Forty-Seven

FABIAN nuzzled the side of her neck with his nose and lips.
“What are these questions about, *mon amour*? Are you worried my desire for you will ever change? Rest assured that just thinking you’re under me gets me roused like a bull in a rut whether you’re with me or we’re apart. I have never, in my life, experienced this much desire for a woman, especially after we’ve become husband and wife. And yes…”
He shamelessly started to move his lower body in a humping motion as his hand reached down to slide her skirts up them, since they were still flushed underneath, and her skirt only covered him in case someone passed by the window and thought to look inside.
This hadn’t ever happened. No one entered the door after Odette brought in tea and a choice of pastries and biscuits.
Everyone in the household—the manor—knew that the Baron and his wife were robust in the activity of sexual pursuits and so, they were mostly left alone on certain parts of the day, whilst they could possibly be ‘occupied,’ which they more normally were.
“*Mon amour*, I will be desirous of you even when we’re both aged and our joints and limbs are not working as well as they are now and we both have lost our teeth,” he whispered near her ear as he entered her from behind with unerring accuracy, and Adalene breath in harshly, as she was as wet as moments ago with her own juice and his seed, and he impaled her effortlessly. “And I will always want to have my ways with you. As long as I live, my manhood will be your slave. I can’t stop its reaction to you the way I can’t stop gasping for air when I’m winded. Do you understand?”
She could barely answer, because he was thrusting back and forth, and she whimpered because of the pleasurable sensations. “*Oui… oui*, oh, *mon amour*, I do.”
There was no chance to talk after that as madness overcame them again, and there was no doubt in her mind how honest he was in his protestations and declarations about how much he desired her.
She could see this on his face, in his body, and in the groans of his soul that escaped his lips as he took her… as it had always happened since the beginning.
How had she even doubted it?
Her Baron was always different from other men in the way he loved her from the moment he had claimed her.
And she truly hoped he would never ever change...


AS preparations continued for the next trip to the port of Rome, Adalene paid more focus on shooting her arrows more accurately and mastering her knife-wielding skills.
It did not lessen her efforts when Fabian welcomed the idea of hiring a small group of stragglers who did look like stragglers but had a reputation for being sound companions on the rough road toward Rome.
They could go to places the knights couldn’t go to and get information that could help make travel less dangerous. In fact, this made her work harder.
She knew she was the reason Fabian worried, but not one of his men who knew him would dare ask him to leave Adalene behind.
They also never made her feel like she was an encumbrance and made a way out of their time to check on her progress and spar with her every day.
Traders bring female members of the family to fairs and trade ports. The only difference to theirs was their trader was a baron, at the behest of the Duke of Burgundy, but only in whispers.
There was one person who did protest, and it was Odette.
And it was not because she worried about going, because she enjoyed the first trip tremendously even though she was strictly alert and tensed the whole time, but because she believed Adalene should just let the knife-throwing and arrow-shooting and sword-fighting be left to the men.
When Adalene couldn’t be persuaded against it, she timidly asked if she could be taught how to use one of the small knives, too, so she could help protect them.
“I know I couldn’t stop you from going, and I wouldn’t want you to think I was the one who is afraid to go. But I am not! I will not be left behind here just because I am scared of road thieves. So… may I ask, my Lady, if you can teach me how to use one of those little knives, too? So I can help put holes on our enemies on this next trip? But only if I have to.”
Odette proved incredibly limber, and she so glowed in every one of their knife-wielding sessions that Adalene started to suspect this was the real reason why she even protested about the thing.
They would be leaving in a month, and her mother and siblings had gone back to the farms before winter started two months ago.
As it was incredibly cold, many hours of the day were now spent indoors.
They were spending Christmas Eve at the Manor and, as she wanted to visit her family during the day, she and Fabian set out to ride there in a small carriage that held their gifts and with no other companions, much to Odette’s dismay.
Lady Madeline had gone back to her own chateau in Dijon and promised to come and visit after much of the cold of the winter departed.
They could expect her to remain with them before the next winter season arrived next year because she enjoyed managing dressmakers and craftsmen's products and organizing travels with Adalene’s mother to fairs so much.
But today, Adalene was excited about the horse ride with her husband to her family’s farm and the stay with him alone in a cabin her parents had built for them last year, which they had never visited yet for a week.
So she made sure all the things on her list were strictly kept.
She would be cooking for him all this time, and she was both excited and nervous about how they were going to spend their time together for seven days.
They distributed gifts to their household staff on Christmas Eve and shared feasts with them.
The knights had a separate place to indulge because they were drinking with… companions Adalene wasn’t supposed to know about, but she could guess.
She knew none of them were married or betrothed, and of course, she spied the two carriages that arrived in the afternoon wherein she thought she heard giggling inside and, Odette whispered to her, a strong smell of women’s perfume inside long before the occupants had left them.
When she asked her how she knew, she said everyone learned it from the stable boys.
Adalene was having a hard time imagining the stoic knights in a night of ‘debauchery with prostitutes’—this was Lady Madeleine’s choice of words the last time she mentioned how brothels were speedily sprouting up in ports of trade in France, with much eye-winking to the knights, who all suddenly disappeared in the vicinity during the time.
They always acted so serious and straight, with the exception of Sir Bertrand, of course, who always gave the impression of wanting to get under her skirts but only to depress the baron, since he was supposedly under the protection of the duke.
But, anyway, as their mellow merriment in the manor’s hall got quieter and their household workers said their greetings and good nights one by one, the giggling, shrieks, and shouts of laughter drifting from outside to their windows seemed to get louder and louder until, when even Odette and the last soul had filed out, it was the only noise both Fabian and Adalene could hear.
“Uhm, I am getting curious about what they’re doing down there. It seemed like they are truly enjoying the birth of Christ, *mon chéri*."
He was trying not to react to what she said, but his mouth twitched. And Adalene pounced on him because of it.
“Can we go there and peep for a moment to see what they’re up to?” she asked him.
“Why do you want to see what they’re up to? Is not what we’ve been up to not enough?”
Adalene could feel her cheeks flaming up, and she punished him with a little nip on the tip of his ear. His breath hitched. “You know it is more than enough. I’m just… curious…” she said, unable to explain it.
He had turned his head and that handsome face was watching her face now, and it was her breath that caught now. “Are you sure you are ready for what you might see down there, *ma bichette*?“
She gulped. “I know you’ve been with them in the past,” she countered. “Do you think I can be… up to what I might find there?”
His lips firmed for a moment as if he wasn’t ready to admit to being with his knights on events like what was going on below in his past before he rescued her from the chapelle. But then he sighed. “I suppose we’ll know in a moment.”
“You’ll let me?”
He nodded. “There is no state whatsoever that I will let you go down there alone.”
Adalene giggled. “I do not plan to go anywhere near them without you. Come on.”
He covered part of his face with one masculine hand. “I am beginning to wonder if I’m starting to fail my Adalene.”
As a response, Adalene leaned in and gave him a thorough kiss on the mouth, then pulled him up to his feet with a feminine grunt before he could pull her down the couch.