her husband, and for the wildness which she’d spent most of her life trying to suppress. The love—and D’Artagnan truly hoped she loved him, because he surely loved her—had come later. But that had been the initial attraction.
Now he was sure—as sure as he was of breathing—that milady had her share of acquaintances who were far more dazzling and interesting than D’Artagnan. Noble, beautiful and doubtlessly connected, she could have her share of titled heads. Even if callow youth were what she wanted, there were a good many young bucks of good family and better looks than D’Artagnan, men she could exhibit abroad, displaying her court and her conquests.
So why had she decided upon D’Artagnan, on the glance of a moment, on the pretext that he had saved her? Why had she conceived such a strong desire for him that she must drag him to her bed and attempt to have her very complex, and rather more knowing than he expected, way with him?
Unless, D’Artagnan thought, she was indeed Athos’s wife and had informed herself of the friendship that united the four inseparables, that friendship which had, at many times and different places been the saving—both physical and spiritual—of all of them.
If it were so, doubtlessly she also knew that Athos had stood in D’Artagnan’s heart in place of a father since D’Artagnan had lost his own father, or possibly before. And he thought—though he’d never dared ask—that Athos thought of D’Artagnan as a son.
What greater revenge was there, D’Artagnan thought, than to seduce the adopted son of the man who had tried to kill her, the man who had repudiated her? Having seduced D’Artagnan, she could either utterly destroy him or turn him against Athos, whichever offered. And even with his eyes open, in the full light of day, D’Artagnan wasn’t sure she could not do either of those. Even now.
She looked at him, her luminous blue eyes sparkling with mischief. And he thought that were it not for his love for Constance, he would be succumbing even now. He thought of Constance’s image, her beautiful face, and that smile she gave him when he had particularly pleased her.
He managed to look away from milady, and the way her hair fell, moonlight-like, outlining her shoulders, her breasts. She breathed deeply, and her breasts rose and fell. He started sliding his legs off the bed, a risky proposition, since he had not the slightest idea how far the floor was from here. But he was determined to find out. “I must be going,” he said. “I am sorry my stupid head made it so difficult for you last night that I must sleep in your bed, but truly I must be going. I have guard duty,” he remembered, with a pang that, in fact, he’d had guard duty the night before. He hoped someone had covered his lack and, though he counted on Monsieur de Treville to smooth things with Monsieur des Essarts, his brother-in-law, he wasn’t absolutely sure he could explain this to Monsieur de Treville.
As he was about to slip off the bed, she grabbed his shoulder in a surprisingly strong hand. “Stay,” she said. And giggled. “You’ve been no trouble at all.”
Her other hand, insinuatingly, curled around his neck and onto his chest, to rake nails very lightly over his heart and head downwards.
Gritting his teeth together, he thought, suddenly, clearly, that the nightgown, mostly transparent as it was on the front, was nonetheless utterly closed in the back, covering it up all the way to her neck. Which, if he understood, was not the sort of design used for this sort of garment.
While her hand explored parts of him he’d never meant anyone but Constance to touch—or at least not for a great many years—he pulled himself up onto the bed by the force of his arm, so that he was more firmly seated. This had the side effect of dislodging her from her position, half-draped over him.
She took it in good part. Now, facing him, she grinned, and lunged forward to kiss him.
D’Artagnan could no more have stopped what he did than he could have willed himself to stop eating or sleeping. Curiosity, his desire to know what was happening and what things meant, was his defining characteristic, his strongest need. Even as her lips met his, as he kept his mouth resolutely closed against her assault, he reached back and, with a strong hand, tore the flimsy cloth that covered her shoulders.
And then just