NOTORIOUS in the Tudor Court: A Sinful Alliance / A Notorious Woman

“The stares of your companion, the priest?” Nicolai said, remembering the thin, pale cleric who seemed to be her Court shadow.

“Father Pierre, yes. He is always warning me to beware of spending too much time with the Spanish. He says you are all not as you seem.”

“That seems a pointless warning to someone like you.”

Her head tilted quizzically. “Someone like me?”

“Someone who lives at Court.”

“Hmm, yes. Surely your own life as a travelling player has prepared you well to be a courtier.”

“The ability to pretend to be someone we are not is useful anywhere. To be able to shift and change whenever we desire.”

“To deceive,” she murmured.

Nicolai moved closer to her, reaching out to gently take her chin in his hand, lifting her face toward him, into the light. The shadows played over her fair skin, the slant of her cheekbones. She stared up at him solemnly, giving nothing away.

Yet she trembled under his touch, like a tiny captive bird trying to escape.

“Who are you, really?” he said softly. “I called you a fairy enchantress, a witch, and so you seem to be.”

“I could not tell you.”

“Because you do not trust me?”

She reached up to take his fingers in hers, bending her head to press a kiss to them. It was a soft, gentle salute, strangely sad. “Because I do not know.”

She let him go, stepping back, easing away from him, from their situation. “I have to go back. I will tell Dona Elena you are well, and will see her at the pageant.”

Then she spun around and dashed away, leaving her lily scent, and her cryptic words, heavy in the air. Nicolai followed to the doorway, watching after her as she hurried into the night, a shimmering, silken figure, like the fairy he called her. She vanished not into some enchanted, misty realm, but into the well-lit, noisy banquet hall. Into her courtiers’ life.

As Nicolai stared after her, a tall, thin shadow detached itself from the night and trailed behind her. An ominous crow flocking after the bright, trembling bird. Father Pierre.

So, Marguerite was far from the only French person with secrets tonight.

Marguerite sat on her clothes chest, her body erect, tense, as she listened to the palace around her. It was deep into the darkest part of the night, the sky outside her little window a purplish indigo. Almost everyone tucked inside Greenwich’s stout walls slept. Claudine’s chamber next door was silent.

But Marguerite could not sleep, could not even lie down on her turned-back bed. She was too restless, every sense humming with acute awareness of the world around her.

What had she meant when she told Nicolai she could not tell him who she was, because she did not know? Of course she knew who she was! She was Marguerite Dumas, the Emerald Lily. Faithful servant of France. Dependent on no one as she made her way through the world. It was all she had worked for, all she had wanted since she was fifteen years old.

Yet when she was near Nicolai, all that vanished. Her world shifted, cracked, reformed into something new and strange, something she did not recognise. When she was near him, these restless longings for she knew not what overwhelmed her.

And she did not know who she was.

Marguerite rose from the chest, drifting toward the looking glass. She wore only a sleeveless sleeping chemise, as thin and light as cobwebs, her hair loose over her shoulders. The glow from the one candle shone through the fine fabric, revealing the slender lines of her body, the high, erect, pink circles of her nipples. She was all white and silver, like a ghost in the night.

She hardly recognised herself. Surely she would just vanish like a wisp of mist, and no one would remember she was there at all.

Marguerite shrugged one long strand of hair back from her shoulder, staring at the tiny red mark just at the upper curve of her breast. Nicolai had left it there, his kiss on her skin a reminder of their wild sex on the theatre floor. A reminder of his touch, of the exploding need that overcame her.

It couldn’t go on. He was a distraction from her work, and any misstep now could prove fatal. She was given this chance after her failure in Venice, this one last chance. She balanced on that acrobat’s tightrope, wobbling, wavering, unable to move forward or back.

She had to decide which way to jump.

Marguerite spun away from the glass, reaching for her cloak before she could let caution overtake her. She swung the black velvet over her chemise, and left her chamber on silent, bare feet.

The corridors were silent, filled only with the soft snores of the pages on their pallets, the sputter of torches in their sconces. From behind some of the closed doors could be heard the cries and sighs of passion. No one stopped her as she crept down the stairs and through the labyrinthine halls, her hood up to cover her pale hair and conceal her face. Surely she was turning to mist already.

The wing housing the Spanish was just as deserted as the rest of the palace, though there were signs of an abandoned gathering in empty goblets and scattered cards, a lute in the corner. Marguerite tiptoed up to a door, half-hidden behind a tapestry, and reached down to test the latch. It was not locked, and clicked open at her touch. She slid inside, hardly able to breathe, and closed the door behind her.

Nicolai was not asleep. He lay propped up in his bed, a book open beside him, candlelight flickering over the tumble of the bedclothes. She could see that he was naked under the sheet, his skin glistening gold against the white linen, the thin fabric skimming lightly over the lines of his body. She shivered as she recalled the slide of that body against hers.

He frowned as he glanced up, one hand edging toward a bolster where she was sure a dagger was hidden. But he went still when she folded back her hood, his eyes widening as the light fell over her face.

There was surely a price for what she did tonight, Marguerite knew that well. She was willing to pay it.

Would he?

Nicolai sat straight up, watching her in the tense silence. The sheet fell back, revealing the lean, muscled contours of his body. The light glimmered on the fine blond hairs of his legs and arms, making him seem gilded, like an ancient idol.

She shrugged the cloak away, leaving it in a pool on the floor as she moved slowly toward the bed. She didn’t know what he would do. Kill her? Kiss her? Laugh at her, and send her away? She would rather he plunged his dagger into her heart than do that!

He said nothing, just studied her with his unearthly eyes as she slowly climbed on to the mattress beside him. She reached out and gently pushed him back on to the tangle of sheets and velvet blankets.

“Marguerite…” he said tightly.

“I am not Marguerite tonight,” she whispered. “I am your fairy enchantress.”

She leaned over his taut body, her hair falling around them in a pale curtain, closing off the world. She touched the hollow of his throat with the tip of her tongue, feeling the pulse of his life, tasting the salt of the tiny bead of sweat that pooled there. He was so tense under her, like a drawn bow, but he leaned back, gave her her own way.

As she trailed kisses across his shoulder, she reached her fingers down to lightly trace the circle of his flat, brown nipple, which pebbled under her caress. Her tongue followed, darting out to lick before blowing on it gently. Ever so softly.

“An enchantress indeed,” he groaned.

Marguerite laughed, revelling in the sudden wave of power that rushed through her. The heady, giddy pleasure. Her lips trailed along his chest, over his taut abdomen, soft, quick, teasing kisses.

At last her mouth closed over the throbbing length of his manhood. His fingers clasped in her hair, as if to push her away—or hold her closer. In that one, perfect moment, he was hers. And it was everything she wanted.

Chapter Twelve

Marguerite drowsed in Nicolai’s loose embrace, lying on her side in his bed, curled back against him as she ran her fingertips lightly along his arm. From his wrist to his elbow and back again, until she twined her fingers with his and pressed his hand to her stomach.

There were old scars there from the horse’s kicks, the cuts of the iron shoes, a tracery of rough red lines she had never let anyone see before. But now she let Nicolai touch them, his fingertips playing over them gently.

“What will you do when you leave England?” she asked quietly.

Nicolai chuckled, his warm breath stirring her hair. He drew her even closer into the heat of his body. “Why? So you can chase me when I go? Run after me across the continent until you kill me at last?”