A Deal to Be Done
Page 3
The Beast said nothing, but the corner of his mouth twitched with amusement.
Nicolette scowled at him. “Do you not imagine me capable of such a murderous act, Beast?”
“I imagine you capable of anything you set your mind to, lass.”
“Then you are awfully trusting,” Nicolette said, a glower plain in her voice, “to grant me sanctuary in your castle and in your bed. Perhaps that will be your downfall.”
“Perhaps,” the Beast allowed, though his smile, sly and small, never faltered. He regarded her, a look of gentle assessment. “But the old man died of his excitement, did he not?”
He had, though Nicolette could hardly call it even that. The memory of his horrid, laboured breathing came back to her then, his greasy, grasping hands upon her skin. Dirt under his ragged nails. A rotten stench to his breath.
And when he had her bare in his bed, all of her, bought and owned, he could barely plant a yardstand, that wrinkled little prick stirring like a maggot between her thighs before his heart beat its last.
“Perhaps he did,” Nicolette said. She tried to make her voice sound strong and steady, though she was doubtful of her success. “So best not excite you, Beast, for that excitement may take you also.”
And Nicolette was right to be doubtful: the Beast only laughed. “I fear I have a stronger disposition, lass.”
But the light in his eyes, though teasing, was enough to draw Nicolette back to herself. “Oh yes, Beast,” she said, on the studied flutter of her lashes. “You are so awfully, terribly strong.”
That light lit with a deeper warmth as his mouth crooked anew, a silent laugh. Laughing at her. The Beast seemed often to be laughing at her. Though there was no cruelness in it. Only kind amusement.
And it only seemed fair that if she was to be his amusement, then Nicolette might use him for her own amusement in turn.
“I do not wish to speak any more of the village or of my rotting corpse of a husband. I wish to speak of prettier things.”
The Beast took her hand and pulled her to her feet, pulled her to him, his hands settling low on her hips. “I think that you wish to speak not at all, lass.”
“And perhaps you are right.” With nimble, eager fingers, Nicolette unlaced the Beast and loosed him from his leathers. Gave him one teasing, testing stroke, encouraging his strengthening. Then she hitched herself up onto the library’s grand table, hitched up her skirts, and laid herself out, all on display. “Come, Beast, and we will see what kind of man you are. No words required.” She hooked his hip with her heel and pulled him, this time, to her.
The Beast came willingly. “I know well what kind of man I am — and that is no man at all.” He grasped her ankle, firm and sure, his finger and thumb meeting with a thrilling ease, and slung her leg over his shoulder as he bent to touch his lips to hers. “But what kind of woman are you, lass?”
“A wanton,” Nicolette whispered into his kiss, truth in it — in that moment at least. A truth for the Beast, and for him alone. “An awful strumpet. A trull for that prick of yours, Beast, all hard and thick inside of me. I want it. So badly. Give it to me. Please.”
The Beast gave her what she asked. She felt it, the slide of his wonderful, wondrous prick into her warmth, the most delicious of stretches. Oh, how ready she was for a tumbling of the finest order, fast and hard and full of fire.
Nicolette let free a broken groan and dug her nails into the Beast’s back, urging him faster, stronger, harder. But this time, unlike all the other times before — and for what reason she knew not — the Beast would not be urged.
Instead, he took her gently. So gently that Nicolette could hardly stand it. He gazed deep into her eyes as he tormented her with pleasure, with his fingers and his tongue and his prick. And Nicolette had known many things from a tumbling, but never tenderness. And that tenderness unsettled her. Terribly. She tried to turn her face away from him, for she did not want the Beast to see the sudden, hot burn of tears that had sprung in her eyes, but the Beast would not let her be.
He took her hot, flushed cheeks in his hands. “Sweet lass,” he said, his voice gentle, his touch gentler still. He kissed her then, deep and long, and the sharp nip of his teeth made it better and worse.
He rocked into her, such softness and care, and he would not be hurried, no matter how Nicolette prompted and prodded, urged and admonished. He would take her thus, she realised, or he would take her not at all. And so Nicolette shivered upon the feeling of her helpless surrender, and she gave herself to him, to his pleasure and to his whim, as he gave himself to her, as he gazed at her as though she were some precious treasure herself, like the diamonds at her wrists and at her neck, like the jewels twined around the finger of her heart.
She tumbled into a sweet and fluttering release with a sigh upon her lips, and her lips still tingling from the Beast’s sharp kisses.
Nicolette found, after, that she often happened upon the Beast in the library, and she found also that the library remained, then, a less forbidding place. When she wished to be outside, under open skies and in fresh air, outside she was. But when the worsening, wintering weather increasingly forced her indoors, the library’s shadows did not seem so deep nor so unwelcoming, and the fire that always burned high in the hearth was a welcome oasis of warmth.
As it was on a day when the rain fell from a grey sky like musket fire, and the wind was a torment, and Nicolette sought sanctuary in the library once more.
The Beast, where he sat at the grand table, looked up as she entered, sure enough, but his eyes seemed somewhere else entirely.
A quill sat before him, sharpened and ready to be dipped, but the nib was dry yet, and the Beast’s fingertips bore no stain of ink. Instead, a book lay open at his elbow, not halfway through its length, as though he had been reading and set the book aside.
“What story is it?” Nicolette asked as she took a seat by him. She had no thought to make out the words, but the drawings on the yellowed pages had been rich in colour once upon a time. “It looks an old one.”
“An old one indeed,” the Beast said. He blinked at her, as though awakening from a memory, or from the deepest of thoughts. “A tale told since the beginning. A folk tale. A fairy tale, they call them. Of a brave and beautiful girl, and of the lover she saved from a terrible enchantment.”
The Beast tipped closed the book, so that the cover showed.
“Yes, it does look awfully old,” Nicolette said, her voice, for some reason she knew not, caught at the edge of a whisper. “And very fine.”
Fine it was: the leather rich, gone supple with age and deep in colour, the edge of each delicate page gilded, the letters on the spine a swirl of incomprehensible gold.
The Beast pushed the book towards her with an idle finger, though the look on his face was not idle at all. “Should you wish to read it, lass?” he asked. “You may take it if you like.”
Nicolette’s mouth twisted, and she did nothing to stop it. “I do not want your fairy tale, Beast,” she snapped. “I am not some innocent little lass.”
“No,” the Beast said on a huff of soft laughter. “You quite plainly are not. But still, would you like the book?”
He asked no other question, but the accursed cocking of his head conveyed one all the same.
“I— I do not know my letters,” Nicolette admitted. And those words brought a flash of shame upon her, hot and fierce, no pleasure in it.
“Many do not,” the Beast said, easy and true.
“But I should. I tried,” Nicolette said, “when I was a lass, when my father still lived and we had the coin for lessons. I tried, but I could not make sense of what the other children could. They called me a clot, for a clot is what I was.” She reached out and pressed her hand to the book’s cover, to the soft leather and the unknowable letters. “What I still am.”
“No, lass,” the Beast said on the shaking of his head. “No.” He pulled her into his lap, and ran his hands through her curls, setting them to tumbled
disarray. “You are no simpleton.”
“But I am,” Nicolette protested. “I am nothing but a clot and a harlot. A lowly tavern girl who does not even know her letters.”
“You would not be here, with me, in this castle, if you were such things,” the Beast said. “Your menfolk fear nothing more than they fear cleverness. You were too clever for them, and they hated you for it.”
Nicolette’s laugh was a snorting, bitter thing. “They hated me for simply being, Beast. But still they wanted me, and they hated me all the more for that.”
The Beast reached out to touch her beautiful ring, to spin it once around her finger, and Nicolette — she could not look away from his sparking golden gaze.
“What is it that you wish for, Nicolette?” he asked, his voice the barest hush. “What is the truest wish of your heart?”
From somewhere deep within, Nicolette summoned her courage. She tore her eyes away from the Beast, from his safety and his surety, looked to the grand library with its countless volumes, the exorbitant warmth of the high hearth, the sheer, unfathomable luxury of it all.
“I wish to be a fine lady,” Nicolette said, and to the Beast she looked once more. “A fine lady always dripped in jewels and silks, with men falling over themselves to please me. And— and I do not know if I wish for another husband,” she said, her voice growing stronger. “Indeed, I think perhaps that I do not. But if I did, I would wish for him to be rich and handsome. And I would want for him to dote upon me. And I would wish him be not old nor ugly nor cruel.” She reached, then, for the beautiful book and held it tight to her breast. “And I do want this book, Beast, and…”
“And?” the Beast prompted, though the truth — and the truth of her heart — seemed to her both bare and plain: the Beast already knew.
Still, Nicolette met his gold-gleaming gaze, held it fast. “And I wish to be able to read it,” she said.
A Day of Lessons
Nicolette was to have a tutor.
“Willeme, is his name,” the Beast said. “He is my land agent in the Capital, but he arrives with the middle-day to aid me in some affairs of the estate. He will teach you your letters, after, when he has the time.” The Beast smirked a touch, as if some unvoiced thought amused him. Then he said, “Do be gentle with him, lass.”
Be gentle with him. Pah!
Nicolette waited in the library, glowering at the doorway.
Be gentle with him. A tutor. Some horrid old man with white hair and bedraggled whiskers, clad in black robes, all stained and stinking of sweat.
Nicolette let her hands become fists, her gall rising, repulsion and anger as one.
She would punish the Beast for this. She would lash him to his fine bedstead and she would ride him for an age, take all of her pleasure, a thousand times over, while never letting him spend his. She should enjoy that, making him groan and beg and plead. Or perhaps he would be too stubborn to beg.
Perhaps she would have to strike him instead.
She should not mind that either, she thought, for the Beast had a lovely arse. She might set her teeth to his buttocks before she spanked him. Make him yelp. Make him—
The grand library door swung open upon its hinges, and in strode her tutor.
Nicolette blinked at him a moment, uncomprehending.
For her tutor was clad in black, true enough, but in leathers, not robes. His face was clean shaven, not a whisker to behold.
But what confounded her the most? He was young. Her age, as she reckoned it. A year or two older at most.
Though such concessions mattered little, for young or not, he was an unpleasant looking man, with hair as dark as his eyes were pale. His shoulders were broad though, stocky, and his arms well-muscled, clear even through the ill-fitting jerkin he wore. His nose had been broken a time or two and never properly set. His mouth was a grim line, no humour in it.
Nicolette hated him. Utterly and immediately.
“You are Nicolette?” he said, sparing her but a fleeting glance as he stepped past her, as he set down the stack of pamphlets he carried, a slate and some chalks, a few scraps of paper and a freshly sharpened quill. “Come, we must get started while we still have light of day. Candles will do you no good while you learn the shape of things.”
Nicolette rose from her seat. With an icy glare, she arranged herself so that her magnificent velvet gown was presented to its fullest effect, so that the rosy pink of her exquisite parure sparkled despite the dreary autumn light. “I am Madame Nicolette,” she said, her voice as sharp as the Beast’s claws. “And I am your Master’s ward. You may not speak to me so lowly.”
“A widowed ward?” Willeme said, snorting, but he sketched a bow in any case. “Then as it pleases you, my lady.”
There was no sincerity in his tone, no suggestion of contrition. Perhaps Nicolette may have to take her hand to his arse too. It would be a sturdy arse, from the build of him. She wondered that it might turn as pink as her gown.
Willeme pulled out a chair with a shrieking, infuriating scrape. “Shall we begin?”
What riled Nicolette the most, she quickly found, was no matter how infuriating his manner, Willeme was also an able tutor. More than able.
Even by the end of their first lessons, the letters he traced, the letters he made her trace, took shape in her mind readily. And she even found a little sense in them: more, certainly, than she ever had as a lass, when they had always seemed both upside-down and roundabout.
And with every passing lesson, those shapes became more familiar and more true, until Nicolette could, in turn, shape sounds from them, and speak the words from a slate that those sounds formed.
She had not yet read the Beast’s fairytale, her growing skills no match for its length, but one day, when the day was already long, Willeme set a book before her. It was hardly thicker than her smallest finger, the letters on the pages large, the pictures larger. He said nothing of the sort, but it was clear to Nicolette that the book Willeme wished her to read was a simple folio intended for only the most inexperienced of scholars.
She burned hot with indignation at the sight of it, and a spat of such heated anger flared within her. “I will not read this!” she exclaimed, standing, her chair toppling with a screech and a thump. “I am a woman grown, and you insult me so? I will set the Beast upon you, Willeme. He will bite your hide bloody!”
For a long moment, Willeme did not respond. He simply regarded her with his pale, placid eyes, his grim mouth set so flat and dour. He did not seem intimidated by her bluster. Not in the slightest. “I have found,” he said, maddeningly level, unruffled yet, “that despite his name, my master is no unthinking beast. I need have no fear for my hide. And I have also found—” He broke off to pick up the folio she had so carelessly flung away and opened it to the first page. “I have also found,” he began again, “that despite appearances, this little book is a good tale, well told. And if you do not wish to read it, I shall.”
Nicolette snatched the book from his hands. She felt contrary and out of sorts. Willeme could rile her as no man ever had. “I will read it,” she said. “I will read your silly little book.”
And so she did, haltingly, painstakingly, from first word to last.
When she was done, Willeme considered her yet another moment, the barest hint of a crook to his mouth, and a warmth in his eyes that was not bare. “Well done, my lady,” he said.
“I do not require your praise,” Nicolette snapped, hating in turn how much that praise seemed to warm her. “Nor, indeed, do I wish for it.”
“Well,” Willeme said, his voice as monotone as ever, “we do not always get what we wish for.”
After, Willeme left Nicolette to write out her letters while he went to search for some dusty tome in the deepest of the library’s shadows. Writing her letters with no intent but to simply write them was always a task that wearied Nicolette, but so late in the day, while the fire burned high and the light outside dimmed, with the library so warm and so close…
And when she woke, it was to utter darkness beyond the windowpanes, and to the Beast’s amused regard.
“Did your lessons go well, lass?”
Nicolette blinked up at him. Her lips formed a soft smile, the haze of her dreams still upon her. “I fell asleep,” she told him.
A huff of a laugh. “So I see.” He took the chair beside her, the one where Willeme had sat. And he took her mouth, a deep, lush kiss, full of promise — the press of his tongue, the bite of his sharp teeth. “Do you like your tutor?” he asked.
Any smile that Nicolette’s lips had held faded fast. As did her sleepful satisfaction. “He is a bore,” she said. “I hate him.”
Another laugh. A knowing one. A smile, small and sly, alongside. “Willeme is a faithful servant to this castle,” the Beast said, “just as his father before him, and his father before that.”
“And that matters little,” Nicolette said. “For he is still a hateful bore. And he is so rude to me, Beast, and so curt!”
“It is only his manner,” the Beast said. “He is in that blunt manner to you as he is to all others.” But then the Beast stopped a moment, a turn of thought to his brow. “No,” he said. “No, perhaps Willeme is not. For I reckon that he has never met a lass quite like you.”
It was Nicolette’s turn to laugh. “There are many men who have never met a lass quite like me.” She fixed the Beast with a look, coy and entreating. “Many men who have never had a lass quite like me.” For she found, suddenly, that her annoyance, simmering and hot, had boiled over into some other manner of hot passion. “But you have had me, Beast. Should you not like to have me again?”
Nicolette awaited no answer — simply pulled up her skirts and straddled him where he sat.
The Beast, obliging, reached back to steady her, his big hands spread across the breadth of her bottom. As a reward for his good behaviour, Nicolette rolled her hips a time or two as she settled, so that her quim pressed down upon the pleasing bulge in his leathers — the bulge she could feel thickening even through her smallclothes.