She’d been glad for his company.
My jaw tightened, and I stood up from the chair, walked over to the window, and braced both hands on the sill as I looked out at nothing in particular. The courtyard below was empty except for a stable boy crossing with a lantern, the flame guttering sideways in the wind.
Tristan wanted something from her; I was sure of it. Men like Tristan always wanted something. They wrapped that want in courtesy, warmth, and that infuriating, practiced attentiveness, but underneath it was the same as everything else. He’d seen a beautiful woman sitting alone, and he’d gone to her the way water finds the lowest point.
Of course, all of us at the high table had been shocked. Some had commented; others hadn’t. Some had even joked that he was moving in to see what he could get from her. I’d been the most interested in Arthur’s reaction, which hadn’t really been much of a reaction at all: an eyebrow raise, a few whispers back and forth with Mordred, and then the subject had been forgotten as he spent the rest of the evening in rapt conversation with Isolde.
As to the subject of Isolde, I had no idea what Arthur was doing, nor why she was here. It was fairly obvious that many of the court believed this was his way of courting her, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she thought the same. But I wasn’t so convinced. Regardless, Arthur hadn’t consulted me on the subject of Isolde, and I tried not to wonder why. It hadseemed in most recent days that the two of us weren’t quite as close as we had been.
But my thoughts didn’t linger long on Arthur. Instead, I kept thinking of Tristan’s hands, those careful, deliberate hands, and the thought of those hands being anywhere near Guinevere made something ugly move through me.
I stepped back from the window.
I had no claim on her. What was more, I’d sworn to forget her. I’d promised myself I’d tamp out every last feeling I harbored toward her, and that would be the end of it. But that hadn’t been the end of it. Far from it. Thoughts of Guinevere were just as present in my mind as they always had been, and now? Now even more so.
The door to the bathing room opened.
The woman stepped out in a wash of candlelight and steam. Dark blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders, and her skin was still flushed from the water. A linen wrap held loosely at her waist but not much else. She caught me looking at her and allowed the wrap to fall in a practiced movement, the kind that usually worked on me.Usually.
I allowed my eyes to scan down the length of her body. She was beautiful. Objectively. The kind of woman I would have pulled into this room without a second thought months ago, the kind of woman I would have fucked then forgotten before the candle burned down an inch.
I looked at her, but all I could see was silver-white hair.
The shape of her face was wrong, and her eyes were brown where they should have been violet. Her mouth was softer, but also less precise. She was the wrong woman in the right light, and my body knew it before my mind had the indignity of admitting it. But I wouldn’t let this best me again. I would fuck her, and I would enjoy it.
“Come here,” I growled.
She came to me, and the second she was within my grasp, I pulled her against me and kissed her. She made a small sound against my mouth as her hands found my chest, and I waited.
But there was nothing happening downstairs. I pulled back and looked at the wall over her shoulder and tried to locate the appropriate part of myself. The part that had never failed me until recently. The part that had been, for over twenty years, entirely reliable in every circumstance except the ones that actually mattered.
Gone. That part of me seemed to be completely, humiliatingly gone. I made the mistake of glancing down and found my cock as flaccid as a used sock.
Again.
The woman looked up at me with an expression that hovered between confusion and the professional concern of someone who needed this evening to go a certain way.
This was the third time in two weeks. The third blonde woman. The third failure. My body had apparently made a decision that I hadn’t been consulted on, and it had made it with the cheerful finality of a gate swinging shut.
I stepped back.
“Get dressed,” I said.
“My lord—”
“I said get dressed.”
She read something in my face and decided not to push it. Then she gathered her things from the chair where she’d left them and dressed quickly, as I walked back to the window and listened to the small sounds of her preparing to leave: the rustle of fabric, the soft step on the rushes, the door latch lifting.
“Take the coin on the table,” I said, without turning around. “It’s yours.”
A pause. Then the door opened and closed, and I didn’t check to see if she’d taken the money.
The fire ticked in the grate; it was most definitely dying.
I stood at the window, looked out at the empty courtyard, and thought about Tristan leaning toward her over a dinner table. Then I thought about those violet eyes going quiet when someone finally treated her like she existed. I thought about what it meant that I knew exactly how her eyes went quiet because I’d been watching her face at dinner from across a room like a man who had completely lost his mind.
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose.