The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [154]
Of course, Leoff thought.
“What is that, lady?” he asked.
“Muriele likes you. You have her ear. I admit that once I thought I might place my son on the throne—he is, after all, William’s son—but now I only wish protection for my children. If Anne wins and Muriele is again queen mother, I only ask you to put it in her ear that I helped you. Nothing more.”
“I can do that without reservation,” Leoff said.
She was massaging him with only one hand now, and he was wondering about that when she pressed down on him and he felt something sticky and warm against his back that sent a thrill all the way to his toes. A ridiculous gasp escaped him. She’d been using her other hand to undo her bodice and was pressing her naked breasts against him. What kind of bodice could be opened with one hand? Did all women have them, or did courtesans have specially designed clothing?
Then she was straddling him, moving down his back, kissing along his spine, drawing the covers down with her torso, and his whole body was instantly awake, on fire. He couldn’t take it; he twisted beneath her, and she was neither heavy nor strong enough to stop him.
“Lady,” he gasped, trying to keep his eyes averted. She still wore her gown, but it was pulled up around her waist, and he could see the ivory skin of her thighs above her stockings. And of course her breasts were there, lily and rose…
“Hush,” she said. “Part of the treatment.”
He held up his hands. “Look at me, Lady Gramme,” he pleaded. “I am a cripple.”
“I should think you might call me Ambria under the circumstances,” she replied. “And you seem to be functional in the parts and territories that interest me.” She leaned down and kissed him with a warm, familiar, very practiced kiss. “This is not love, Leovigild, and it is not charity. It is something between—a gift for what you have done for Mery, if you wish. And to deny it would make you uncharitable indeed.”
She kissed him again, then on the chin, the throat. She rose up and after a bit of bustling was suddenly all flesh upon him, and he certainly couldn’t protest anymore. He tried to be active, to be a man, but she gently guided him away from everything but experiencing her.
It was slow, and mostly quiet, and very good indeed. Ambria Gramme wasn’t the first woman he’d been with, but this was far beyond anything he’d ever experienced, and he suddenly understood something about her that he never had imagined before. What he could do with music, she could do with her body.
For the first time he understood that love could be art, and a lover an artist.
For that insight he would be grateful for however many days he had left in the lands of fate.
And so he felt a bit of guilt when, at his most helpless moment, it was Areana’s face he saw and not Ambria’s.
When they were done, she poured them wine and reclined, still nude, against a pillow. She had seemed tall when he first met her, but she really wasn’t. She was quite small—almost as narrow-waisted as she appeared in a corset—but her body curved luxuriously, and he could just make out the tiger-stripe marks on her belly from bearing William’s children.
“And now you feel better, don’t you?” she said.
“I admit it,” he replied.
She reached over and shuttered the flame so that she became an alabaster goddess in the shaft of moonlight seeping in the window. She finished the wine and crawled under the covers, turning him so she was spooned against his back.
“In three days,” she whispered into his ear. “Three nights from now, at midnight. You will meet me in the entrance hall. I will have gathered up Mery and Areana. Be prepared.”
“I will,” Leoff said. He thought for a moment. “Should you—will you be discovered here?”
“I will be safer here for the next few hours than anywhere I can imagine,” she said. “Unless you want me to leave.”
“No,” Leoff said. “I don’t.”
Her warmth against him was pleasant, still sexual but in a subdued mode that allowed him