Snow (8 page)

Anais had noticed a cooling in the Snow Bitch’s attitude towards her betrothed. It was nothing blatant. Perhaps a tightening of the skin around her eyes or a thinning of her lips. A smile that never reached her eyes. There was wariness in Charming’s eyes too. A calculating expression on his face. They were nothing but polite in their dealings with each other, but Anais could sense a change.

When she mentioned it to Rui, he had laughed it off as pre-wedding nerves. “Nothing has changed,” he said, kissing her roughly. “We need to keep moving. Entice him to your bed. We are so close to attaining everything that we desire.” He sounded angry, and there was anger in the way he made love to her that night too. Still, at the end, she clasped him to her, his hair soft as silk beneath her hands.

“Must we do this?” she murmured. “I have no wish to lie with another.”

Rui gave a furious exclamation and rolled off her to sit on the edge of the bed. “Are we to go over this again and again?”

He was angry. Anais touched his shoulder, and he jerked upright and strode to the window, gazing out with a brooding expression on his face. Anais slid from the bed and wrapped her arms around him, pressing herself against his firm, warm body.

“She will be queen this time next week. What makes you so certain the first thing she does won’t be to banish you and me from the court? What makes you so certain that we will even have a year in which to act?”

He turned in her arms, and she stared into his face. “Charming will keep her so busy she won’t have time to think on you and me. She’ll be flat on her back.”

“She doesn’t like him. In fact, I begin to think she hates him.”

His hands dug painfully into her shoulders. “Don’t think,” he said and kissed her. “Trust me,” he said against her mouth.

“We could go away. Just you and I together,” said Anais. Rui became still in her arms, his mouth resting against her cheek. “I love you.” She had never said it out loud before.

“Go away together? And do what? Give up all this? Would you have me exchange a kingdom for a pigpen? If you love me, then you will do this for me.”

He had pushed her to the floor and made love to her again, more gently this time. It was only later, after he had left her, that Anais thought upon what he had said.

And what he hadn’t said.

He hadn’t said that he loved her.

Charming came across Anais in the rose garden where she sat upon an ornamental stone bench staring pensively at the soft green covering of new leaves with their promise of spring. Two of her women sat nearby idly chatting, their heads bent close together. All the talk was of the wedding in five days’ time. Anais’s head ached. She was weary of the tedium of the court and its fascination with the Snow Bitch and her Prince Charming. Weary of Rui’s demands. His words hammered her heart as relentlessly as his body hammered hers.

If you loved me, you would do this…

Yet love him she did. Despite her fears.

She pasted a smile on her face as Charming approached, allowing him to take her hand and bow over it. His fingers lingered on hers perhaps an instant too long. He gestured to the seat beside her.

“May I join you, Majesty?”

Majesty.
In five days’ time, she would no longer have the right to that title.

Anais gave him a gracious nod in acquiescence, and he sank onto the stone seat beside her. He was very graceful, Anais noted. He had a loose-limbed litheness to him that reminded her of Rui.

But his eyes were black, not blue, and she could read nothing from them.

“So, Your Highness. The contracts are signed and all is in readiness for your wedding day?”

“Indeed,” he murmured. “But please, call me Charming.”

“Then you must call me Anais. After all, we will be relatives of a sort in a few days.” Anais smiled brightly.

“Hmm,” he said absently, leaning back and gazing up at the sky.

“You seem distracted, Charming. Thinking of your wedding night, perhaps?” This last was said a touch more sharply than Anais had intended.

He laughed. “Perhaps. Although not in the way you might imagine, Anais.”

She lifted an eyebrow in polite enquiry. Charming turned his head to look at her, taking her hand in his and absently stroking it. She suppressed a shiver. He leaned a little closer to her, and she forced herself not to move away. “In truth I don’t anticipate much pleasure from my wedding night,” he said conversationally. “A well-broken mare is a much sweeter ride than an unbroken filly.”

This startled a laugh from her. “That is hardly a flattering analogy, my lord! For the mare or the filly.”

He grinned, and for once Anais could see the charm in him. Just for one brief moment, as though he had let his guard down for an instant. “Perhaps not. Would you prefer it if I compared a princess to a queen?”

Anais felt her face colour. “I will be your stepmother.”

This time it was Charming who laughed. He lifted her hand to his lips. “Let me assure you that what I feel for you is nothing remotely resembling filial devotion.” His tongue stroked her palm, rough and wet, before he released her.

Her heart was beating a tattoo. She felt as though Rui stood at her shoulder watching her.

She smiled at Charming. “How intriguing. Perhaps we could discuss exactly what it is you feel for me after supper this evening?”

His wide mouth curled in an answering smile. “Nothing would please me more. In the meantime, perhaps you would like a taste of exactly what it is I feel for you? Just so you are in no doubt?” He placed Anais’s hand between his legs. She could feel his erection straining against his breeches. He gave a little grunt of pleasure as she pressed her palm against him there.

“Gracious, my lord. It appears that you feel a great deal for me.” She patted him again, letting her voice drop to a purr. “A very great deal indeed.”

“You have no idea,” Charming said huskily.

Rising to her feet, Anais shook out her skirts. “Until tonight then, Charming.”

“I am counting the hours.”

He remained sprawled on the seat, watching her with heavy eyes. Anais could feel his gaze locked on her back as she walked away.

If you love me, you will do this for me…

She didn’t realise she was weeping until she reached her apartments and met the startled eyes of one of her ladies-in-waiting.

Anais dismissed her women and lay upon her bed with a cold compress upon her aching forehead. Something startled her awake some time later. She sat up, gasping, her eyes widening with fear as she took note of the man sitting in a chair by her bed. He held a dagger in his hands which he was turning over and over in his hands. At Anais’s gasp, he lifted his head.

The tallest dwarf, the angry one. He studied her with expressionless black eyes. Where Snow White’s other dwarves clung to her side like leeches, this one had not been seen about the court for many days. One side of his face was a patchwork of fading yellow and green bruises. There was a half-healed scab on his bottom lip.

He could mean her nothing but ill.

“What do you want? What are you doing here?” Anais forced the words through a throat gone tight with terror.

“I won’t hurt you.” His low, husky voice, although soft, did nothing to reassure her.

Anais’s hands fisted in the bedclothes as she scuttled across the bed. “Leave. Immediately. Or I shall scream.”

“Scream if you want to,” he said tonelessly. “It won’t do you any good.”

For no reason that she could fathom, Anais believed him. She didn’t scream. “You are her creature. Do you mean to kill me?”

Anger flared deep in his eyes. “I am no one’s creature. And I told you. I won’t hurt you.”

“Then what do you want?”

Rising from the chair, he sheathed the dagger at his hip and held out his hand. “I want you to come with me.”

Anais shook her head.

A brief, humourless smile touched his mouth. “Don’t you wish to see how your lover besports himself when he isn’t in your bed? Don’t you wish to know where his heart truly lies? If he says he loves you, then he is a liar.”

His words struck Anais like blows. “You are the liar,” she said, her voice trembling.

“Mayhap. But have you courage enough to put that to the test?”

“You are mad! Return to your mistress and be assured that she will hear of your audacity.”

Again that unsmiling smile. “It is not my mistress who means you ill. You have invited a rabid dog into your bed, my Queen, and he will turn on you and rip out your throat…”

“Get out,” she hissed. “Go. Go!”

He merely held his hand out to her again.

Anais would never know why, with a despairing sob, she lurched across the bed and took his hand. His fingers were warm and dry in hers. Instead of leading her from the room, he moved to the wall, stretching up on tiptoes to press his fingers against a carved wooden rose. With a soft snick, a section of the wall swung inwards, releasing a whiff of stale air.

Letting go of her hand, he took a small tinderbox from a pouch at his waist and lit one of the candles that sat on a chest by the door. With a faint look of challenge on his impassive face, he took her hand in his and led her into the passageway.

She balked after a few steps, pulling against his firm grip. “What is this? Where does it lead?”

“You have been here in the palace all these years and you haven’t yet discovered the secret ways that honeycomb it? I must admit to a sense of disappointment. I thought you more enterprising than that.”

She bridled at the mockery in his voice. “Perhaps, unlike you, I am unaccustomed to scuttling around in dark places like a rat!”

“Perhaps,” he said equably. “In truth it took me little enough time to discover these passages. You are probably right. I am more suited to the dark.”

Anais stole a look at him, unaccountably saddened by his bitter tone. Why did he unsettle her so? And why was she following him down a dark passageway? In all likelihood he would slit her throat and leave her body here to rot.

Still, she went with him.

After climbing up a flight of dusty stairs and numerous twists and turns that convinced Anais she would never find her way out alone again if it came to that, the dwarf came to a halt.

“You must keep quiet now,” he said.

Anais nodded.

He gave her a hard look, and she nodded again. He blew out the candle. A few feet ahead, Anais could see faint stripes of light falling across the floor. Moving carefully he led her forward. Placing his hands on her shoulders, he gently pressed her to her knees. The light came through two thin slits in the wall, wide enough to put an eye against and to peer through. She followed his lead and placed her eye to the peephole.

She recognised the room immediately. Rui’s room. The peephole looked down upon the bed where two people lay entwined in a tangle of long, pale limbs. Anais’s heart stuttered. She knew each curve, every muscled inch of Rui’s body. She watched him now as he moved languidly against the second body in the bed, sweat gleaming on his back. His spine bowed as he gave a soft moan and a shudder ripped through him. He rolled onto his back, legs akimbo, one arm flung across his face.

Charming pillowed his head on one arm and watched him. The other hand stroked Rui’s chest.

Anais’s fingernails dug into her palms.

“Do you feel better now?” Charming asked.

Rui laughed, lowering his arm. He stared up at the ceiling. “I can’t shake the feeling that this is all going awry. That we are sitting atop a runaway horse with no means of bringing it to a halt.”

“Doubts, my love? That’s not like you. Tonight the queen comes to my bed. In five days, I wed the princess…”

“She is not fond of you. Your little interlude with the dwarf came dangerously close to ruining everything.”

Charming’s eyebrows rose. “
Your
interlude with the dwarf, I think you mean.”

“You started it.”

“And you, my darling, finished it. Beautifully, I might add. So what if she had her eyes opened a little as to my…temper. She will learn soon enough once we are wed who the master is. Besides, if you had listened to me and done as I wanted, the dwarf would have been dead and no one the wiser. Instead you had to develop a hitherto unknown predilection for dwarves.”

Rui turned his head to look at Charming. “I developed a hitherto unknown predilection for dwarves?”

Charming was laughing at him. “Well, perhaps we both did.” He rose on one elbow and lowered his mouth to Rui’s.

Anais was acutely aware of the man beside her. She could sense the tension and the fury coiled within him. She should have been afraid. Instead she felt numb. Was she still asleep upon her bed and this all some terrible dream?

“You need to get her with child at once,” Rui said as Charming lifted his head. His mouth was kiss-swollen, and Anais shuddered as she recalled all the times she had kissed those same lips. “I’ll go mad if we have to wait much longer.”

“Yet this was all your idea,” Charming said, his mouth trailing kisses down Rui’s neck. “Still, once your queen has had a taste of me tonight, she should be less willing to come to your bed.”

“My queen?” Anais recoiled from the vehemence in his voice. “Gods, but if I have to listen to her whine that she loves me once more…”

“Sshh,” Charming soothed. “I’ll make her love me. She seems willing enough. She had her hands on my cock this afternoon and I thought she’d never let go.”

Rui moved suddenly, straddling the other man and pinning his arms above his head. “You are such a liar.”

Charming bucked underneath him. “It’s true. I swear it,” he said, laughing.

They tussled fiercely for a few moments before Charming flipped Rui on his back. “We are so close,” he whispered against his mouth. “So close. A year, my love, and both the young bitch and the old one dead. Then we need merely wait for my father to go to his just reward and we can go home again. I will be king. And you will be by my side. Always. Now, say something wicked to me.”

“I love you.”

The words pierced Anais to the heart. Words he had never said to her.

“And I love you. But that isn’t wicked. That’s a fundamental truth.”