Beauty's Release by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online

with gilded and caged slaves as well as other beautiful creatures fixed in dramatic positions atop marble pedestals.
    Beauty was made to stop. The leashes were taken from her mouth. And she saw her groom gather up her own leashes as he stood beside her. The thong played between her thighs, tickling her, forcing her legs a little apart. Then a hand smoothed her hair tenderly. She saw Tristan to her left and Laurent to her right, and she realized that the slaves had been positioned in a loose circle.
    But all at once the great crowd of grooms began to laugh and talk as though released from some enforced silence. They closed in on the slaves, hands pointing, gesturing.
    The slipper was on Beauty’s neck again, and it forced her head down until her lips touched the marble. She could see out of the corner of her eye that Laurent and the others were bent in the same lowly posture.
    In a wash of rainbow colors the silk robes of the grooms surrounded them. The din of conversation was worse than the noise of the crowd in the streets. Beauty knelt shuddering as she felt hands on her back and on her hair, the thong pushing her legs even wider. Silk-robed grooms stood between her and Tristan, between her and Laurent.
    But suddenly a silence fell that utterly shattered the last of Beauty’s fragile composure.
    The grooms withdrew as if swept aside. And there was no sound except the chattering of birds, and the tinkling of wind chimes.
    Then Beauty heard the soft sound of slippered feet approaching.

BEAUTY: EXAMINATION IN THE GARDEN
    I T WAS NOT one man who entered the garden, but a group of three. Yet two stood back in deference to one who advanced alone and slowly.
    In the tense silence, Beauty saw his feet and the hem of his robe as he moved about the circle. Richer fabric, and velvet slippers with high upturned curling toes, each decorated by a dangling ruby. He moved with slow steps, as if he was surveying everything carefully.
    Beauty held her breath as he approached her. She squinted slightly as the toe of the wine-colored slipper touched her cheek, and then rested upon the back of her neck, then followed the line of her spine to its tip.
    She shivered, unable to help herself, her moan sounding loud and impertinent to her own ears. But there was no reprimand.
    She thought she heard a little laugh. And then a sentence spoken gently made the tears spring to her eyes again. How soothing was the voice, how unusually musical. Maybe the unintelligible language made it seem more lyrical. Yet she longed to understand the words spoken.
    Of course, she had not been addressed. The words had been spoken to one of the other two men, yet the voice stirred her, almost seduced her.
    Quite suddenly she felt the chains pulled hard. Her nipples stiffened with a tingling that sent its tentacles down into her groin instantly.
    She knelt up, unsure, frightened, and then was pulled to her feet, nipples burning, her face flaming.
    For one moment the immensity of the garden impressed her. The bound slaves, the lavish blooms, the blue sky above shockingly clear, the large assemblage of the grooms watching her. And then the man standing before her.
    What must she do with her hands? She put them behind her neck, and stood staring at the tiled floor, with only the vaguest picture of the Master who faced her.
    He was much taller than the little boys—in fact, he was a slender giant of a man, elegantly proportioned, and he seemed older by virtue of his air of command. And it was he who had pulled the chains himself and still held the handles.
    Quite suddenly he passed them from his right hand to his left. And with the right hand, he slapped the undersides of Beauty’s breasts, startling her. She bit down on her cry. But the warm yielding of her body surprised her. She throbbed with the desire to be touched, slapped again, for an even more annihilating violence.
    And in the moment of trying to collect her wits, she had glimpsed the man’s dark wavy hair, not