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Belle Favager had grown used to being considered last in her life: named as an afterthought, taught by accident, left alone. Mostly, she did not mind. She had grown up beautiful, right into the name bestowed by her father—while he sobbed for his lost wife, and he’d never held her as a baby, her nursemaid said—and educated enough on his books, and she was not lonely. She’d had a competent nursemaid as a small child, a governess to teach her to read and write and sew a little, and then at some point the money had started to go, and she’d never had a tutor, just her father’s once-beloved books.
Her father Maurice had been a prosperous man, with a fine house—now in some disarray—and a strong business—ships from across the world came to his warehouses—but like many men he turned out to be a creature of glass, and the crack of his wife’s death spread and splintered, until his business was all but gone, his daughter isolated, left to herself for days on end, and the gardens of his house creeping with weeds and vines.
Belle found wine bottles on the staircase sometimes, and would rinse them out and leave them to collect rainwater in the very corner of the garden. She had some thought that when she shook herself free of the dreamy, choking mood that gripped her most days, she could find some use for them. Most of her days were spent either in a blind, sweaty panic over trying to direct the shipment of guns and wood and dolls and cotton and toothbrushes that came through the Favager warehouses, or back into the exhausted funk that left her reading the same lines of novels or plays again and again, and sleeping in the middle of the afternoon.
Maurice sometimes managed to have partners and rivals over for dinner, when he wasn’t lost in a winey haze, and Belle would put on a performance as hostess, though she knew there was always something off about it. She had never been to school, never really had a friend since she was thirteen and the last maid had been let go: the housekeeper cooked and kept the kitchen and some rooms clean, and Belle hadn’t had success talking to the busy woman, who kept more than their house. She could answer the polite questions directed her way, and then clear the table when Maurice invited them all into the parlor for cards and whiskey.
She knew that somehow she had reached eighteen years old without doing much besides picking up the mess of the man who she couldn’t think of as her father, but she reminded herself that the company of books and the occasional walk to the store and the warehouses was enough. It kept her head half in the clouds, to be perpetually hung up on other people’s lives and thoughts and challenges, always half eaten by Charybdis or Fenris, never really bothering to be especially adventurous herself, always leaving it for later.
Still, she should have known that adventure would come looking for her, because it did for every hero. It came in a way that, had she been reading it, would have given her pause, because she knew that women could be more than victims to start stories.
Maurice was having a dinner with a few very important men, the kind to whom he owed money, and Belle had managed to get the table together and any rooms they might enter dusted and vacuumed. She had the meat left in the oven warming gently, the bread as well, and the vegetables simmering on the stove. That was as far as she went, in terms of cooking, but it was all that was required, and she changed into a blue dress and low-heeled shoes just in time to answer a knock on the door.
There were three guests, in all: George Regan, Leon Midas, and Calum Gold. She knew each name from the receipts she had gone through recording the traders who used their warehouses and ships (though they owned none of them now, these three men did). They frightened her: cold-eyed, militaristic Regan, who shook her hand hard enough to crush it; Midas, whose skin had a sickly tint and his eyes a feverish cast, and Gold, who gave her a mocking smile and tossed her his overcoat. She hung it up on the coatrack despite her disdain, and settled herself in the dining room to mediate for Maurice.
Her affection for her father was slight, but binding, and she needed his house and what money he could make to live, so it was with quite a lot at stake that she carved beef and passed the basket of rolls. Regan was interested in speaking about steel imports, and she remembered that at the moment he was asset-rich and cash-poor, but she didn’t know enough to turn the talk to their advantage. At any rate, he kept cutting across her attempts to talk, and she was slightly preoccupied with leaning away from the overfriendly Midas, who was eyeing her meager figure like a dog. Gold cut across everyone, and while he didn’t look at her like a lecher, the downright animalistic and predatory gleam, cut through with playfulness, was more chilling.
When Maurice suggested cards and drinks, she had never been so glad to be left with the dishes and leftovers in her life.
“Miss Favager, will you not be joining us?” Midas beckoned her into the room, and she could already smell someone’s cigar, but Maurice nodded sharply, and she entered cautiously.
“I don’t really play cards,” she ventured, hoping to be dismissed, but Regan gestured to the scotch bottles on the wall, and she gritted her teeth. She didn’t like his cold, sneering eyes, but she poured his drink anyway, figuring this would put them all in a good mood, staying around as hostess, prolonging the party mood. The role of placating-civilising-mother-figure was not one she wanted, but she played it anyway, hoping for the best.
At some point, the four men had broken into two groups: Belle found herself, to her dismay, corralled by Regan and Midas, who mostly ignored her in favor of their discussion, but she didn’t care to hear it when Maurice was more or less backed into the corner of the room, clearly drunk, and playing cards.
She extricated herself under the pretext of getting a drink, and hurried over to Gold, who was smiling cruelly at Maurice.
“Whiskey?” she asked, and he flicked brown eyes in her direction.
“How old are you?” he said abruptly. She frowned.
“Eighteen,” she replied automatically, wondering why he cared to know. He sat back and raised his eyebrows at Maurice.
“You see, Miss Favager, your father has lost more money to me over the last few months than the worth of his business and his house.” Belle bit back a gasp. He hadn’t noted that in her carefully kept books, meaning all her work in saving them money had been for nothing. “Quite a lot more, actually. I don’t want to worry you with numbers, but when I say I would be at a considerable loss if I don’t take my pound of flesh, so to speak, I speak the truth.”
“We-we’ll make it back as soon as we can,” she faltered, hands shaking. His cold eyes didn’t promise any mercy.
“I effectively own everything your father owns, Miss Favager. I was simply wondering if that included you.” She couldn’t tell if it was greed or amusement or lust that made his eyes so terrifying, but she jumped back.
“Of course not, I am myself.” He raised an indolent hand.
“Of course you are. But if I call in these debts, you have nothing. Your father goes to prison, you end up on the streets or at the mercy of some friend.” If you have one, his eyes said, and she swallowed. “I’ll take you and the business, leave him the house and some savings, and call the rest even.”
“Why do you want me?” she asked, and her voice shook against her will. Why should she sacrifice herself for Maurice, even though she didn’t have a choice, was the real question.
“Miss Favager, I want you to keep me company. I am a lonely man.” He said the last with a twirl of his fingers and a twitch of his head, and a grin that boded ill. Belle pressed further.
“Keep you company how?” He turned and looked at her, not sideways as while he had flippantly explained their debts, really looked right at her, and replied.
“Any way I choose, dearie. I hear from your father you can do some business work, I can see from your pretty body that you’d look nice in my bed: there are plenty of ways to pick from.” Belle recoiled from the dispassionate look and tone with which he spoke of having and using her.
“You can’t just treat people like slaves!” she protested, angered. Her skin practically crawled at the thought of his touch, but she pushed that feeling back, let her eyes flash angrily at him. He lifted a corner of his mouth.
“You’d be surprised, dearie, but very well. You can be paid a wage, or you can marry me. Or you can find yourself on the street come morning, and we can do this deal, all over again.” Belle swallowed, mouth dry, and set the bottle of whiskey down on the card table.
“Debts forgiven in exchange for me?” she confirmed.
“And I get what’s left of the company,” he reminded her, and she held out her hand.
“I won’t marry you,” she said, and he shook it firmly, then shrugged.
“Be my whore instead, then, I don’t care. At any rate, you need to get your belongings together and get ready to leave. I think I’m done with cards for the night.”
“Already?” she asked, voice rising into a squeak. Maurice had watched the whole exchange with the narrowed eyes and confused face of the far too inebriated. Belle wondered, detachedly, if Gold had cheated, or if he was just that bad at cards. It didn’t matter: he was a bastard for playing a drunk either way.
A bastard she now worked for, in likely more ways than one, and she was just exchanging her dull prison here for a more dangerous one.
She kept that thought in her mind as she packed her clothes into cases, cramming a few of her favorite books in as well. Mr. Gold took one suitcase from her hand as she met him at the bottom of the stairs, changed into better shoes, and a scarf and sweater. Maurice was standing next to him, blinking stupidly, and Belle felt there was really no better way to end their relationship than this way, her father as unaware of her leaving as of her arrival.
Mr. Gold’s car was warm, with leather seats, and he sat in the backseat with her, and spoke quietly to the dim figure of the driver. The car moved, and she fumbled for the cold metal of the seatbelt, and to her surprise, she shed a few tears at the sudden loss of the only home she’d known.
Mr. Gold took one of her suitcases and held the door for her when they arrived at his house, and said simply, “Third floor, hallway to the left, the last door,” before melting into the dim corners of his house, the noise of his tapping cane fading away. Belle didn’t have time to nod, and was grateful to the little yellow lamps that cast small globes of light on the staircases and hallways. The room in question was easy to find, and she fumbled in the scant moonlight coming through half-closed blinds until she found the switch of a lamp on a small table.
Blinking in the sudden blaze of light, she rested her suitcases in the corner, pulled out a nightgown, and changed hurriedly. The bed was made, and there was a small table with a lamp and a clock, and a chair and a chest of drawers. The walls were a light tan color that went as well as anything could with the bloody-red rug laid over a wooden floor. She set her books in a pile under the chair, eyes heavy with sleep but mind frozen in disbelief, then climbed into the bed and closed her eyes against her shock.
Morning came with the hoarse barking of a dog floors below her, the faint, unfamiliar noise enough to frighten her awake. Her bladder was full as well, and she dressed speedily, before creeping down the hallway to look for a bathroom. There was one only two door down from her room, and though the tap took a while to run with hot water, with a clean face and teeth, she felt much refreshed and ready to face her new job. She did not know what that was: Mr. Gold had named her secretary and whore in almost the same breath, but she would find out.
The house that had been dim and forbidding in the night was bright with sunshine in the morning, and she was unnerved to find the hallway clean and fresh. She had expected the prowling, wolf-like Gold to live in a dank and dusty den, but it was cleaner than most of her old home. The upper stories had gone untended, and venturing to the third floor was to leave footprints in thick dust and walk through tangles of cobwebs to reach sticky doors and rusted-hinged windows. The wooden floor of Gold’s house was swept neat, and where carpets were laid over it, she knew there would be no dust underneath them. It was uncomfortable to notice it, and she hurried downstairs, trying to be silent.
The barking dog turned out to be only knee-high and a fluffy brown mutt, and it pranced up to her when she would have preferred to reach the first floor silently. A stout woman in a sensible kerchief came hurrying after it and pulled up short at the sight of Belle, then frowned.
“I’m supposed to work here?” she ventured. “I arrived last night, with Mr. Gold, and he didn’t give me any instructions beyond where to sleep.” The woman wiped her hands on an apron that had once been printed with Kiss the Cook and had since faded greatly.
“Hmph, I don’t suppose he did,” she said huffily, and jerked her head at Belle, indicating she should follow. “I’ll get you some breakfast and send you up to his study, all right?” Belle blinked and nodded: the brisk, warm tone in her voice reminded her of her former governess, a woman who’d liked green dresses and fairytales. No one had spoken to her in such a way in ten years, she thought, and she didn’t know what to do. No one spoke to her at all, usually, except to inform her of Maurice’s choices and to let her know her order at the store was ready.
She ate the dish of oatmeal offered her, and the woman said her name was Mrs. Potts, and she was cook for Mr. Gold. Belle nodded, unsure of what to say to someone who was not trying to scam her or order her.
“Is this your dog?” she asked finally, and Mrs. Potts shook her head, wisps of grey-brown hair escaping a bun.
“No, it belongs to Mr. Cogsworth, the driver.” She nudged the little creature aside with her shoe. “He lives in the old apartment over the garage, from when it was still the carriage-house, and so this little thing runs about. Mr. Gold doesn’t mind it.” She raised an eyebrow at Belle. “I expect you’re to live here as well?”
“Yes,” she replied, keeping her voice as calm and controlled as possible. The other woman didn’t say anything directly to Belle, simply moved about the kitchen taking out bowls and cutting boards, and muttering.
“He will have his deals, I suppose,” Belle heard, and figured she meant to indicate disapproval but no interference. She studied her hands carefully.
“He told me to stay in a room on the third floor: it has a chair with a wicker seat and a brown cushion,” she said, and Mrs. Potts nodded.
“Well, his study’s on this floor, near the west corner of the house. Just knock before you go in,” she replied, and turned back to her work. Belle brought her dishes uncertainly to the sink, and the other woman flapped a hand at her. “Someone will get it: possibly you, if that’s what your job turns out to be, but someone will.”
Washing dishes was something she could do, though the prospect of spending her days up to her elbows in soap and her nights on her back for the master of the house wasn’t appealing. Gold’s study was easy to find, and her knock on the door earned her a sharp ‘come in.’
His brown eyes narrowed when she entered the room, and he sat back a little from his desk.
“Miss Favager. Did you sleep well?” There was a trace of amusement playing at his mouth.
“Yes,” Belle replied, because she actually had, and there didn’t seem a point to antagonizing him. He put the tips of his fingers together and stared at her over them.
“Good, then,” he said, and pointed at a chair in front of his desk. “We had better discuss terms and duties.” Belle sat, keeping her back carefully straight. “I will have to take room and board out of your wages, of course,” he said, as if that was fair, when he’d forced her from her father’s house in the middle of the night.
“I could simply live at my own home and come to work each morning,” she said. He snorted.
“What, get here on your own? We’re not in the city, Miss Favager: we’re outside it, and it’s forty-five minutes’ drive from your father’s house. And your duties might require you at any hour of the day: better to be here.” There he went again, being sly and cruel with his implications. Belle gripped her hands together tightly.
“Will you simply tell me whether or not you are going to make me sleep with you? It is making me a little sick, not knowing.” Gold snickered, and gave her the least hungry smile he had yet.
“Truly forcing you would make me sick as well, I’m afraid, but I am hoping you will remember that the deal was for any way I wanted you, and stick to your word.” There wasn’t much chance of forgetting, especially with that reminder, and she bit her lip.
“So you do want me to?” He met her eyes again, and she felt her pulse speed at the wolf’s look her directed her way.
“Yes,” he said, after a long pause, and wetted his lips. “Are you so afraid of me?” She folded her arms and regarded him, thinking of Persephone eating bloody red fruit in Hades’s palace, and the oatmeal and brown sugar lingering on her tongue were suddenly overpowering.
“You act so cold,” she said finally, and his eyebrows drew together, displeased.
“Very well, Miss Favager, I shall not ask you to my bedroom until I can seduce you there. Will that make you feel better?” He continued without giving her a chance to speak, and she sensed he was angry, with her or himself. Sometimes Maurice would talk like that, turn his anger at her instead of his wine and himself. “In the meantime, you can put yourself to good use sorting through the wool orders from Flanders, the records are disorganized and backlogged a good twenty years. File room’s the next door. Enjoy yourself.”
Whoever had formerly been in charge of wool, it hadn’t been Gold, because she had seen his writing on documents for Maurice’s company—well, Favager Shipping was defunct now, but never mind that now—and he was neat and organized. This person had simply tucked every paper: orders, receipts, reports, taxes, and the rest, into folders by year, with little care, and twenty boxes all labeled simply “Flanders” stood against one wall.
Belle opened the first, pulled out the messy stack, it shedding paperclips and yellowed banker’s slips all the while, and deposited it on the desk. At least the small window had a view out to a green tree behind the house, she thought, and peered at the former clerk’s scribbles regarding the requested amount of black fine-woven lambswool.
She worked through the day, stopping to eat and drink once, and tried not to be angry. This was useful work, this checking of records, and the first box was carefully divided into expenses, revenues, and reports by five in the evening. Another nineteen days—and she would get faster with time—and this would be finished. In the mid-afternoon, she pried the window partially open and sucked in gasps of fresh air: the small, dusty, papery little room was making her sleepy and dull-hearted, and she felt lethargy was not in her best interests here. Better to be angry and awake and fearful than stumble about in the haze that had defined half her life, and let Maurice lose everything of theirs, including her.
Gold apparently ate alone, because she saw a thin man setting a table for one person in the dark-paneled dining room, but when she stepped into the kitchen in search of some food, Mrs. Potts turned and said,
“Mr. Gold says to join him for dinner tonight, and Louis will lay a place for you.” Belle blinked.
“Why?”
“Because he likes to pretend to be a gentleman and feed his prey before he takes it upstairs and eats it, I expect.” The frank answer made her jump, and she wondered if he would remember that he’d said he would seduce her honestly. Well, he had said simply seduce her. Gold did not seem to put much stock in anything other than literal honesty: words, not spirit, which must serve him well in his business.
The thin man served them roast chicken, soup, rice, and baked peppers, but Belle had a hard time eating in Gold’s presence. There was a bottle of red wine standing on the table, and he uncorked if deftly and poured for her.
“Miss Favager, are you not hungry?” He was calling her that to be politely mocking, but she did not know if she would like him to use her first name.
“I am tired, and not used to talking,” she replied. He seemed amused by her response.
“I think your father was wrong when he told me you were as bright and happy as any young woman. He did go on about your friendliness and warmth.” Belle tilted her head, fighting off a grin.
“Maurice never told me he loved me, even when I was a small child. Never held nor hugged me. I was raised half by nurses and half by books. I wasn’t let beyond the gates of our yard from the age of ten till I was fourteen and he couldn’t go out to buy food himself. I think he was holding me hostage until he could get my mother back in return for me, or until I became her.”
“So who did you become, then?” Gold asked, face absolutely still at her cold outburst. She gestured hopelessly.
“Not one player in Beauty and the Beast, I’m afraid. Good at numbers and discerning meter, poor at being a kind and friendly human.” Gold raised his glass to her and waited until she did as well, clinking the rims together.
“To being cold, then,” he said, and the wine was sweeter and richer than she had been expecting.
She drank the glass through dinner, interspersed with sips of water, and managed to eat all her food. Gold did not press her for conversation, simply watched her from time to time, and leaned over to kiss the back of her hand, very lightly, after she finished.
“A very nice seduction,” she said, for lack of anything else, and he quirked his mouth into a half-smile.
“I think I may have found a match in you, you know,” he said seriously. “Most girls would have simply cried their way out of their problems, or just folded like—“ he gestured, twirling his hand, “—like a rose that I could crush in my hand.”
“You missed the part where you thought my life was much easier than this,” she said. There was more to process here, less time to lock herself away and forget to eat for days, and the pressure of that might mean she cried tonight, but a cold man who demanded work from her was nothing new.
“I did,” he agreed. “But, Miss Favager, whenever you decide you want to let go of everything you’re carrying inside your head and on your back for a moment, tell me.” He sipped from his glass, eyes warm and lustful again. Belle stood up, unsettled by the warmth rushing to her cheeks, and picked up her plate and silverware.
“I—thank you?” she tried, uncertain of his meaning, and the heat in his eyes was suddenly tempered with amusement. He rose as well and stepped closer to her.
“I meant in the orgasm sense, dearie, not in the friendly confidante sense, but either does work.” She stepped back, biting her lip, flushing more at his words now than at any he’d said earlier. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that pleasure would be harder to give him than her body, that she’d read her fair share of French novels, but she didn’t. He would just tangle her up in words and end up laughing at her again, the way he was now.
Instead, she went back to her new room and sat down on her bed. The day’s events skittered through her brain, more than she had had to worry over before, and the knowledge that she had surrendered herself to another life that would not be so different from the one she had known before was suddenly terrifying. She’d always had the thought of escaping somehow, becoming an adventuress while remaining still and sedentary on her chair, and now she was bound to stay. This was no adventure, it was dull, a life of money and mind games like it always had been, and the promise of green hills and foreign skies was gone now, barred away.
She cried herself to sleep that night.
~
Mrs. Potts always talked to her in the mornings, when she woke up to have breakfast in the kitchen, and she thought that at least here she had someone to talk to who wanted to talk. The little dog that belonged to the driver was named Cinnabar, and sometimes she let it into the file room to tumble around while she worked.
Gold came into the room to take out files, and sometimes he would speak to her, perfectly politely, as if he had never told her she could be his whore or his wife, about all sorts of things. She had read all the classics, because those were the books that rested on her father’s shelves, but she’d never had a book of literary criticism before, and she faltered when he tried to draw her into conversation that veered away from what she had gathered from her own readings.
“Miss Favager, you know there is a library in this house, and you can always read anything you wish from it,” he told her, at the start of her second week, and she found it easily enough, and scarcely slept at night with all the new volumes. She did not find herself slipping into the post-reading lethargy that used to consume her at home, because she had work to do, the little dog kept her on her toes, she had to be sharp to talk with Gold, and she had to be friendly to talk to Mrs. Potts. There was no space to withdraw back into the cavern of her mind here, and it made her tired in a more wholesome way.
Gold was funny, in a biting way that she had never known anyone in her life to have, and she found herself relishing every time he came into the file room to comment on her work or some trouble a distributor was having. He was a bastard, she tried to remind herself, he’d cheated drunk Maurice, but it was no good when he was being clever, when the wolf’s mask gave way to Reynard’s sly comments.
“Did you know that apparently a rainy summer is the reason for the underproduction of children’s building blocks?” he said one day, a sour note in his voice, after she had heard him screaming at someone over the telephone in his study.
“The very sunshine is painted onto the blocks, Mr. Gold,” she teased him. “We don’t want rainy building blocks.” He snorted and gave her a look, and she only smiled and patted Cinnabar, who was at her feet, tongue lolling happily.
The house, though large and largely unoccupied, did not feel as if the rooms were haunted by more than the occasional cricket: certainly not the ghost of a mother she’d never known. It was clean, and the windows were open often, and after four weeks, she realized her life was possibly better here, because she had a friend in Gold and companions in Mrs. Potts, the stolid Cogsworth, and the odd, whimsical Louis.
The history of Gold’s company in wool imports and exports was now completely and perfectly engrained in her mind, and the files in question were readable and useful. She ate with Gold every night, and sometimes he would say things in passing that scared her. Not that he would hurt her, for he had been perfectly serious when he’d said he was simply lonely, and she’d spoken to him enough to know he was softer than his cold, predatory exterior suggested. But she could see loveless harsh youth turned to loveless harsh adulthood written on his face, and it was like looking into a mirror of her future.
Maybe that was why she did finally decide he’d seduced her enough: it wasn’t because he was especially charming, or kind, or anything besides someone who would talk and listen to her, but because she needed to wrench them both off the tracks of a life that led lonely into papered offices and unmourned deaths.
She stepped into his arms and kissed him without any warning after dinner, and the way he froze at her inexpert touch let her know he had never really expected her to acquiesce. Then his arms wrapped around her, and she tried to feel like Guinevere in the arms of a sinner knight, but she could only feel like herself in the arms of her only friend as they turned into lovers.
He kissed back softly, pushing at her lips with his, parting her mouth, licking and biting at her lower lip until she let him slide his tongue softly into her mouth. He tasted like wine and his mouth was hot and wet over hers, and made her knees tremble. His hands rested on the small of her back and in the curls of her hair, and she clutched him close to her, shaking with the strangeness of having someone touching her.
She wasn’t sure how long it had been since someone put their arms around her: maybe eight years, maybe less, but if she hadn’t known she wanted to be even closer to him, she would have simply cried into his arms. As things stood, though, he was moving his mouth over her neck and making noises that tightened her between her legs, and she felt herself grow hot all over. Gold tugged her upstairs with him, stopping every other step to kiss her again, as though she would run if she became distracted. Belle kissed back, tried to mimic the movements of his lips and tongue, and then they were in the doorway of his room and her heart was pounding. She wasn’t sure whether it was in excitement or fear or both, but then Gold closed the door behind them and she was pulling blindly at his tie and jacket while his fingers felt for the closure at her dress.
“I’ve never been with anyone,” she said, and put her hands on his shoulders to still him. His brown eyes were mostly black, the pupils spread wide, but he nodded and made his next kiss, against her sternum, soft and with just his lips. He looked gentler, away from his study and his cruel remarks, and she wondered what change was in her face, when she knew part of her was just like him. Did she look softer, less lonely, with hungry eyes?
He undressed her slowly, peeling her dress away with careful hands and tracing the borders of skin and cloth made by her underthings. Belle tried to take the same care with him, but her hands shook at the buttons of his shirt, and he caught her hands, undid them himself, and shed the shirt. His chest and stomach were tanner than she’d expected from a man who spent most of his time inside, but all she could do was sigh and run her hands over his shoulders as he backed her onto the bed and got on his hands and knees over her. She remembered sharply that she’d thought of him as a wolf more than once at their first meeting, and with his shaggy hair brushing past his shoulders and a gleeful, hungry expression on his face, it fit. Not it an unpleasant way any longer, because his bared teeth were making her heart leap and her loins burn.
“Belle,” he whispered, and his finally using her name made her gasp as he leaned down and kissed between her breasts, unfastening her brassiere and pulling it off. The flat of his tongue touched a nipple, and she cried out, quietly, unprepared for the jerk the touch caused between her legs.
“I don’t know what to do,” she confessed, and he licked over her other breast, pressing her nipple between his lips.
“Why do you want to do this at all?” he asked, hands sliding over the sheets and coming to caress her sides while his mouth wandered over her chest and neck. “Why did you decide to let this happen?” Belle shivered as his fingertips toyed with the edge of her underwear, and tried to shift her legs apart, only to find herself arrested by his knees on either side of her.
“We deserve more than shipping details and manufacturers’ notices,” she managed, though she meant they deserved more than loneliness and hate for and from everything in the world. A sigh gusted from his mouth, and then he moved between her legs, shedding his pants and letting his hips, still covered in his boxers, press against hers. She could feel a hardness that was hot and heavy as well pressing against her inner thigh, and even her books about tragedy and poems about ribaldry hadn’t prepared her for feeling his insistent need.
“We’ll be careful,” he promised, and his hands squeezed her breasts and hips while he laid his face next to hers. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, kissed and bit at his jaw and neck, savoring warmth and closeness. Then she felt his fingers drift down the waistband of her underwear and slip beneath, and his warm hand was cupping her sex, fingers parting her folds and sliding through the wetness there while he kissed her, thrusting his tongue into her mouth and moaning. “Belle, tell me what you like,” he said hoarsely, and she swept her hands along his back, almost regretting that he wasn’t pressed so tightly to her while he moved his hand.
That feeling disappeared when he brushed something that made her yelp and shudder in delight, and press back against his hand.
“This feels—good,” she panted, and he chuckled into her ear, moving his fingers again and again over the little rough piece of flesh he’d found.
“Good,” he replied, and she couldn’t help but jerk her hips up against his hand while his breath came fast and moist in her ear. “Oh, Belle, yes.” She seized onto his back, hardly realizing it as her nails pressed into his skin, as he kept stroking her, feeling something tighten unbearably between her legs and in her lower back and then—then the feeling was different, tingles and then waves of pleasure washing her whole body, and she moaned like him, unable to stop her legs from trembling. The feeling faded too fast, and suddenly his fingers on her were too much to bear, and she squirmed away.
“That felt—“ she couldn’t quite say how it had felt, with little twitches still pricking between her legs and a dreamy bliss stealing at her mind. That had been ecstasy, that lovers found and sculptors carved onto the faces of chaste saints. She turned her head to the side and kissed him, a slow, sucking, teasing kiss, and she felt the hand she had pushed from between her legs tug at his boxers. To her surprise, she felt only eagerness as she spread her legs apart and let him put his body over her. “Take me,” she requested, and he growled into her neck, and guided one of her legs to wrap around his waist and rest at his back.
“Don’t let me hurt you,” he said, but Belle could not think of anything else but how close they were, skin to skin, and soon it would be even closer. His wet fingers pulled her folds apart, teased over her opening, and then something much thicker and hotter was pressing inside her.
Truthfully, it hurt, even with her wetness to let him slide inside, but it was good, the feeling of stretching for him giving her a little thrill, and she kissed him again as he pushed further and further in.
“I used to read adventures and epics and thought I would go off sailing and fighting,” she confessed, and he gave her a confused look at her sudden spurt of words. “I was very upset for a while when I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do that. And then I just understood that the adventure doesn’t matter as long as I’m all knotted up and cold and dirty at the heart, and I have been my whole life.” She stroked his cheek and watched his eyes soften at the touch. “The heart part is what matters, I think,” she whispered. “And I want you to help me get warm and clean, because you’re the same as me.”
“Yes,” he said, and kissed her forehead, and moved inside her. “Belle, you don’t have to—you should—I don’t mean to hold you like, like a prisoner—“ She shushed him with a finger on his lips and pressed her heel into his backside, encouraging his movement.
“It’s okay,” she soothed, because it was, even though there were tears spilling over her face for the loving, longing look he gave her and his arms wrapped around her. Even though she knew she must be bleeding a little, it was okay, because no one had ever been gentle before with her, or him. Though this was gentle with bodies, she could feel them a few steps away from gentle with hearts, and she knew she would not sleep alone tonight, nor afraid, nor resigned to being last and nothing any longer.