Adora by Bertrice Small Read Free Book Online

wrong!”
    “No,” he said fiercely. “We do no wrong! You will never go to my father! You are nothing to him but a political necessity.”
    “But when I am widowed I may not come to you either. If I belong to anyone I belong to the empire of Byzantium. Once your father is gone, my next marriage will be arranged for me, as this one was.”
    “You belong to me,” he said huskily, “now and always.”
    She knew that she was lost, whatever happened. She loved him. “Yes,” she whispered, amazed at her own words. “Yes! I do belong to you, Murad!”
    And as his mouth savagely moved against hers, she felt a wild joy flood her. She was no longer afraid. Handspassionately caressed her, and her young body rose eagerly to meet his touch. Only once did she cry out—when his fingers found their way to the sweet core of her. But he stilled her protests with his mouth. He felt her wildly beating pulse beneath his lips. “No, dove,” he murmured hungrily, “let my fingers have their way. It will be sweetness, my love, only sweetness, I promise you.”
    And he could feel her slowly relaxing in his arms. Smiling he teased the sensitive flesh while the girl beneath him moaned softly, her lashes dark smudges against her white skin, her slim hips writhing. At last, satisfied that she was ready, he gently thrust a finger into her.
    Adora gasped, but before she could protest she was lost to the sweet wave of delight that possessed her completely. She arched to meet his hand, floating weightless until the tightness building within her shattered like a mirror into a rainbow of flashing lights.
    Her amethyst eyes finally opened, and she asked, her voice soft with the wonder of it, “How can such sweetness be, my lord?”
    He smiled down at her. “It is but a taste of delight, my dove. Just a taste of things to come.”

Chapter Three
    In Constantinople, the night was as dark as Emperor John Cantacuzene’s mood. His beloved wife, Zoe, was dead in a last futile attempt to give him another son. The awful irony was that she had given her last bit of strength to push twin sons from her exhausted and weakened body. Misshapen scraps of deformed humanity, they were joined at the chest and shared, so the physician claimed, a single heart. These monstrosities had been, praise God, born dead. Their mother, curse God, had followed them.
    If this tragedy were not terrible enough, his daughter, Helena, wife to the co-emperor John Paleaologi, was plotting with her husband to overthrow him, to take complete control of the empire. While her mother had lived Helena had been recognized only as wife to the young Paleaologi. Her mother had been recognized as the empress. Now Helena wished to be recognized as empress.
    “And if I remarry?” asked her father.
    “Why on earth would you remarry?” demanded his daughter.
    “To give the empire more sons.”
    “My son, Andronicus, is the heir. Next comes the child I now carry.”
    “There is no decree to that effect, my daughter.”
    “Really Father!”
    Every day Helena sounded more and more like her mother-in-law, the wretched Anna of Savoy.
    “My husband,” continued Helena, “is the rightful emperor of Byzantium, and therefore our son is the true heir.Surely you must realize that by now. God has spoken quite plainly. Your eldest son is dead, and my brother, Matthew, has chosen to follow the monastic life. In the last six years Mother miscarried five times of six sons. Now God has taken her from you—in obvious disapproval. What more do you want? Must the words of God’s will be engraved in clouds of fire over the city for you to accept it?”
    “The seer, Belasarius, has predicted that from my loins and my seed would spring a new empire out of Constantinople. How can this be if I do not have sons to carry on my line?”
    “Perhaps through me, Father,” said Helena smugly.
    “Or your sister, Theadora,” he snapped back.
    Helena glared and, without another word, left the room. John