I Accidentally Slept With My Future Brother In Law novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Still Room
Sold with her sister for her father's barony, Elinor slips down to the palace still room, catches the King's tea painted with copper, and spends one nameless night with the man testing it; in the morning the Crown Prince, her sister's groom, turns around and it's him.
My father traded my sister and me to the royal family for a title.
Blanche got the Crown Prince.
I got the Prime Minister, the King's younger son, a man the whole city called cold.
Nobody asked either of us.
Our carriage reached the palace at dusk, and Father made us stand in the courtyard while he looked us over.
He walked around Blanche.
"Chin up. You're going to be a queen one day. Try to look like one."
Then he got to me.
He grabbed my wrist and turned my hand over.
My fingertips were brown.
They always are. I'd been blending the autumn black that morning before the carriage came.
"Gloves, Elinor," he said. "Every minute you're in this palace. Nobody needs to know I sold a prince a shopgirl."
"You named the shop Pellow and Sons," I said. "I'm the closest thing to a son you've got."
He squeezed my wrist until the bones ground together.
"Three hundred thousand crowns. That's what you two cost me. Smile like you're worth it."
The footmen stared at the cobbles.
Blanche took my other hand and didn't let go until we were inside.
At midnight I gave up on sleep.
In the morning I would be handed to a stranger in front of the whole court.
Everyone said the same three things about Prince Bertrand.
He ran the kingdom while his father was sick.
He never smiled.
He once sent a duke home from council for being four minutes late.
I pulled on my old blue wrapper, pushed up my sleeves and took my tea kit down the servants' stairs.
I can't sleep without a pot. I never could.
The kitchens were dark, but there was lamplight under the still-room door.
A man stood at the long table in his shirtsleeves.
A ring of keys lay by his elbow.
In front of him sat a silver caddy with the royal crest, and three cups in a row.
He looked up.
Black hair falling in his eyes. Dark eyes. A jaw nobody had shaved since morning.
"You're new," he said.
"I'm here for the kettle."
"The kettle's mine tonight."
I looked at his cups. He had poured boiling water straight onto green leaf.
"Then you'd better learn to use it," I said. "You're cooking that. Green wants the water just off the boil."
He stared at me.
Then he stepped back and held out the caddy.
"Go on, then. Show me."
I took a pinch.
The leaf was too bright. Green, not like anything that grew.
I brewed it right, pulled a mouthful hard across my tongue the way tasters do, and spat it into the slop bowl.
Then I spat again.
"Who sold the King this?"
He went very still. "Why?"
"Because it isn't tea. Half of it is sloe leaf. Some of it is ash. Somebody painted it."
I rubbed a wet leaf between my finger and thumb.
When I opened my hand, my fingertip was green.
"Verdigris," I said. "Copper. Painters use it on shutters. You don't drink it."
He looked at my finger for a long moment.
"Three months," he said quietly. "I've known something was wrong for three months, and every physician in this palace told me I was imagining it."
"Are you the King's apothecary?"
He turned the ring of keys over in his hand.
"I see to what he drinks. Somebody has to."
"Then stop him drinking that."
"I will. Tomorrow." He looked at me again, properly this time. "Who are you?"
If anyone found out a Pellow bride had spent the night in the kitchens, Father would make Blanche pay for it.
"No names," I said. "Tomorrow I belong to somebody else. Tonight I'd like to belong to me."
Something moved in his face.
"No names," he said. "I don't want mine tonight either."
I made us a proper pot from my own kit.
We sat on the flour bins and drank it like two people with nowhere to be.
He told me his father had picked his wife, and he'd meet her in the morning.
"Is she kind?" I asked.
"I've never met her. They say she's very sensible."
"Mine's never smiled in his life."
He laughed out loud.
It was a good laugh, low and surprised.
"Sensible and never smiles," he said. "They'd make a lovely couple."
"Don't."
"Would you rather marry the apothecary?"
"I'd rather marry the kettle," I said. "It's never let me down."
He reached over and wiped my bottom lip with his thumb.
"You've got green on you."
His thumb stayed.
I didn't move away.
I had done what I was told for twenty-four years.
Tomorrow I would do it for the rest of my life.
"I want one thing I chose," I said. "Before morning."
He set his cup down very carefully.
"Nobody in this room has had anything stronger than tea," he said. "So you can't blame the wine tomorrow."
"Yes."
"Then say it like you want it."
"I want it."
I stood up, took his face in my stained hands and kissed him.
He made a sound against my mouth and pulled me down onto his knee.
"Yes," I said again, into his collar. "Now you."
"Yes," he said. "God, yes."
Behind the still room was the drying room, warm from the oven wall, with mint and chamomile hanging from the beams.
He carried me there.
He carried me into the drying room and set me down by the pallet.
The room was warm from the oven wall.
Mint and chamomile swung from the beams above us.
One lamp burned on a hook, throwing our shadows long and slow across the sacks.
He was already reaching for me, but I stepped in first.
I pushed him down onto the pallet.
He landed with a grunt, looking up at me.
"You're in a hurry, kettle girl."
"Water just off the boil," I said. "Not before."
I dropped to my knees over him and opened his shirt myself.
Button after button, my stained fingers working fast and sure.
His chest was lean and warm under my palms.
He hissed when I dragged my nails down through the dark hair there.
"God," he said. "You've done this before."
"None of your business."
I bent and bit his collarbone.
He grabbed my hips and pulled me flush against him.
Through my wrapper and my nightgown I felt him, hard already, and I rolled against it.
"Tell me what you like," he said. "I want to hear you say it."
"I like being on top."
"That so."
But he surged up and rolled us, and suddenly I was under him.
The straw crackled under my back.
Mint brushed my cheek from a low-hung bunch.
"You can have the top next time," he said. "Right now I want to see your face while I make you fall apart."
"I said one night. There isn't a next time."
"Then I'd better make this count."
He kissed me then, open and hot and slow.
His hands slid down my sides and gathered the hem of my nightgown.
I lifted my hips and let him pull it off over my head.
My wrapper had already come open when he rolled us.
It lay between my bare back and the meal sacks, damp from the warm room.
He sat back on his heels and looked at me.
I was naked under him and I did not cover myself.
"You're staring, apothecary."
"I'm memorizing."
He bent and took one nipple into his mouth.
I gasped and fisted my hands in his hair.
He sucked slow, then bit just enough to make me arch up off the pallet.
"You make better sounds than the kettle," he said against my skin.
"Shut up."
"Make me."
He moved to my other breast and I pulled his hair harder.
He groaned against me and I felt it in my cunt, a hot clench of want.
"Now you," I said. "Take these off."
I shoved at his trousers.
He knelt up and unfastened them.
When he pushed them down, his cock sprang free, thick and flushed and glistening at the head.
I reached for it.
"It's in my way."
He laughed, low and rough.
I wrapped my hand around his cock and stroked him once, from root to tip.
His hips jerked into my grip.
"Fuck," he said. "Your hands are so warm."
"Tea stains and all."
"I like the stains."
I stroked him again and he dropped his head back.
The lamplight caught the sweat starting on his chest.
I watched him, the way his jaw tightened, the way he thrust into my fist.
Then he caught my wrist and pressed my hand down onto the pallet.
"My turn," he said.
He kissed his way down my stomach, slow and open-mouthed.
When he reached my hip, he bit me there.
I bucked and he laughed against my skin.
"So impatient."
"Stop talking and do something useful."
He pushed my thighs apart and settled between them.
One long look up my body, and then his mouth was on me.
I cried out and my head fell back against the sacks.
He licked me open with slow, deliberate strokes, his tongue flat then pointed.
Every pass over my clit made my thighs shake.
He reached up and palmed my breast while he worked me.
"You're so wet," he said. "I haven't even started."
"You have a big opinion of your tongue."
"Tell me it's not good."
I didn't answer.
He closed his lips around my clit and sucked.
My hips came up off the pallet.
He pinned them down with one arm and did it again.
"So wet," he said again, and pushed one finger inside me.
I moaned, long and raw.
He fucked me with his finger while his tongue circled my clit.
I felt the build rising, hot and tight at the base of my spine.
"Don't stop," I said. "Don't you dare stop."
He didn't.
He added a second finger and curled them forward.
My cunt clenched around him.
I was close, the pleasure bright and sharp like water just off the boil.
Then he pulled back.
I could have killed him.
"Why did you stop?"
"Because I want to be inside you when you come."
He crawled up my body and kissed me, and I tasted myself on his mouth.
I reached down and guided his cock to my entrance.
"Now," I said. "Fuck me now."
He pushed in slow, inch by inch.
I felt every bit of him stretching me open.
He dropped his forehead to mine.
"God, you feel good."
"Move."
He did.
He pulled back and thrust deep, and I cried out.
The sound echoed off the warm stone walls.
He set a rhythm, hard and steady, and I wrapped my legs around his waist.
"Harder," I said.
He gave me harder.
The pallet scraped against the floor with every thrust.
Mint leaves fell around us like confetti.
"You're going to make me come," I gasped.
"Good."
He drove into me, deep and relentless.
I clutched at his shoulders, nails digging in.
"Fuck. Fuck. Don't stop."
"Say my name."
"You don't have one."
He laughed and kissed me hard.
"Then say mine anyway," he said against my mouth.
I shook my head and pulled him closer.
The pleasure was building everywhere, in my cunt and my clit and the backs of my thighs.
He shifted his angle and hit the spot that made me see white.
"Come for me," he said. "Come on my cock."
I shattered.
The climax rolled through me in waves, hot and blinding.
I cried out, my whole body clenching around him.
He fucked me through it, slower now, drawing it out.
"Fuck," he said. "Fuck, you're tight when you come."
When the last of it faded, I lay panting beneath him.
He was still hard inside me.
"Your turn," I said.
He pulled out and I rolled onto my stomach.
"Oh," he said. "You want it that way."
"I said I liked being on top. This is close enough."
He laughed and pulled my hips up.
Then he was inside me again, one hard drive that made me gasp.
He found a rough rhythm, fast and deep.
His hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise.
I pushed back against him.
"You like this," he said. "Don't you."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I like it. I like your cock. Fuck me harder."
He made a wild sound and drove into me.
The slaps of our bodies filled the little room.
I buried my face in the sacks and bit down on the linen.
His rhythm broke.
He slammed into me one last time and came with a hoarse shout.
I felt the heat of him spill inside me.
He held there, buried deep, while his breathing slowed.
Then he pulled out and collapsed beside me.
We lay on the pallet, both of us slick with sweat.
Mint leaves had tangled in my hair.
He reached up and combed one out with his fingers.
"Come here," he said.
I turned and he pulled me against his chest.
His heart hammered under my ear.
Slowly he began to comb his hand through my hair.
The room smelled of mint and chamomile and sex.
He kissed the top of my head.
"I don't even know what to call you," he said.
I closed my eyes.
"Then don't."
I woke before dawn with mint leaves in my hair.
He was asleep on his back, one arm still under my shoulders.
I didn't let myself look at him for long.
I dressed in the dark.
On the still-room table the royal caddy sat where he'd left it.
I tipped a pinch of the King's tea into a twist of paper and put it in my pocket.
If he didn't stop it, I would.
On the servants' stairs a guard in palace blue stepped aside to let me pass.
He looked at my wrapper, my hair, and the door I'd come from.
I kept walking.
By nine o'clock I was in gray silk, gloved to the elbow, standing beside Blanche in the throne room.
The King was too sick to sit his throne.
A thin, long-faced man in black velvet read the names instead.
Father whispered that he was Mortimer, Duke of Ellesmere, the King's cousin, and to curtsy lower.
"Sir Oswin Pellow presents his daughters," the Duke said, like he was reading a bill of sale.
"Prince Bertrand, Prime Minister of the realm."
A tall man in black stepped forward with a silver chain across his chest.
He looked at me.
"Miss Pellow," he said. "Your glove is buttoned wrong."
Father's fingers dug into my back.
"And His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince Alistair."
The man at the window turned around.
Cream and gold coat. Shaved jaw. Black hair combed back off his face.
Dark eyes I'd watched close in the lamplight a few hours ago.
He took my sister's hand and bowed over it.
Then he lifted his head and looked straight at me.
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