The prince stared at me as if stunned by my fury. “I have no doubt of that, but…”
“Oh, give it up, Arles.” My sister strolled from the shadows. “You’re going to make her your princess, and everyone knows it.”
He frowned at her. “This is a private conversation, Isa. Go back to the ballroom.”
“You’re not emperor yet, Arles. You can’t order me to do a damned thing.” She sauntered over to face me. “So you’re going to be Empress of Tor.”
I stepped back warily, instincts howling at the feverish glitter in her moonlit eyes. “And you’ll be queen of Swanhilde.”
“Of course. I’m the oldest, raised to rule. I spent hours at our mother’s side, learning all the boring bullshit she cared to teach me. While you…” She curled a lip. “You played combat games with the handsome prince. The girl everyone loved. Empress Gisel. He should have been mine!”
The stiletto dropped from her elegant sleeve to fill her hand in a length of gleaming steel. She lunged, driving it at my chest.
Chapter Seven
I had no idea she was so fast.
But Galon had spent years teaching me to fight. I swept up my manacled wrists to wrap the chain around the knife, dragging it out of her hand and into mine as I pivoted aside. I slammed my elbow into her chin, sending her staggering backward. My elbow jangled viciously.
Isa shook off the impact. “You bitch,” she snarled, and barreled toward me.
For a moment I was tempted to use the knife I’d just taken away from her. But I couldn’t bring myself to hurt my sister, so I hooked one foot between hers and tripped her. She fell right into the bench, her head hitting the silacaslate seat with a thunk. I winced. My sister tumbled limply backward, out cold.
“Gisel…” Arles broke off.
The prince was on his feet, but he stopped in mid-step, an expression of disbelief on his face. He looked down at the bloody blade protruding from his chest, mouthed a curse and dropped to his knees.
Behind Arles, the captain of his bodyguard jerked the sword from the prince’s chest and flicked the gore from the blade. He smiled in demonic satisfaction and raised his weapon over Arles’s head.
I flung myself into a roundhouse kick that cracked into the assassin’s chin. Something snapped, sharp as a breaking stick. His body spun from the force of the blow to collapse in a boneless pile, his head twisted on his broken neck.
I knelt beside the prince. Blood soaked his dress uniform from the wound that pierced the left side of his chest. “Arles!”
“Missed his stroke… the traitorous fuck,” my lover panted, rolling over onto his belly as he clawed his attacker’s fallen sword into his hand. “Hit the lung, missed the heart.” Arles pushed himself onto hands and knees, still holding the weapon. Sweat gleamed on his white face. He coughed, his breath bubbling wetly.
Oh, not good.
“Where the hell… are the rest of my guards?”
“Here, my Prince.” Two more agents streaked out of the dark, swords lifted. I leaped to meet the first, ignoring my manacles, the knife held in a fighter’s easy grip.
The traitor parried my blade and swung his own at my head. I threw out both arms, snapping the chain tight between them, deflecting the blade. We spun apart and began to circle.
“Damn it, Gisel, get out of here!” Arles reeled to his feet, one hand clamped to his wounded chest, the other gripping the sword. He bared his teeth and charged the remaining guard before he could skewer me from behind. The man spun away to meet him.
Even badly wounded, Arles had the strength of the gene-sculpted warrior he was. You’d never know he was hurt as we engaged the traitors, blades ringing in the relentless rhythm of attack and parry. Sweat rolled down my arms and thighs as I labored to keep my opponent from gutting me with his longer blade.
Arles growled like a leopard, ignoring the blood rolling down his side. His foe charged him, and he spun aside, striking even as he whirled. His blade chopped into the traitor’s chest as if he were slicing soft cream. Choking on a scream, the assassin collapsed.
My opponent’s gaze flicked toward them, and I saw my opening. I lunged inside his guard and slashed my blade across his throat. Blood sprayed hot across my face. He reeled back from my attack, clutching his throat as he stared at me in betrayal. His knees gave under him, and he toppled, eyes going empty and fixed.
“Where’s the fourth guard?” I growled, spinning to stand back to back with Arles.
“That’s a very good question.” Together, we scanned the darkness.
Voices rose in shouts, and we tensed, staring toward the rustling bushes and listening to the click of running boots on the silicaslate path.
“Arles!” Ragnar shouted, emerging from the bushes with a crowd of agents. One of them was the missing bodyguard, who’d evidently gone for help.
“We seem to have traitors in our midst,” Arles growled, not lowering his weapon as he glared at the agents. “Evidently Isa has bought at least some of them off.”
“Again?” Ragnar swore so viciously, I knew he was thinking of his dead wife, who’d also been attacked by her own bodyguards. She, however, had died. “I thought our security practices were supposed to catch traitors!”
“Yes, well, apparently they didn’t work.” Arles swayed, going ghost-pale. “Oh.”
I hooked one arm around his waist, bracing him against my side. “Your Excellency, the prince is hurt. One of the guards ran him through.”
The emperor’s eyes widened before he rapped out an order. “Doctor Cavo, get your ass up here!”
The guards parted to allow a man in court garb to step through, towing a trauma unit. “I’m here, Sire.”
Arles lowered his weapon and sat down on the bench to let the doctor treat his wound, though he kept a wary eye on the agents. They appeared not to notice as two of them slapped forcecuffs on Isa, who still lay unconscious in the grass. The others fanned out to search the gardens.
Ragnar and I watched as the doctor coaxed Arles to lie down on the bench so the trauma unit could treat him. The device moved to hover a centimeter from his wounded ribs, humming and chirping as it coaxed the bleeding to stop so he could be transported to surgery.
I was vaguely aware that cambots circled us like gnats, but they were the least of my worries. I was terrified I was about to lose Arles.
The prince ignored both the doctor and the cameras in favor of briefing his father on the attack. “Gisel saved my life,” he told the emperor. “They’d have finished me if she hadn’t helped fight them off.” Arles’s vivid gaze flicked to me. “Wearing manacles and armed with nothing more than a knife. She killed the one who stabbed me before he could take my head.”
Ragnar glanced at me, brows lifted. “My spies were right. You can fight, can’t you?”
“That’s not all she can do,” Arles said, reaching past the doctor to grab one of my manacles. He pressed his thumb to a gemstone, and the collar and chains fell away with a musical rattle. I stared at him, startled. “To hell with the politics, my enemies, and my pride. Marry me, Gisel.”
“What?” I gaped at him helplessly. “But…”
“When Isa went for you with that knife, I felt my heart stop.” He ran his thumb over the thin flesh of my wrist, tracing the fine blue vein there. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. “You are everything I have ever wanted, everything I love. Life without you wouldn’t be living at all.” Staring into my eyes, he breathed, “Please, Gisel, please. Marry me.”
And I said the only thing I could say. “Yes.”
Chapter Eight
The wedding took six months to plan, largely because Arles insisted on an affair grand enough to make clear how much he valued me. In the meantime, Ragnar and my mother waged a ferocious media campaign to transform me from the butt of sexual jokes into the royal heroine who’d saved the prince from assassins.
For once, the media cooperated, interviewing damn near every member of the Valkyrie’s crew, along with the
grateful residents of various planets we’d helped protect from would-be invaders. Never mind that we’d been well paid to do so.
By the time my friends and allies were finished singing my praises, I barely recognized the heroic woman warrior they’d turned me into. Arles and I found ourselves the stars of an interplanetary romance that had become a mass obsession in the Empire.
No less than four different BioVids were produced, but none of them had a damned thing to do with reality.
Still, the end result was exactly what Ragnar intended. None of his political foes dared say a word against either of us for fear of suffering the wrath of the entire Empire.
I doubted this golden haze of political stardom would last, but I planned to enjoy it while it did.
Isa was charged with conspiring to assassinate an imperial heir. She could have faced the death penalty, had a panel of doctors not ruled her mentally ill. Luckily, the therapy seemed to work. During my weekly visits to the Imperial Center for Mental Health, she seemed much calmer, no longer the shrill psychotic who’d tried to kill me.
Her doctors believed the pressure of life as the royal heir was responsible for her illness, and suggested removing her from the line of succession. My mother readily agreed and declared me the heir to the throne. She and Ragnar then started work on a treaty to bring Swanhilde into the Torrean Empire.
Arles’s brother, Jarrat, finally obtained the divorce from Isa he’d wanted for years. He promptly started enjoying his new sexual freedom with a parade of exotic beauties from around the Empire.
Meanwhile, Arles and I did a great deal of smiling and a great many interviews. By the time the day for the wedding arrived, I was ready to kidnap him, drag him aboard the Valkyrie, and flee to the most remote world we could find.
But since I knew the cambots would probably track us down, I resisted the impulse.
* * *
Our wedding day arrived in a sensory assault of color, music and glittering candlelight. The palace throne room was barely recognizable under drifts of rare red roses, shipped all the way from Earth and arranged in exquisite Elderkind urns older than Earth’s pyramids. Every breath I took was scented with perfume from exotic petals.
Thousands of guests from Odin knew how many planets watched as Emperor Ragnar presided over the ceremony in his iridescent robes of state. I barely heard his Imperial blessing of our union, too busy gazing helplessly at my impossibly handsome groom.
A rainbow of military honors glinted on Arles’s broad chest, dazzling against the somber, dark blue fabric of his dress uniform jacket. He’d worn his azure hair loose around those powerful shoulders, emeralds glinting from braided locks on either side of his strong, warrior’s face.
But none of that gemstone glitter could match the happiness blazing from his eyes.
Arles and I repeated oaths of love and fealty to one another before he gave me a kiss so passionate I knew it would lead every vid cast in the Empire for a week.
We then had to endure a reception ball and the attentions of a swarm of cambots. I smiled until my cheeks went numb, and Arles visibly fidgeted with the need to get me to himself. I was chatting up the ambassador from Earth when the prince’s control broke.
“Excuse me, sir. I need to borrow my bride for a few days,” Arles growled, and swept me into his arms, along with several meters of white nanosilk skirt. He carried me out as I called hasty goodbyes to the laughing guests, my lace veil swirling in our wake. How he avoided tripping on my train, I will never know.
* * *
“I thought we’d never escape that lot,” the prince growled, kicking the door to his chambers closed as he swept me inside. He wasn’t even breathing hard, despite carrying the combined weight of me and my wedding gown down half a kilometer of palace hallways.
He put me down on my jeweled high heels, and I got busy trying to untangle myself from the gown’s extravagant, pearl-encrusted skirt. “Yes, well, I don’t think I’m ever going to escape this dress.”
Arles gave me a wolfish grin. “Why don’t I help you with that?”
I lifted a brow at him as I wrestled layers of stubborn fabric. The thin, diamond bangles he’d given me rang together with every tug. “According to the Newsies, you do have a talent for getting women out of their clothes.”
“A skill I’ll be restricting to you from now on.”
“Good to hear.”
Moving around behind me, he kicked my nanosilk train aside and went to work on the gown’s countless tiny fasteners. It took him ten minutes and some quiet swearing, but he got them open. I squirmed out of the tight bodice and began hauling the dress over my head.
Arles stepped around me and sprawled in a chair to watch, shamelessly enjoying my struggles.
I finally tunneled free of the gown and its layers of petticoats, then pulled off my veil before wrestling the whole pile over to my new walk-in closet. I stuffed the lot into the auto-fold hamper, which devoured them with a series of chirps. A moment later the unit huffed a blast of jasmine-scented air and spat them all out onto one of the closet shelves, neatly cleaned, packaged and vacuum-sealed.
“Mmm,” Arles purred. I turned to find him eyeing me with predatory interest. A heavy, full-length mirror in a massive, gildwood frame stood just behind his chair, and I realized why he was staring. I now wore only a Victorian corset beaded with pearls, a pair of tiny lace panties, and jeweled high heels that made my legs look endless in white lace stockings. A long pearl necklace draped over my corset-mounded cleavage to swing at my waist.
Even I had to admit the view wasn’t bad.
“I knew you’d look luscious in that corset.” It had been yet another gift from him, having arrived just in time for the wedding gown’s final fitting. The designer had not been happy with either of us for the addition.
Sprawled in the armchair in his dress uniform, Arles gave me a buccaneering smile. “Come here.” An erection looking damn near as thick as my wrist bulged beneath his snug black uniform trousers.
“Well now,” I purred. “Whatever do you have in mind?”
“I haven’t tied you up and fucked you hard in three whole days.” There hadn’t been time. “I find I’m feeling… neglected.”
“Can’t have that.” I sauntered toward him, strutting just a bit on those ridiculous heels.
Arles rose to his feet, lithe as a panther, and pulled the seal of his dress tunic. I watched him shrug out of the jacket, powerful muscle bunching and releasing under a silken thatch of iridescent hair. Bracing his booted feet apart, he tossed the tunic aside and waited for me.
My tiny panties were already wet through. Not that it mattered. They didn’t have a prayer once he got those big hands on them.
Smiling up into his hungry eyes, I stepped into his arms. Just as I expected, he slid his palms over my hips, found the fragile waistband, and tugged. The lace snapped, and he dropped what was left of my panties on the floor.
His mouth came down on mine, hot, wet and famished, in a ruthless kiss of possession and need. I kissed him back, opening for the teasing thrust of his tongue, the nibbling capture of my lip as his hands slid up, cupping my corseted breasts.
When we finally tore away to breathe, Arles smiled down at me, the animal heat in his gaze tempered by tenderness. “Wife,” he breathed.
I smiled dreamily up at him. “Husband.” Neither word had ever sounded so sweet.
Chapter Nine
Arles turned me to face the mirror and wrapped his strong arms around my waist. With a sigh, I leaned my head back against his chest, admiring the contrast between us. I’ve got a mercenary’s body, lean with fighting muscle, but dressed in that corset I looked as lush as any courtesan.
“Take hold of the mirror,” Arles rumbled in my ear.
Lifting a brow, I met his gaze in our reflection and reached upward, meaning to take hold of the carved posts at the top of the mirror’s heavy gilt frame. Before I could touch it, my arms jerked forward until my diamond bracelets clicked agains
t the posts. I gave my wrists a tug, but the bracelets appeared stuck fast to the mirror.
“They’re force cuffs!” I stared at him over one shoulder. “You gave me diamond force cuffs as a wedding gift?”
He grinned like a wolf at a lamb. “It does seem so.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Now it was his turn to blink. “Oh?”
“I was afraid we were going to start having boring married sex.”
Green eyes narrowed. “I’ll show you boring.”
I smirked. “Oh, dear. Am I in trouble?”
“Yes.” His hand landed on my ass in a swat that made me bounce on my jeweled heels.
I glared. “That hurt!”
“It was supposed to.” He eyed my butt. “Now you have a pink handprint on one lovely cheek. I do believe it needs company.”
“Don’t you…”
Six hard swats landed on my butt until I danced and yowled, squirming from side to side in a vain attempt to avoid the stinging blows.
“Now that,” he announced at last in a tone of relish, “is a really pretty shade of pink.”
I glowered at him, butt flaming. “I married a brute.”
“Poor thing.” Arles slid an arm around my waist and reached down to finger my sex. I caught my breath at the luscious penetration. I hadn’t known I was that wet. “You do suffer so.” His teeth flashed. “Or at least, you’re going to.”
“Oh, good.” He added another finger to the one probing my sex, and my eyes closed in delight. “I hear suffering is good for the soul.”
“Now that you’ve brought it up…” He cupped both breasts, still covered by the corset. To my astonishment, the pearl-encrusted fabric moved, sliding downward to bare my nipples even as it raised the soft mounds.
I blinked. Of course, a nanosilk garment could assume different styles depending on its programming, but somehow I hadn’t expected this. “You rigged my corset?”
“I certainly did.” He caught my long pearl necklace in both hands and started dragging the strand back and forth across my stiff pink nipples. “Backfired on me, though. All through the reception, I kept thinking about what I could do to you with it. That’s why I stayed behind you all night -- I had a hard-on like a blast cannon I was hiding behind your skirts.”
Chain of Kisses Page 5