The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

A barge from the black ship bearing Judge Henri Le Cherche splashed down, rowed over, and carried the two captives to their fate. And so Electra Gates found herself once again facing Judge Henri Le Cherche, this time on the deck of his flagship with his brother at her side.

“The lovely Miss Gates and my troublesome brother,” Judge Le Cherche greeted them. “How convenient for you to have run away, mademoiselle, since it made it easy for me to describe you to the world as a fool who placed herself in the hands of the vermin that hang about the Calais docks. So sad, and so easy to convince them that you were probably taken by slave-traders, probably dead.” He smiled. “No one need search for you now. How unfortunate for you to have so few powerful connections and friends on shore. You see, I have always known how vulnerable you were … how alone in the world. Only that desperate mother to push you one way and another, a woman without a single powerful friend.” He smiled. “And now I needn’t even bother with a wedding ceremony or any public scrutiny of our relationship. So much better than my former situation. I thank you for delivering yourself into complete anonymity. I will use it well. And dear brother,” he continued, still smiling, “how satisfying to put you in chains in the hold. You never appreciated the charms of chains. Pity. They do have charms.” Their captor lifted an eyebrow and three brawny members of his lower deck dragged Basil Le Cherche off. “Come, my pet,” Henri Le Cherche said, taking Electra’s arm so firmly that it was ringed with bruises within the hour. “You must be made ready for me.”

He led her to an airy chamber with windows overlooking the sea, a room as beautiful as Basil’s quarters on the Cat but without a single book or instrument. Instead of Basil’s cool teak floor and walls, here every surface gleamed black except for one wall which held an enormous mirror. There he left her in the care of three frightened young women, each holding boxes. “Sit still for us, mademoiselle, or he will make us all so sorry. Please.” Electra looked into their terrified eyes and nodded, submitting while they washed and perfumed her, laced her breasts into a bodice, drew silk stockings up to a filmy garter, swept her hair first up and then down in a mass of curls (Would he prefer curls or a bound mass? Curls? We will try curls…) and finally, for what seemed like an eternity, they painted her lips and eyes, brushed blush and color between her bound breasts, hung glittering jewels from her ears, and finally stepped back to critically assess their work.

“Will he be pleased?” one asked the others nervously.

“He will be impatient.” With this they turned away as if Electra herself had been a doll or mannequin and bustled out, leaving her alone before the mirror. She regarded herself. The image reflected there glittered. Her eyes traveled over the smoothed, scented, blushed, bound breasts. She drew herself to her full height and glared at her own reflection fiercely. She would allow no one to touch her, least of all the monster Judge Henri Le Cherche! Then, in part to banish thoughts of the judge, in part because she could not control the direction her mind took when she turned it away from this room and that man, she imagined his brother. She imagined Basil Le Cherche’s gray gaze, his cool authority, his hands touching her. Heat pulsed down to the world between her legs and she drew her own hands up and around her breasts. The touch sent a thick surge of feeling downward from her belly. The door opened. Before she could resume her indifferent perch on the locker Judge Le Cherche caught the last of her self-inspection.

“Yes, you are quite lovely. You will be even lovelier when I rip away all that careful work done by my young handmaidens. I hope you will be lovelier then. If not, there are other uses for you.”

“You disgust me! I know how you made your fortune, sir!”

“A person must make his way in the world, my pet. We all must make our way. Selling something that others want—that is all I do. I am a merchant of sorts. It is the buyers who make the market. Not the sellers. It is business. There is nothing personal involved.”

“Nothing personal perhaps for the buyers. Very personal for the sold.”

“Well then the trick is not to be one of the sold.” He approached her, lifted a hand and grasped her chin. She ducked her entire head quickly to break his hold and when he tightened his grip she sank her teeth in the palm of his hand deeply enough to draw blood.

“Unmannerly bitch!” he spat. “You perform such an act when you are told to perform it—not in response to any impulse of your own!” He wrapped the hand briskly in a linen handkerchief and the swift-flowing blood pulsed through, red field on white. “You should be more careful of your own safety, Electra Gates. Perhaps a night in the same conditions as my brother will make your position here clearer to you.”

Within moments she found herself dragged roughly to the hold and shoved into what seemed to be an animal stall, an enclosure full of stale hay and the smell of pig. The door slammed shut and the clank of a lock followed. She struggled to see in what seemed to be total darkness.

“Electra?”

The voice came from the wall to her right. She pressed herself against it in the darkness and found rough boards, many of them loose. “Basil?”

“Are you all right?” His voice was so close! He was just on the other side of these ill-fitted boards—some quite thin. She struggled with more determination and power than she had imagined herself capable of, finally pushing two planks aside—just enough space for a slender woman if she weren’t wearing these voluminous skirts. She shed her outer garments, untying the long petticoats and struggling out of the yards of silk around her hips. Clad only in the bodice, the chemise, and sheer stockings that the frightened young women had forced upon her, she wriggled through the opening into the stall next to hers. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the interior and she could make out the form of a figure prone, chained to bolts driven into the hull itself: Basil Le Cherche. His face was swollen and bloodied, his clothes torn, his chest exposed and in the tiny shafts of light entering through cracks in the wall behind him his skin gleamed with sweat. In the narrow shattered rays she made out his expression—he was smiling.

“Smiling! Are you mad?” she hissed.

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