Augustus hunted just enough to feed us, while I grew a garden.
I had two children, and my daughter was an elf. A hundred years later, there was no one to gossip over that. By day, I raised her and her dark-haired faery brother, both of them as loved and free in their little world as any children had ever been.
We no longer made love in the real world. We had too much work that we enjoyed doing.
At night, we lay together in our bed, and fell into a dream that was just as real to us as shooting an arrow or milking a goat.
More, perhaps.
We knew, that first night, when everyone in the Sun Palace led us into the Hall of Mirrors. Julia was practically squealing with glee (to be joined before long by Louisa), and Josef and Charles were with their wives, everyone dressed in the very finest gowns by a proud-looking Madame Bertin and her bevy of favorite assistants who had finally done her the courtesy of joining her in this world.
At the end of the long hall, reflected in the tall mirrors, he was waiting.
A hundred years. It isn’t so very long, after all.
“Axel…!” I could hardly breathe. “Axel!”
I ran to him and I dragged Augustus with me, which I don’t think he minded at all, and soon we were all crushed in an embrace. We held each other so tight that when I woke up the next morning, I had real bruises.
“You are truly the Sword of the King,” Augustus said. “What can we ever do to repay you for such a sacrifice?”
“What a question, my lord,” Axel said.
“I am at your mercy,” Augustus said, arching a brow.
“As am I,” I said.
“You’ve waited a very long time to be at my mercy, haven’t you? What do you want me to do to you?”
I wet my lips. He was as beautiful as ever. As fierce as ever. As dear as ever.
In this world, we belonged to him fully.
“What don’t I wish you to do to me?” I breathed.
“Tonight, I will make you speak the words,” he said. “But let’s feast and dance and…this is truly a night to celebrate.”
The Sun Palace seemed to come alive in a new way, with fireworks and food that seemed to go on forever, but as the court settled into sleeping off drinks or simply vanishing into the ether, we all walked under the moonlight to the Lady’s Treat.
“I watched over you here for a century,” Axel said. “Now, in this place, I am your master. I ask you again, what do you want me to do to you, Rose?”
I flushed. Yes, after all this time I still could flush at the idea of voicing such desires. “I…I miss the way it feels when you’re both making love to me.”
“You want us both to fuck you?”
“Yes…”
“Say the words, Rose.”
“Fuck me,” I whispered. “Both of you.”
“Who do you want to fuck you where?”
“I want Augustus to—“ I swallowed. “Augustus can take me from behind. I want to see your face, Axel. Tonight. And I think he does too.”
“Does this suit you, Axel?”
“Yes…for now,” he said.
“All right,” Axel said.
He sent us to the bedroom, with a series of polite after-yous, and then he shut the door. “Now I’ll tell you how it will go…take off your clothes. Both of you. Quickly, now. I’ve already waited a hundred years.” He snapped his fingers, and the little burst of force and the domineering look in his eyes made me quiver with such desperate yearning that I was almost tearing myself out of my dress.
The King’s Vine shifted around me, and reached for Augustus, and drew us together, lifting me up toward him. He put his hands on his thighs to support me and the vine kept tightening, pulling his stiff cock toward my ass, and as this happened, Azel walked over and lifted up my legs. I was mounted on him and the vine was still snaking around us. It pinned our hands at our sides.
“To the wall,” Axel said, holding my knees up while Augustus’ cock throbbed inside my nether hole. “But don’t let her go.”
Augustus walked backwards carefully until his back was against the wall.
There were restraints above us on the wall now that I hadn’t noticed before, but this was a dream and sometimes not everything was fixed, so maybe they hadn’t been there before anyway.
The vine let our left hands go, and Axel lifted them up and tied them together. Then the right. And all the while Augustus was deep inside me, filling me up, the sensation not quite pleasant but my wet sex suggested otherwise.
As Axel noted with a quick stroke of his finger down the slick cleft.
He licked his fingers. “I have missed the taste of you…so very much. And I have missed the feel of you. And tonight, I promise you, I won’t spare either of you any mercy at all.” As he said the last, he slammed his cock into me, while he was still gripping my legs, and I cried out with relief and intensity of emotion and the sweetest of agony.
“I’m going to fuck you, Rose, until you can barely walk. And then I’ll do the same to Augustus and he can protest all he likes, but I’ll gag him if he does. And by then I’m sure you’ll need to be fucked again, so he can fuck you while you pleasure my cock…and he must be rough with you, but you must be very gentle with me.”
“Oh…” I moaned and Augustus growled and Axel seemed like all the force and fire we had yearned for all these years.
“Will you like that, Rose?” Axel purred in my ear.
“Yes…”
“Augustus?” he said, more sharply. “Am I everything you’ve ever wanted?”
“Yes! Yes!” We both cried out now.
“I’ll never leave you again,” he said. “Every night, when you go to sleep, you will never escape the pleasures and tortures I will bring you.”
Of course, he didn’t need to ask, not really.
He already knew what we dreamed of. And in the Palace of the Sun that lived in our dreams, he could give it to us freely, where he lived on forever, and so did we.
Long after the real world forgets us, we will be there still.
Thank you for reading this book. I went a little darker than usual with this story and made myself cry. The story of Marie Antoinette and Versailles has always been one of my favorite moments in history and it always does me cry at the same time. I tried my best to do it justice within my magical world. Make sure to join my Facebook group or my mailing list so you don’t miss release dates and bonus stories.
This book is set in the same world (at a later time) as my Fairy Tale Heat series. If you haven’t read it yet, you can join my mailing list to get a FREE copy of The Goblin Cinderella! This romantic tale is a fan favorite in my Fairy Tale Heat series.
The first book in the Fairy Tale Heat series is Beauty and the Goblin King. Keep reading for a sample chapter following the cover gallery!
Original Cover Gallery
Is this a fairy tale retelling or a dark romance? It had elements of both. The single volumes of this series had illustrated covers that suited the fairy tale romance aspect better. I decided to go a different direction for the box set but I still think the illustrations are quite charming, with Marie-Rose’s outfits rendered beautifully by the artist, chisami!
Sample Chapter of Beauty and the Goblin King!
I was a girl when the goblin king first sent out his messages. Any young, unmarried woman willing to come to his castle would receive one gold piece for every night she spent there.
Everyone whispered about him. What did he want with them? Why was he asking for human girls?
The goblin king was a young man, who used to come to town sometimes, flashy with gold, riding a black horse, accompanied by his friends. They were ugly, noisy tricksters, everyone said. Dangerous.
But there was the matter of the gold.
After his message, he never came to town again. Neither did any of his subjects. They didn’t even trade for the most necessary items, like salt. It was as if all the goblins had vanished.
He was there, though. Desperate women trave
led to him from every town and village within several days’ journey, and they got their gold pieces. Sometimes one, sometimes a week’s worth. A single gold coin was a substantial sum, about the cost of a horse, or a wardrobe suitable for attracting a wealthy husband—enough to change a peasant’s stars.
Not that I knew anyone who had been to see him, personally, but the stories went around. The girls who went to see him never said much about the experience, except that he wanted exactly what you might expect him to want, but they didn’t complain either. It was one of the great mysteries of the region. Why had the young goblin king become a recluse, willing to rut any unmarried girl who comes to his doorstep, even if she isn’t much of a catch herself?
To me, there was an air of intrigue about the king. By the time I was a young woman myself, his situation had not changed. People used to speak about the goblins as if they had died out in the region. Many years ago, they said, you could see their bonfires from the road at night, hear their songs. The goblin maidens used to ride into town astride, they said, as naughty as the menfolk.
Maybe I liked the idea of them because I was always given to fancy, always lost in books.
Just around the corner from the large stone house where I lived with my father and three older sisters was the town’s subscription library, and I spent so much time there that I was frequently teased about it.
I was seventeen years old when I was browsing—Local Legends, the book was called. I came across an etching of the goblin king. He had a grinning mouth full of fangs, a mane of untamed dark hair, and two little horns on the top of his head.
Goblins live in small “kingdoms” which are more like what we would call clans, but they are usually very prosperous, due to their skill at sensing out gold and gems within the earth. In the later years of King Stephen’s rein, the goblin king of the Green Hollows disappeared into his cavernous realm, and as of this writing has not been seen since. The only visitors he accepts are young, unmarried human women. It is suspected that he is under a curse, and he and his subjects are barred from leaving the cavern, but perhaps we shall never know what the curse is. Men have made attempts to approach his cavern, but the entrance has vanished. Only a woman traveling alone can find it, and when she returns, her memory always seems a bit hazy.
I stared at the picture of the king for a long time.
It gave me a strange feeling somewhere in my stomach, a sort of twist that was not unpleasant. I was supposed to think he was ugly, but there was something about that grinning, fanged mouth that made me wish I could see him, just once.
“What are you doing?”
My oldest sister Clara snuck up on me that day, and grabbed the book from my hand. “Is that the goblin king? Respectable girls should keep their noses out of that naughty business.”
I grabbed the book back, shut it, and shelved it. “And you shouldn’t be looking over people’s shoulders when they're reading,” I said, but my cheeks were flushed. My fair cheeks had a way of betraying me at inconvenient times.
Ever since my mother died when were young, Clara had become the boss, but she was ten times bossier than Mother ever was. She looked at me like she had caught me getting fucked by our stableboy. “All this reading isn’t good for you,” she declared. “You’re starting to get ideas.”
“It was just a book, Clara. You’re ridiculous.”
“You ought to be out and about, finding yourself a husband, not locked up in here with books.”
I rolled my eyes and grabbed my cloak off the back of a nearby chair, resigned to coming home.
Clara led the way, her back as straight as a post, her hood always pointed straight ahead. Clara was never curious about anything.
I’d never tell anyone, but way deep down in my soul, sometimes I wondered what would happen if I took the long walk over the green hills to the door of his cave and knocked.
That is, until my father lost all his money, and my wonderings came true.
At first it just seemed like a bad year. When you’re a merchant, bad years come and go. Some of the grain in the storehouse spoiled. A ship was lost at sea. My father had to borrow from one of the lenders down on Crow Alley, which he hated to do because they charged higher interest. But this had happened a couple of times before when I was a wee thing.
The trouble was, my mother had been alive back then, and all my older sisters were wee things too. Now, they were young women. The twins were looking for husbands. Clara was settling in to be a proud old maid, intending to take care of Father and probably to inherit the house. They were horrified at the idea of looking poor and losing their prospects. They kept spending as if nothing had happened. Appearances must be maintained. Father hardly protested.
Then, came the fire. It started in the night, and swept through all the storehouses on the west side of the river. By morning, all was ashes. All of the goods waiting to be shipped south were lost.
Those months were a whirlwind of denial. My sisters couldn’t believe that we wouldn’t make it out of this. Father had insurance, didn’t he? The insurance company collapsed, unable to make all the payments. The lenders were at our door and soon they were sending very aggressive men to pound on our windows in the middle of the night.
We had to start pawning our things. All of the silver was sold off. The better sets of bedclothes. A few items of furniture. A few pieces of Mother’s jewelry that was not so much in style now—but that was especially painful, because it was associated with memories.
Servants were let go, and we had to start keeping the house tidy ourselves. One might expect Clara to like housework, since she was such a stickler for everything, but she didn’t. Not one bit. She was always trying to get the rest of us to do it for her. I believe I was the only one who actually liked washing and scrubbing. It was a good chance to daydream.
But we were still in trouble, dodging lenders in the street in some embarrassing instances. Marta and Trixie were obsessed with snagging husbands, and terrified that word would get out about just how poor we were.
Soon, we were down to the essentials, and there was no hiding it anymore. We had sold the horse and carriage. The only servant left was the cook, and that was mostly because she had been with us so long that she refused to leave, and would work for nothing but food and board. We were no longer invited to social functions, because everyone knew we were on the brink of losing all respectability, and we didn’t have the money to keep up.
We were about to lose the house.
It was time for a serious discussion.
“The dowries!” cried Trixie. “Our good name! Why couldn’t this have happened once we were safely married? I thought I had Danny Martin on the brink of proposal.”
“Someone would probably marry Sabela, even if she had no money.” Marta looked at me. I was the beauty of the family, so much so that Father called me “Beauty” most of the time. It had never sat comfortably with me; I didn’t especially want attention. Most of all, I didn’t like male attention. I could imagine nothing more stifling than to be a married woman in Fairhaven. Likely, my husband would be a merchant like Father, who would travel around, while I was home with the servants and babies.
“But Sabela never pays any attention to men.”
“Not real men. Just the men in books,” Clara said. “Books and tales. Like the goblin king.”
I flushed.
“One gold coin,” she said. “That would pay for this house.”
“But no one ever stays more than a few nights,” Trixie said. “He must get bored of them.” She was the closest to my age.
“Trixie, pay attention. One gold coin would shut up the lenders for a little while. Two gold coins, and we could buy some new clothes. People would think we were doing better again.”
“Maybe he won’t get bored of Sabela,” Clara said. “She’s too pretty. And even a few gold coins would buy us another month to think.”
I thought Father would snap at her that he would never, ever do such a thing to me. He w
ould never send away his youngest daughter to sleep with the goblin king.
“We can’t…ask that of Sabela.” He looked very tired, and heaved a sigh. His hand moved to reach for his pipe, and then withdrew when he realized there had not been money for tobacco.
“But what else do we do? Lose the house?” Clara said. “Lose the house where we grew up, where we were born, where Mother died?”
His eyes met mine.
I looked at the floor, flushing again. It was a funny thing about the goblin king. No, you didn’t go to him unless you needed money, so it wasn’t a thing respectable women were likely to do.
But if you were desperate—
It wasn’t viewed the same way as prostitution. He was a magical creature who never left his caverns. I would never see him again. He would never gossip about me. And then, there was the fact that the women never quite remembered what had happened.
“The goblin king only accepts young women who go willingly,” Father said.
“Last year, I caught Sabela looking at a picture of the goblin king in a book, and she turned just as red as she is now,” Clara said. “I think she might do it.”
“Clara!” I had never liked Clara much. But this was the first time I hated her.
“My beauty, is it true, that you would be amenable?” Father asked, tentative, but even in his eyes, I saw something like hope. Like he just wanted someone to solve his problems. He was getting old, his hair thinning, his eyes growing too weak to read, but I still felt a pang when I realized he would let me go.
“I…” My voice died as I saw them all looking at me, my selfish sisters. Why me? I thought. Why shouldn’t one of my older sisters go instead?
But then I realized that if one of them were to volunteer, a different sort of emotion would pass through me, and it would not quite be pleasant. I don’t really know why I wasn’t entirely terrified of the goblin king, why something called me to go to his door now and indeed, ever since I started to become aware of myself as a woman, but it did. I couldn’t deny that. I didn’t exactly want to go, but if someone must, it would be me. Not my sisters.
The Surrender of Sleeping Beauty Page 43