Maire wakes a man

Egelric threw up his arms, and grabbed, and held on. Somehow he already knew he was no longer dreaming, but he meant to cling to the dream as tightly as to the girl. Too many times she had eluded him, waking him to run away, tormenting him with doors she slammed behind her, teasing him with echoes of her laughter down corridors he no longer knew.

But no squeals nor wicked laughter burbled up from that breast he crushed against his own. No blonde braids thwacked his face, nor curtains of tousled blonde hair tented their heads and trapped her candy-​sweet breath between them.

The body he held bucked ferociously, and the voice snarled, “Egelric! Egelric!” in an accent that was not hers.

“Maire!” he gasped. “The devil!”

He flung her away and pressed his back down against the bed, rigid with a half-​sleeping, superstitious terror of touching a great lord’s daughter, and of molesting another man’s wife.

His body’s response to squeezing and struggling with a woman’s body followed only afterwards, blazing from the arms and shoulder that had held her, down to rekindle the smoldering fire in his groin.

He sat up and pulled up the blankets to make a tent over his knees.

Though she had fought viciously to free herself, Maire scarcely moved once he had released her. She still leaned over the bed, panting softly, hiding only half-​way behind her hair. The bed-​curtains billowed behind her, enclosing her and him in this larger tent, with its own, isolated atmosphere that was dark and warm and smelled of the sweat of his restless sleep.

“What the devil were you thinking, Maire?” he muttered. “Waking a man.”

“You’re wanted at Nothelm,” she said.

In an instant Egelric ticked off the names of the people he loved the most until he found the first who was at Nothelm.

“Baby-​Flann!”

He threw the blankets off his legs and swung them out of the bed. With Maire still leaning against the mattress he was forced to tangle with the curtains to get out.

“No, Egelric,” she said coldly as he passed, with none of the compassion of a woman reassuring a man that his baby was not ill.

He stumbled out onto the floor, into the fresh air of the room and the dry heat of the fire. Maire stepped out grandly from behind the curtains and pulled them closed behind her back. The gesture lifted her breasts high, and she held them proudly like her head.

In the first instant Egelric felt only outrage: Maire was so depraved as to have snuck nearly into his bed wearing one of Lili’s little nightgowns… But of course, he reminded himself, Lili’s little nightgowns had been so very little that a woman of Maire’s size could never have squeezed herself into one of them.

He remembered then that Lili was supposed to have started quite a fashion among the ladies with the pattern she had tacked up—to the tune of much shushing and giggling—with Lottie, whose ampler charms practically dictated such a design.

The gown was gathered high beneath the bust and cut low over it, with minute shirring in the trim that with its slight, persistent pucker made the gown and the girl seem the embodiment of a kiss.

Lili had often brushed out her long hair till it shone and put on such a gown when she had done something that needed pardoning. The poor girl! thinking she needed to employ such wiles to win forgiveness from him!

Nor had she known that he preferred the Lili of the pigtails and the plain white shift, which was always a little too long for her, always flopping about her feet and tripping her up in her frolics, as if even to the girl who hemmed her gowns she could never quite admit how tiny she truly had been.

It was only afterwards that Egelric noticed how such a gown looked on Maire, with her ampler charms. Her breasts strained against it, though it had been made to her size, and though it hung loosely beneath them it draped over every curve of her round hips, and hung to the perfect length, just off the floor.

Also, unlike Lili’s, Maire’s gown seemed to lace and tie in the back. Maire was a woman who expected to be dressed and undressed by a maid, or by a man she made serve as one.

“It’s a baby, though,” she said with a queer, choking triumph in her voice. “A strange elf woman and an elf baby—looking for you!”

Egelric snorted. He ruffled up his hair from off the back of his damp neck and turned away from Maire in a drowsy search for his clothes. He could not fathom why Nothelm would send for him when there was a perfectly good elf already in residence at the keep. He had thought his days as diplomat to the elves were done.

It was only a moment afterwards that he realized what thought had put that brassy, strident ring into Maire’s words.

“You think it’s mine!” he cried.

Maire snorted like a man and coldly smiled, but her cheeks were hot and flushed.

“What is this elf woman to me?” he demanded.

“That is what I wonder.”

Egelric turned about in search of something he could safely smack and settled on the bedpost.

“The devil you do! Is that what you’re doing in here in your nightgown, woman? Couldn’t wait till dawn to come in here and crow at me as you did at Aengus?”

“I am merely delivering a message,” she murmured.

“And I have a message for you, Maire! It isn’t mine! And I have no idea who this elf is, if she isn’t an elf you already know!”

He grabbed the bedpost, and held on, and shook it until the bed rattled. Lili’s name burst out of him, like the echo of words he had once said, though it was so choked into a sob that he could hope Maire had not understood.

This was what burned him: he could lie with every elf lady in the valley now that Lili was gone, have a thousand bastard babies now that Lili was gone, but he would not be accused of deceiving her while she lived.

Indeed, he would have rather given up all elf ladies and all women forever, if he could have had one last night with Lili, but this was not the choice he was given. Elf ladies and all women there would be forever, but Lili was gone.

“And I am not your husband, Maire!”

“Thank God,” she muttered.

He turned his fury to the bed again, and he grabbed the edge of the curtain and flung it aside, exposing the rumpled sheets for a moment before the curtain billowed back.

“Aye! And you are not my wife! Thank God! Though I think it would do you some good!”

“Does it think so?” she whispered scornfully.

She turned her face away from him, but her arms were folded tightly beneath her breasts—not shielding them from him, but lifting them and squeezing them together, stretching the shirred fabric almost smooth. She could turn her face away, but her hip was tilted towards his, and its slant followed him as he walked around her.

“At the very least you’d be learning not to go half-​naked to wake a man in his bed!”

She shrugged her shoulders as if to reassure herself of her half-​nakedness in her gown, or to strain against it. The gesture lifted her breasts still higher and settled them across the backs of her arms again.

Egelric could scarcely keep from laughing aloud. If she licked her lips or tossed back her hair, he thought he would.

“Or perhaps you’d be learning to like it, and going again?”

“It’s to deliver an urgent message I came,” she growled, “and it’s private I understood it to be. If my husband had been home, it’s him I would have been sending—and him you would have tossed back on your bed and raped, as that’s what you seem to be implying.”

All the while she had turned in place as he turned around her, keeping her scornful face and raised breasts always in his sight, but at the last he slipped behind her in two long strides.

If she would follow him then, she had no choice but to whip around to face him, as if she had been afraid. He had guessed she would not.

He waited until he had leaned far enough over her shoulder to stir the hair over her breast with his breath.

“How long has it been, Maire?” he asked softly. “A year? More?”

She shrugged again, lifting one shoulder then the other, one breast then the other.

“It never could have been so long had I been the husband of you, Maire,” he chuckled grimly. “That’s a lesson would have done you good to learn, daughter of Aed.”

She dropped the weight of her breasts and flung out her arms to steady herself as she spun to face him, but he was ready, and he caught her firmly by the waist.

She arched her back against his body and struggled with him, but he knew it for the struggling of a woman who wanted to be caught.

“Lesson repeated until it stays with you, Maire: such a thrashing as you’d not be sleeping on your back for a week, and such a dobbing as you’d not be walking straight for days.”

All at once she went vicious, snarling and stomping and flailing at him with her fingernails.

Egelric was a strong man, however, and Maire was small, and he could hold even a woman who did not want to be held. It was he who whipped her around, and before she could do more than hiss at him, he kissed her crushingly.

She fought him at first, ferocious, twisting and arching in his arms like a fish, scratching at his back with her nails, battering his lips with her teeth, but he had guessed she would not fight long enough to injure him.

She surrendered in a spasm, and her hand shivered up to lie on the back of his sweaty neck, fluttering her fingertips beneath the tent of his hair.

Only then did he shove her away.

“That was the easy lesson, daughter of Aed. If you are wise you will learn it well.”

The words came chuckling out of him like echoes of others he had said once, and he was briefly sickened—until he remembered that then he had been trying to prove that he was bad. Now he was only trying to prove to Maire that she was.

Or perhaps it was himself he was trying to convince. Perhaps he would have cured himself of desire for women forever, once he had proven they were all what he thought of them—all of them, from filthy two-​penny prostitutes to fine ladies, unto princesses, unto daughters of Aed.

“Now you know full well what’s coming to you if you’re waking a man in his bed, Maire,” he murmured.

He shook her gently until her breasts quivered out of rhythm with her panting breath.

“Now you know, daughter of Aed,” he whispered. “If you’re coming again, it’ll not be rape.”