Bed of Rose and Thorns Page 3

  “Go to the city of the Queen one final time.” She leaned forward and presented her hand to him for another kiss. “And put it properly behind you.”

  Ezra did not remember if he kissed her hand or not before he took to his feet. He could not say whether he had nodded to Rachel or Pontes. His mind felt like it was whirled in a cyclone, turning on Kristen’s ill-conceived notion that going to the city would allow him to achieve some sort of closure, turning on the question of why his banishment had been rescinded, turning on his suppressed memories of the Queen, and on the decade and more of feelings he had denied.

  He turned and turned inside, fearing that his carefully nurtured balance had been lost, that a massive, dread potential was building in him again to some new, unknown, uncontrollable purpose.

  Chapter 4

  Fit to Ring

  It had been some time since Ezra had been stabbed by a sword, but this other weapon now poking into his shoulder felt no less deadly than cold steel. And the timing of this assault could not have been worse. His body could not have been less protected.

  “This is, let me see, the fourth time, I believe, in eleven years, that I’ve seen you without armor, Sir Knight, and here I find you quite disarmed,” the voice of his attacker said. “Whatever are you going to do now?”

  The hard nipple of Rachel’s right breast was poking his left shoulder quite firmly through the thin fabric of her dress.

  Ezra struggled to still himself. He did not know what to do about the young woman, or her breast, given his state of undress in the Stonehouse fitting room. Worse, Rachel had sprung another surprise. She had not just caught him unawares—out of his armor and distracted out of his mind by the recent turn of events—and was not merely pressing herself close against him while he was trying to hold still and be measured. She had also died her raven-colored hair blonde. Just like the Queen’s.

  Why?

  He had a powerful autonomic reaction to this, the same reaction he had experienced on the few other occasions over the last decade when he had accidently crossed paths with a woman who bore a resemblance to the Queen.

  It had been eleven years, but some reactions never faded. Some injuries never healed.

  We are slaves to our pasts. Even those we have banished.

  This time, the reaction was so much the worse. He was being sent back to the capital, the city of the Queen. His banishment was apparently over, and he had already begun to fantasize about catching some fleeting glimpse of his Queen, just a momentary glance at her long hair, of the sun’s rays reflecting off its golden, heavenly sheen. And then Rachel had arrived, pressing herself against him, looking too much like the woman he could never forget.

  The lady of the house, master seamstress Danielle Stonehouse, was just at that moment measuring his inseam, precisely the wrong place for her gentle fingers to be while he was being poked by a young woman’s high, erect nipple and remembering the Queen. Ezra looked down at Danielle and saw her eyes narrow at the gravity of the situation.

  “Rachel Province,” she said with something of exasperation and something of wickedness, “a little close and personal, are we not? Have you come to pick something up for your mother?”

  “For me,” Rachel said, still pressing shamelessly into Ezra. “I would like a new scarf. It’s positively dusty out there.”

  “Well, I’m done with Sir Ezra’s . . . measurements,” said Danielle standing up. She was in her late thirties, just a little older than Ezra but, unlike him, fully dressed in a smooth, dark, semi-formal outfit. Ezra was wearing only a thin pair of shorts. Whatever Danielle’s thoughts, they were hidden, unlike Sir Ezra’s. His were on full display.

  She looked from Ezra’s straining, uncomfortable shorts to his more uncomfortable eyes but spoke without expression. “I will have your formal clothes ready later this afternoon, Ezra. Why don’t you get dressed, go get those supplies you need for your journey, and then come back?” She walked across the dressing room, and at the door, gestured to Rachel. “Come along dear, I’ll help you find something safer to drape around your pretty young neck.”

  “I’ll be there in a moment, Danielle,” Rachel said, pressing harder, as if it was her strength and aggressiveness that counted. Once a man felt a woman against him, her power was known. But she seemed to think, incorrectly, that Ezra’s discomfiture was only the result of his arousal and—also incorrectly—that his arousal was entirely the result of the life-affirming power of her breast.

  No one but the Queen, and possibly Kay, could know the depth of his feeling for the woman who had banished him. The woman who created the necessary lie that had separated them forever. No one but the Queen knew her power over him, the bite she had left on his neck and his soul, the power that even now raised his shorts because a young woman had dyed her long locks into a passable resemblance of a distant Queen’s wild, blonde hair.

  Rachel had no way of knowing how she was at once raising his arousal and grinding her soft leather boots into his broken heart.

  Ezra was not about to tell her, either.

  “I think you should come now, young la—” Stonehouse began, then stopped when she saw Ezra’s nod.

  I’ll deescalate this.

  He knew that he should, that he must. Rachel had been a little girl when he was sent to be her mother’s knight and guardian. He had made the mistake of being kind to the youngest daughter, instructing her in the sword when her tutors had ignored her. Sometimes, attention, reputation, and bad timing have a life-changing effect. He needed to find a gentle way of dealing with her infatuation.

  Danielle Stonehouse sighed. “Don’t be long, or your mother will hear of it.” She swept out through the door without another word or a backward glance.

  Ezra put his hands on Rachel’s lean shoulders then and held her away from him. “Rachel,” he started, but she burst into tears, wriggled out of his gentle grasp, and wrapped her arms around him, pressing all of herself against him.

  “Don’t go!” she wailed. “Do not go back to the evil Queen in her evil castle.”

  “Come now, Rachel, the Queen is not evil.” Ezra said, still hoping not to have to use real force to push her away. “And there is little chance I will see her in any case.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes a mess of red from tears and black from smudgy paint. “Yes, yes she is. She is evil. Everyone knows she eats men alive. How many dead husbands is it now?” Ezra flinched.

  “Don’t go,” Rachel cried again. “She threw you out like slops, but you were lucky to get out. Stay out. Stay here.” She breathed seductively, “With me.”

  She ground herself against his erection then, an escalation far beyond anything she had ever managed back at the estate. It was intensely pleasurable. And very, very wrong.

  I must be extremely careful.

  As good as Rachel felt, he did not want her. He had only ever wanted one woman since Lilly, his wife, had died. Lilly had been about Rachel’s age too, and feeling her young love now only made him sad. The erection was the result of long blonde hair and memories of the Queen, the return of dark memories prompted by this prospect of returning to the capital. But Rachel’s youth and earnestness, her fragility, was not something Ezra wanted to test. He did not want to hurt her. He hoped he could talk sense into her, though she was not making it easy.

  How can I do this?

  A tricky question, with Rachel pressing so hard against him in the dressing room, dressed up like the woman who owned his soul. It was not as if Ezra had much experience with women. His wife, yes, but that had been nearly twenty years ago. The Queen, but that relationship was complex, and he had been on the other side of a grossly asymmetric set of feelings. Rachel’s mother, Lady Kristen, may have wanted him, always asking him to kneel close to her and kiss her hand, but her attentions had been easy to avoid while in his steel plate. He always made sure that touching him would be unpleasant for her, had always kept his hardest armor strapped tight, so tight that only a squire could unbuckle it. No other woman had ever shown any interest, not Rachel’s five sisters … not anyone. There was Sir Marigold, of course, who came to visit every few months, but she was a friend. Perhaps his only friend aside from Danielle.

  Rachel started pulling at the long fabric at the front of her dress, raising it out of the way. An old vibration, still mild, stirred in Ezra then, a shadow of bell notes brought by long blonde hair, the coming trip, and persistent memory. The spell of the Queen was long and deep.

  No, this is not happening. Dear gods, no.

  He grasped Rachel again by the shoulders, but harder this time, knowing he needed to put a stop to matters. “We cannot do this, Rachel.”

  “Why not?” she asked, teeth barred. “I can feel that you want me. You’re harder than one of those ironwood canes that Lady Stonehouse keeps out there.”

  The sharp, barred teeth also reminded him of the Queen, of her shocking aggression, her painful bite. The vibration sounded again, still soft but growing. It came from within him, he knew, from his passion, but it was an exceedingly rare and very poorly understood phenomenon, the tolling of a vast potential energy inside himself.

  NO!

  “Rachel, you . . .” he wanted to say that she was too young, except that age was not the true issue. She was just wrong, for him.

  I already have an owner.

  He looked down at her, at her long blonde hair, trying to think of what else to say. He had been sure he could manage her, always had before, easily, but thoughts of the Queen and her hair, her hypnotic smile and bared teeth, had undone him. And the more he thought about those things, the more he struggled to put them from his mind, the more fully he fell under that old power.

  Eleven years away from her, deprived and abandoned, had hollowed out a great, unfil
lable hole in his soul, a soul that yearned, despite this, to speak love to the heavens.

  The first chime rolled out.

  It came from within him, from his feelings, from his body, which had just, almost imperceptibly, begun to vibrate. But the sound came also from the air above, from some continuum that resonated with his passions.

  Another chime thrilled the air.

  “What was that?” Rachel’s head cocked and her eyes narrowed. “You’ve started chiming!” Her eyes widened. “There have always been rumors that you might be a Bell, but I never believed them. … That you ring before battle, before terrific violence, and . . . from deep, true love.” Her eyes flashed, open and wider still, her pupils suddenly filled them, black and large. “You love me!”

  No, no, no, no, no.

  This was bad. Even without the harmonic, having a confused and unwanted would-be lover was not a problem Ezra had experienced often, though he knew that sexual misadventures and misunderstandings were common between people. It was rare for him to be molested by an amorous, delusional partner, but he was well aware that such things were not rare for others. Sexual misattention happened all the time, often to even worse ends than this might lead. It was worse when it was a man who was obsessed. Men resorted to violence. Some of them, anyway. Too many of them.

  His Bell nature he really, really did not need right now, though. It was the incarnation of a romantic legend that he had always tried to hide—a poorly kept secret that probably had not been believed—but if now confirmed and on full display would do nothing to deescalate the situation. Depending on what stories Rachel had read, it could make things worse. A lot worse.

  “Oh, you are mine! My Bell lover, the only one in the Queendom!” Somehow Rachel had slipped from his grip once more and was pressing into him again. He looked down at her long, dyed blonde hair so like the Queens’s, and chimed louder.

  I’m in trouble. I have lost my grip on reality.

  It would have been funny, because it was getting damned ridiculous, except that this was also damned serious.

  “Rachel,” he said, pulling free and taking a knee before her, holding her hips away from him, trying to calm her down and show seriousness. He looked up, and her hair made a fan, so like the Queen’s, and his mind spun, reverting to those days, eleven years ago. He remembered daggers of long, blonde hair trailing into his face as he kneeled before her in the blood of Erle.

  The quiet air of the room erupted in a deep, rolling, bell-like tolling sound, shaking the building, shattering something in another room. His body spasmed. He lost time, then found his face in Rachel’s stomach, his hands under her dress, his fingers roaming desperately up and over her thighs, over her ass, and down and around, his thumbs hooking over her hips as he pulled her toward himself, crying.

  Oh, my Queen! What have you done to me?

  “It’s okay,” Rachel crooned, her hands tangled in his hair, holding his face hard against her. “I love you, too, I’ve always loved you Ezra, since first we met.”

  “Rachel, this isn’t wh—”

  “Oh, I can feel it through your hands, through your face. It’s love from heaven. Don’t stop, Ezra, it feels wonderful. Mmmmmm, so wonderful. Dead gods, get this dress off me!”

  She tore her bodice open, knelt down, and pushed her breast against the side of his face, against his lips, just as the dressing-room door opened.

  “What in the names of the lost gods!” bellowed the normally cultured voice of Danielle Stonehouse. She ran across the room and pulled Ezra away, pausing only to stare in shock at her hands where they had touched the vibrating knight. “There will be no noonday chiming of Elysian Bells here in my store! Go wait in the private room, Rachel. Now!”

  * * *

  “What the hell, Ezra!” Danielle Stonehouse exclaimed. “The Queen banished you here to look after her mother, not fall in love with her youngest daughter.”

  “I’m not in love with her,” Ezra said miserably.

  Stonehouse put her hands on her hips and bent toward him, brows raised, “My front window cracked, Knight. It’s in the other room. I lost five antique vases, and I don’t know what else out there. You love her like nothing I’ve ever heard of from a living person.”

  She paused, face harder, and added, “You love her like the god in one of those stories young women read, stories that are left behind because the woman grows up and finds out there is no such thing as storybook love like that.” She scowled. “Except you just showed Rachel that such a love does exist, and for her.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!” If anything, Danielle only looked more exasperated. “As far as that young lady thinks, you just pledged yourself to her. You knelled for her and touched her. You chimed Elysian Bells. You announced your love to heaven. There are a few backwater courts where that would mean you just married the girl.” She straightened up and shook her head. “How am I going to explain this to Lady Kristen?”

  “I. Don’t. Love. Her.”

  “Horse. Shit. Everyone in the store just had their teeth cracked by your love. People as far as the third well probably heard it. Word will be spreading through town that a Bell went off. A crowd will be gathering outside my store by now.”

  “But I don’t.”

  Danielle looked at him skeptically. “Are you embarrassed, Ezra? You shouldn’t be. I don’t know why it has to be her, a slip of a girl, and not someone more . . . mature.” She glared meaningfully at him, then shook her head. “But it’s a gift that your feelings manifest like this, an amazing gift. Explore it, yes, but outside my store, if you please. And after you marry her.”

  “She looked like the Queen,” Ezra said.

  “What?” Danielle froze.

  “Her blonde hair, it made her look like the Queen, just as she looked eleven years ago.”

  “The Queen?” Danielle’s face was aghast, her eyes wide, mouth caught between skepticism and horror.

  “Yes.”

  Danielle caught her breath, smoothed her face, and reached unsteadily for a chair to catch her balance. “You chimed for the Queen?”

  Ezra looked down. “No one can know.” It was an enormous secret, though not his darkest. “I never touched the Queen,” he lied. “No one can think that I did. I just loved her. A secret I kept from everyone. Especially from her.”

  “Really?” Stonehouse said, face skeptical again.

  “Yes. She didn’t know. It was never acted upon. My nature, too, I kept secret.”

  Daniella shook her head in disbelief. “Well, not from the Prince of Earl. You ripped his head off and kicked it down the royal halls. He might have had an inkling before his head came loose.” She looked up at the ceiling, rolling her eyes. Ezra could almost see her putting it all together, his public history and his poorly kept secret.

  “The whole story, your banishment, makes sense now! You killed the prince, then you stormed through the palace murdering whoever you could find in his livery, nearly touching off a war. So they all might have figured it out before they died. It’s so obvious now.” Danielle thrummed her hands on the chair back. “The only reason no one saw this is that no one alive has ever actually seen a Bell. No one really believes the legends about them anymore.”

  Stonehouse pulled up the chair and sat in it. She looked Ezra up and down, considering. “So when someone looks like the Queen, whom you love,” she squinted skeptically, “secretly, even from her—you chime for them?”

  “No … uh … not until now … not really.”

  Danielle looked at him flatly. “It has always been possible, then, but you managed to contain yourself?”

  Ezra nodded. “This is the first time it’s ever gotten away from me. I stay in my armor, as you know—except for here, today—I don’t touch people. And Rachel surprised me, as you also know.”

  Danielle sat back thoughtfully. “It almost makes me want to invest in a blonde wig.” An eyebrow arched, “Though it’s hard on my merchandise.”

  “I’m not marrying Rachel.”

  I have another owner. Even if she sent me away.

  “No, no, you can’t,” said Stonehouse soberly. “Once that hair dye came out, she would be a very disappointed young lady.” Danielle held an apologetic hand up toward Ezra and added, “I just measured you, Sir Knight. You, uh, have what it takes, but the young lady thinks she has a love made in heaven, perhaps the only one in this generation . . .” She thought some more and added, “And what if the Queen wants you back?”