned down a street with signs that she identified as blacksmiths, and was amazed to hear the ring of one lo
ne hammer, still at work, echoing down the street.

  She made her way quickly toward it, not only because she needed the assistance of whoever wielded it, but also because she wished very much to know who was still working when everyone else in the entire village, it seemed, had left their work.

  She found the shop, a small one at the end, and knocked on the door. There was no answer. So she knocked again, louder. Still, there was no response from inside the shop. She weighed for a moment the possibility of going back, but without anyone to ask directions from, the situation was still dire.

  She pushed open the door and went inside. The shop was smoky from the furnace, and the man working the hammer had a look of intense concentration on his face that made her immediately understand why he had not heard her knocking. He had no shirt, and his body was sooty from his work, and wet from the sweat of working next to the furnace. The object in his hands was something finely turned, and she could tell even though it was red-hot that it was no horseshoe or simple sword.

  The man himself had arms like she’d never seen. Perhaps it was simply because she had been so sheltered, even where she had been raised, that she had never been allowed much contact with men of the lower trades, and certainly had never been exposed to them without their shirts on. Now she understood why.

  She stood for a little while, unnoticed and transfixed, watching the way his muscles tensed with each blow. Usually people around her were half afraid and half scattered, distracted from whatever they were doing by fear that she would tell her husband something bad about them and there would be dire consequences. But this man didn’t know, and didn’t care. He had one focus in the world, and it seemed impossible to separate him from it.

  Finally, apparently satisfied, he placed his work in a trough of water, and his silhouette in from of the wave of steam that rose from it took Anne’s breath away. She must have made a noise, because he suddenly looked at her, seeing her for the first time.

  He wasn’t afraid or startled, but merely seemed curious.

  “What are you?” he asked, and Anne was insulted in spite of herself.

  “I’m Jane,” she said, feeling guiltier from the lie than she had anticipated. She wanted to tell this man the truth, though she’d rehearsed mentally all day what she would say to any commoners she spoke to.

  “Hello, Jane,” he said. “I meant ‘what are you?’ What do you do? I’m sorry, but you seem strange to my eye. You don’t hold yourself right. And I’m sure I would have seen you if you were from here.”

  Anne was momentarily taken aback. She’d planned to claim to be a baker, but she saw now this was impossible. She searched her mind…

  “I’m a trader. I trade. I travel. I’m sorry if my manner is strange to you, but truly your manner is strange to me.”

  This didn’t seem to fully satisfy him, but it stopped him asking questions, and that was enough for Anne. Instead, he walked closer to her, and she found her heartbeat speeding up with ever step he took towards her.

  “Hello, Jane,” he said. “I’m James.”

  He walked closer to her than any man ever did. Usually she was given her space by all men, in fear of her husband, who also never stepped this close to her unless they were in the marital bed. She suspected – or was it hope? – that men didn’t generally stand this close to common women, either.

  With him closer to her now, she could see more clearly the sweat rolling down the hard muscles of his chest and abdomen.

  “Is this your shop?” she heard herself say, not really interested in the answer. She could not believe her own thoughts. They had always been tame. She had always wanted only some hazy image of a future husband in some clean, subservient way. And since she had had a very real, very unwanted husband, she hadn’t wanted any man at all. But now that James was before her, she found a very real desire deep in her, hidden for all the years of her life, bursting out with all the vigor of the trapped animal it was.

  “No, I’m an apprentice,” she heard him say, only barely. She was stepping closer to him, without really meaning to. Her body was doing what it pleased on its own, and she found her own very valid fears were unable to do anything about it.

  She had to touch him, she knew. She had to know what it felt like to touch this man. And then, quite as a surprise even to herself, she had placed her hand gently on his chest.

  He seemed confused at first, but only for a moment. He placed his hand over hers, and then regarded her suspiciously. His questions from before came up in his eyes, but then were shoved aside, as he brought his lips down to hers.

  He tasted like salt and somehow like cinnamon. The kiss was long and deep, and Anne felt light on her feet. Her heartbeat was frantic, scattered, and she wrapped her arms around him to steady herself. He was the only thing holding her on this Earth, she felt.

  He drew back from her, his chest heaving as he breathed, just as she knew hers was.

  “You smell like – I don’t know. You smell like sweet things I’ve never smelled before.”

  He was bewildered, but smiling. The preparations her husband had demanded she make for him had pleased this man, this commoner. Anne laughed loudly into the shallow space between them in spite of herself. If her husband knew this, it would destroy him. If he could see his wife in the arms of another man…

  This thought lit a fire deep down in Anne’s body, and this time she was the one to bring her lips to James’. Then she kissed his neck, making her intentions known with every desperate, searching kiss she planted on his salty skin.

  When they had finished, and lay together in the little cot in the back of the shop, she could still feel him inside her though he was now lying half asleep beside her.

  “You surprise me, Jane,” he said, with a gentle familiarity that Anne now realized she’d never felt. It warmed her, even as a draft from a poorly built window beside them blew across her skin, pulling her nipples back to attention. James saw them, and shifted to his side so he could play with them idly.

  “I surprise myself,” she replied. She had time to really look at his face, now. He had kind features, she finally decided. That was the best way of thinking of it. He looked like a man who could be trusted, not only with great things but also with all the little ones.

  Anne felt herself getting drowsy. She felt safe here with James. She’d only just met him but still she felt more and more at ease with each passing moment. It was so unlike with her husband, she thought.

  Her husband! She jerked up, and awake.

  “I have to leave,” she said. He body felt strange. He’d used her up and now she had to discover again how to walk as she searched around the shop for each piece of clothing.

  “Which way is it from here to the main road?”

  James was confused, but he gave her directions. When she got to the front door of the shop, she found him standing there, questioning.

  “When will I see you again?” he asked.

  Anne felt she couldn’t answer truthfully. She didn’t truthfully know the answer. She couldn’t see how she could possibly see him again without great risk to both their lives, but then she also couldn’t bear the thought that this could be true.

  “You’ll see me every time you close your eyes,” she said, with a put-on ease that surprised her nearly as much as it embarrassed her. And then she slipped out the door before he could kiss her and her body could force her to stay.

  -

  She arrived back at the palace with barely time to speak to Sarah and change from the commoner’s clothes before the rest of the servants would arrive for her nightly ritual.

  “What took you so long?” Sarah asked. Anne told her she got lost and she had to find directions, but Sarah was not fooled.

  “You couldn’t!” was all she could say at first.

  “Please tell me what you are referring to,” Anne replied, with an artificial formality that probably only gave her away further.

  “Milady, you can’t. Who was it, even?”

 
Before Anne could reply she shook her head and stepped back.

  “No – no, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  Anne did not argue further, and Sarah did not further comment until they had her prepared for the other servants. In silence, Sarah worked quickly, and they found themselves with another minute to themselves before the throng arrived.

  “You can’t,” Sarah said. Her attitude now was less accusing or outraged. She looked only sad for her friend, and understanding of the unfortunate truth behind her words.

  “Of course not. Of course, I can’t.”

  Anne heard herself say the words, and let the tears come. She was supposed to be despondent, so they would offer no cause for suspicion for the servants now coming in the door to prepare her. And when they had gone she lay on her side and tried the best she could to remember James’ face, and commit it to her mind, so that she wouldn’t forget over the lifetime ahead of her without him.

  -

  Anne kept to Sarah’s good advice for a solid week. When they were alone together they did not speak of it, but Anne noticed that Sarah was treating her more gently than she generally did. But Anne found that the words kept building up in her, and finally they overflowed.

  “I don’t know if it is possible for me not to see him again,” she said finally, in a moment when they were alone between arranged engagements with a visiting viceroy. Sarah knew immediately what she was speaking of.

  “Milady, men have a way of taking good judgement from us. It’s our duty as women to take it back.”

  Anne laughed a little. The joke was intended to lighten the mood between them, and it succeeded, but only a little.

  “I wouldn’t be endangering you, would I? Is this your concern?”

  Sarah seemed insulted by the implication. She slipped into acting.

  “No, sir,” she said, “how could I have known? She asked for time alone and I granted it to her. I was only doing my duty. I wouldn’t have wanted to disrespect her wishes, for that would be nearly like disrespecting yours, and I could never do that.”