slightly to the side to see the jewels glittering on the coverlet. And she knew how they would torture her as soon as he had mounted her.
But she wanted him so badly. And when she saw him rise up over her, she felt not the hot throbbing pain in her body but a flood of juices between her legs and a new moan coming out of her as she opened herself to him.
She couldn't keep from lifting her hips, praying it didn't displease him.
He knelt over her, removing his erect cock from his breeches, and then he brought her up on her knees and impaled her upon it.
She cried out. Her head fell back. It was a great hard driving thing inside her sore and quivering orifice. But she felt it bathed with her juices, and as the Prince forced it in deeper and brought her down upon it, it seemed a spit that rubbed against some mysterious core in her, sending the ecstasy washing through her so she was giving great guttural moans in spite of herself. The Prince's thrusts came faster and faster and then he too gave a soft cry, and held her close to him, her breasts aching and pressed to his chest, his lips on the back of her neck, his body softening slowly.
"Beauty, Beauty," he whispered. "You have conquered me as surely as I have conquered you. Don't ever arouse my jealousy again. I don't know what I would do if you did it!"
"My Prince," she moaned and kissed him on the mouth, and when she saw the distress in his face, she covered it with kisses.
"I'm your slave, my Prince," she said.
But he would only moan and press his face into her neck, and seemed bereft.
"I love you," she implored him, and then he laid her down on the bed, and drawing up beside her, took his wine from the bedside stand and, gazing at the fire, seemed for a long time to be thinking.
Chapter 7
PRINCE ALEXI
BEAUTY DREAMED a dream of boredom. She roamed the castle in which she had lived all her life, with nothing to do, and now and then paused in a deep window seat to watch the tiny figures of the peasants in the fields below gathering the fresh mown grass into haystacks. The sky was cloudless and she disliked the look of it, its sameness and vastness.
It seemed she could not find anything to do that hadn't been done a thousand times before, and then suddenly there came to her ears a sound she could not identify.
She followed the sound, and through a doorway saw an old woman, bent and ugly, plying a strange contraption. It was a great turning wheel with a thread that was winding itself upon a spindle.
"What is it?" Beauty asked with great interest.
"Come see for yourself," said the old woman, who had the most remarkable voice, because it was young and strong and so unlike her visage.
It seemed Beauty had only just touched this marvelous machine with its whirring wheel when she fell down in a great swoon, and all about her heard the world weeping.
"...sleep, sleep for a hundred years!"
And she wanted to cry out, "Unbearable, worse than death," for it seemed some great deepening of the ennui she had struggled against ever since she could remember, the wandering from room to room...
But she awoke.
She was not at home.
She was lying in the bed of her Prince, and she felt the prickling of the jeweled coverlet beneath her.
The room was full of the leaping shadows of the fire, and she saw the gleam of the carved posts of the bed, and the drapery fallen about her in rich colors. She felt herself animated and flushed with desire, and she rose up, so eager was she to lose the weight and texture of her dream, and she realized that the Prince was not beside her.
But there he was, by the fire, his elbow against the stone above it, which bore a great crest with crossed swords. He wore his brilliant red velvet cloak still and his high turned down leather boots with their pointed toes, and his face was sharpened with brooding.
The pulse between her legs quickened. She stirred, and gave some faint little sigh so that he awoke from his thoughts and approached her. She could not see his expression in the darkness.
"All right, there is but one answer," he said to her. "You shall become accustomed to all the