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  The King’s Viper

  Janine Ashbless

  When Lady Eloise of the Isle of Venn becomes betrothed to the King of Ystria, she looks forward to a life of luxury and status at the royal court. She certainly doesn’t anticipate being shipwrecked on the way to her wedding, escorted by the King’s assassin, Severin de Meynard, the most hated man in the kingdom. Nor does she anticipate them having to make their way back home to Ystria on foot, through hundreds of miles of enemy territory. Above all, she doesn’t expect to fall in love with the cynical, ruthless Severin.

  Eloise and Severin struggle to control their growing attraction to each other because if they do not—if she returns to the King no longer a virgin—then they will both be executed. Yet their passion threatens to be far stronger than their self-control, leading them to other ways to satisfy their desires. Severin and Eloise are torn between duty and their burning need for one another, and both will face bitter sacrifice before the end.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  The King’s Viper

  ISBN 9781419934315

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The King’s Viper Copyright © 2011 Janine Ashbless

  Edited by Raelene Gorlinsky

  Cover art by Syneca

  Electronic book publication August 2011

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  The King’s Viper

  Janine Ashbless

  Chapter One

  “Father? You sent for me?”

  Earl Ailwyn of the Isle of Venn looked up from the King’s letter and smiled at his daughter Eloise. Smiled sadly, because these days he felt he hardly knew her. The haunted expression that had been in her eyes for months, ever since her return home, sat like a curse on her face and threatened to overwhelm her youth. Rising from the broad window seat he favored when working alone, he kissed her on the cheek, then motioned for her to sit next to him.

  “You’ve heard, haven’t you, that a ship from Kingsholme docked last night?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Severin de Meynard was on it. We’ve spoken together.”

  Eloise, who had been looking politely into his face, bowed her head. A mass of tangled brown curls slid to hide her face as she averted it, making it only too obvious that she hadn’t bothered to comb her hair properly or tie it back in a becoming style. Ailwyn noted that her dress was splashed with mud around the hem too, and that one of her sleeves was torn. He made a mental note to pass a reprimand to her attiring-women. Even if the Daughter of Venn was no longer prepared to care for her appearance, that did not justify them neglecting their duties.

  The annoyance he felt helped him to bear the ache of his concern.

  She’d been like a ghost since her rescue, he thought. She’d taken to aimlessly wandering the passages of Venn Keep, saying not a word to anyone and so mired in her thoughts that she barely managed to recall herself and answer when addressed. Like a specter she drifted through the shadowed halls, clad in the appearance of life but without any of its warmth or intent. She no longer took any interest in accompanying him in his duties as lord and judge of the demesne, and the Earl missed her thoughtful questions and comments. Indeed, her voice was rarely heard at all now. When she was moved to action it was, as often as not, to go alone to the cliff top behind Venn Keep, to the tumbled drystone wall there. The wall had been built to keep cows from falling off the cliff in the days when cattle grazed around the motte. Eloise had selected a section and was rebuilding it, stone by stone, her damask sleeves rolled back as she toiled. Her hands were rough and torn these days—when she lifted one absently to her lips, her father could see the chipped nails.

  Ailwyn felt the familiar dismay stir inside him. What was a daughter of earls thinking, working like a peasant? Yet when he tried to question her about her ordeal, she had nothing to say. And he didn’t have the heart to be stern with her, the daughter who had come back to him from the dead.

  “Tell me, daughter, what do you truly think of the man?”

  “He saved my life,” said Eloise in a quiet, dull voice. “He’s a man of honor.”

  “Is that all?” He’d asked the question before, several times and in several ways, but like everyone else he had been refused answer.

  “What else should there be?”

  Ailwyn exhaled down his nose, struggling with his frustration. “He came to ask for your hand, daughter.”

  Eloise’s shoulders quivered. She looked up at him and Ailwyn nearly flinched from the intensity of her gray-eyed gaze. Her lips were pursed tight, as if she dared not open them.

  “I know this is a shock. After everything that happened…” Ailwyn sighed. He didn’t like de Meynard, but he couldn’t deny that he owed the man a debt of gratitude. “But he brought this royal warrant expressing approval for the match. The King has no objection—though it is to be a marriage of the left hand only. He’s not permitted to inherit the Isle of Venn upon my death, though your children might.”

  “I see,” said Eloise faintly.

  “In the circumstances, daughter, I can see the sense of this. It would solve our predicament, would it not? But also, in the circumstances, I can see why you would not wish this. So…I have decided that the choice will be yours, daughter.”

  Tears gathered in the girl’s eyes and she reached out to touch her father’s hand. He wrapped his fingers around hers.

  “There will be other men, if you wish to wait, my Eloise,” he murmured, wishing that he sounded more confident, or that Eloise were fool enough to fall for his comforts. “Others will ask for your hand in time.”

  “Will they?” She sniffed as she blinked away the tears. “Thank you, my father and lord, for your gracious gift. But you are right, it makes sense that I marry the King’s Viper.”

  “Then you agree?”

  “I will do it, with your blessing.”

  Ailwyn nodded and let out a breath that had been pent up for half a year. “Then I shall sign the contract of betrothal and issue the proclamation. The wedding will take place tomorrow afternoon.”

  * * * * *

  On her wedding night, Eloise waited in her chamber—not her old familiar bedroom, but a grand chamber that had been specially prepared for the nuptials of the heir of Venn—the curtains dusted, the mattress on the four-poster bed beaten and aired and covered
in fresh linens.

  She was led into the chamber by her maids. On the far side of the bed the chamberlain and his men waited to do their duty. The womenfolk cast them scolding glances and held up sheets to protect her from their prurient eyes as they disrobed her down to a close-fitting shift of very white, very fine silk. They pulled all the curtains about the bed, holding open only one gap for Eloise to enter.

  “Make no sound, no matter how it hurts,” urged one of the senior ladies in her ear. “If you cry out in weakness, then your firstborn will be a girl.”

  Eloise climbed onto the mattress and the gap vanished, leaving her enclosed in a fabric chamber all her own. Firelight glowed on one curtain, lighting the inner sanctum dimly. She sat up, hugging one knee and chewing a fingernail.

  Severin de Meynard had said hardly a word to her throughout the ceremony and the meal afterward—a wedding breakfast she’d scarcely touched because her stomach was clenched with tension. His gaze had slid over her as smoothly as black fur. And she hadn’t dared sneak more than a few glances at him. There was too much between them, a history of terror. He’d changed the style of his narrow beard though, she’d noticed. Now it ran the length of his jaw. The bruises she’d seen on his face at their last meeting had long gone of course, but nothing could heal the missing fingers on his right hand. And he looked older. There were gray hairs among the black on his chin.

  His left hand had been cool upon hers as they exchanged vows, his voice emotionless, his expression unreadable.

  The officials and the maids talked together in low voices and laughed. Her nervousness turned to hot rage. None of this was about her, only about her descendants. Before the wedding she’d been thrashed with a sheaf of wheat, had her breasts anointed with ewes’ milk and had a boy baby passed between her thighs, everything designed to encourage her to bear healthy heirs. Even the white silk kerchief, wedged in the carved headboard, was intended to capture for public display the tokens of her ruptured virginity. Nobody cared if she was happy or unhappy, whether he was tender or cruel to her, whether they took joy in one another or co-existed in loathing. The only matters of significance were that she came to the marriage a maiden, and that she be fertile thereafter.

  I could have been Queen of Ystria, she thought. And exactly the same would have been true then.

  The chamber door creaked open and closed. He was here. For a moment the official witnesses fell silent. Then someone spoke—the chamberlain almost certainly—and though Eloise could not hear all the words of his elaborate pleasantry she knew from his tone that it was ribald.

  The joke fell flat, as Severin made no response. The silence stretched to an uncomfortable length until the chamberlain coughed nervously. Eloise smiled despite herself, though it was a warped and grim smile. Severin de Meynard had a way of killing foolish humor. He could look right through you as if judging your innermost weaknesses, without passion and without mercy.

  The curtain of her chamber-within-a-chamber twitched aside, and the King’s Viper looked in on her. He didn’t smile.

  “Good even, my lady wife.”

  “My lord husband.” The words came out falteringly. She wondered if she should have arranged it so that his first glimpse of her was not like this, hunched up on the bed like a child afraid of the dark. But it was too late for that. He turned away, speaking to the others in an undertone, then climbed onto the bed. A small leather flask, the sort used to hold strong liquor, swung by its thong from his hand.

  “It’s been—” she whispered, but he cut her off, placing a finger against her lips for silence. The reproof made her quail.

  He made sure the curtains were drawn tight and nothing could be glimpsed of them from without. He was wearing only woolen hose, hitched loosely about his hips now that they were not laced to a doublet. His chest—with its compact, hard muscle and its dark flare of hair—was bare. She saw unfamiliar scars, still shiny and fresh, laced across his ribs.

  They’d punished him cruelly for what he’d done to her.

  Eloise dug her fingers into her shin. Do I really know this man?

  She had seen for herself that he was a killer. Had he ever been truly kind to her? Hadn’t he systematically stripped her of all hope and abandoned her to her pain? Hadn’t he taken everything from her?

  Everything, she realized, except that which he was about to claim now, by right of marriage.

  In a moment the whole edifice of her memory crumbled into doubt. A visceral terror made her wonder if she had made an awful mistake—if in fact she had been mistaken all along. Perhaps she had deceived herself. Perhaps he had deliberately deceived her.

  As he knelt before her with his thighs spread, and laid his right hand along her cheek, she trembled.

  Severin felt it. He withdrew the hand at once, dropped the flask upon the coverlet and lifted the other, whole, hand instead. Eloise felt a stab of wild horror. He thinks I’m recoiling from his disfigurement! She put both palms on his chest as swiftly as she could. His skin felt hot against her fingers, against her chin as he lifted her face, and against her lips as his mouth covered hers in a move that snatched her breath away.

  His kiss—deep, hungry and impatient—belied the mask of deference he’d worn all day, and it ran through Eloise’s body on a hot, wet tide of racing blood. Her heart slammed painfully in her breast. Her skin crackled with sensation, her nipples tightening as if something cold had brushed her soul. Panting, she broke at last from his kiss, and the scent of him filled her head—that provoking, frightening, male smell of his body so familiar even after months apart. She knew it as well as she knew her own and it woke a response in her flesh, an ache and a weakness. She knew the heaviness of his arms and the lethal strength in them. She knew it was useless to resist as he caught her and pulled her in an ungainly tangle of limbs into his lap, his hands caressing her back and thighs and rear with a determination bordering on roughness. He tried to slip one hand between the cheeks of her rump and when the tight fabric of her shift thwarted him she felt his tiny growl of frustration. His kisses left her lips bruised and her head spinning.

  He stopped and she wondered if Severin had sensed her terror. But he was only intent on taking the neck of her shift in his hands. The fine cloth—imported into Venn, and extraordinarily expensive—tore between his fists, all the way down her spine. An exclamation flew to Eloise’s lips and battered itself against them before she swallowed it back down again. Only a soft moan escaped her as his hand took possession of the curve of her rear once more, this time unimpeded by the cloth.

  Arcing her over his arm, Severin brushed aside the loose fall of fabric that hung upon her chest and planted biting kisses down the swell of her right breast. Eloise shut her eyes as his lips passed over the scar there and it tingled into life. She remembered the dull patina of the knife, the burning pain as it sliced her flesh, the hot trickle of blood down her breastbone—and remembering, she dug her nails into the nape of his neck. Severin’s teeth, locked around the tender point of her nipple, pinched tighter and then suddenly let go.

  He sat back. They were both breathing fast, yet trying not to be loud about it. She stared into the darkness that was his eyes but couldn’t read his expression in the gloom. She wanted desperately to speak, her breast swelled with unuttered words. Months of silence boiled in the stifling air between them.

  Taking her hand from about his neck, he pressed it to the inside of his thigh, to the burgeoning swell of flesh there under the stretched wool of his hose.

  And oh, she knew that too. She knew what he carried between his legs, its weight and its surge and its girth. Its insistence and its hunger for her. Hadn’t those things haunted her nights for six long months as she lay alone in her bed and stared into the darkness? It was fighting its way out now through the vent of the cloth into the open air, hot and silky and hard against the curve of her hand. Its mouth bestowed a moist kiss on her fingertips. She couldn’t see it clearly in this amber twilight but she knew that blue veins were threade
d through the flushed and ruddy flesh. She clasped it obediently and stroked it from root to crown.

  A gasp escaped from Severin’s lips, the first syllable of a word that he smothered against her lips. His tongue tangled with hers and the name drowned as well as suffocated. He growled in his throat and she felt it in hers, all the way down to her core.

  He let go of her a moment later, but only so that he could push his hose impatiently down his thighs. They were rough with hair, just as Eloise remembered, and his cock, fully erect, stood up dark against the wall of his abdomen. He sought the little flask he’d discarded, twisted off the stopper and upturned it over the head of his erection.

  “Here,” he breathed—the only word he’d permitted either of them since he’d joined her in the marriage bed. There was a thin ooze, a trickling glisten on his flesh, a peppery green scent in her nostrils. Olive oil. The smell took her back suddenly, fiercely, to that night in the inn on the border—just as it did every time she dipped salted bread in oil for a meal, every time the lamps were filled. As always it woke a fluttering stab inside her belly, an unasked-for gush of heat and moisture to her sex.

  This time, at least, her memory was not a private torment.

  Taking her hand again, he guided her fingers to his cock and buried his face in her hair as she slicked him thoroughly, up and down. His breath was shallow and impatient. With his free hand he grasped the nape of her neck. The oil soaked his pubic hair to black ringlets and ran down over the corrugations of his clenched scrotum. That ball-sac was fat and tight just as she recalled—filled to bursting.

  They would be getting oil on his hose, she thought irrelevantly. It was inevitable. Concupiscence always left evidence, she knew now, even if the stains were hidden within the soul.