Forever His by Shelly Thacker Page B

the cook, to assist in baking breads and meat pies for the next day.
    At least she had been able to show some skill there. She hadn’t trained at the Cordon Bleu for nothing. She might not know her way around a cauldron, but she had run one of Chicago’s finest restaurants for a year and a half. She made a pastry crust to die for. All the newspaper reviewers had said so, before she closed her little bistro to pursue a career in modeling.
    Celine rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position on the bed, groaning as a muscle in her leg cramped in protest. She rubbed at her calf, laughing to keep herself from crying. If all of this weren’t so awful, it would almost be funny. Like Cinderella in reverse. A rich princess transformed into a servant.
    She had never realized until now just how much she was used to living a life of ease, to having people around to take care of life’s bothersome little chores.
    People to take care of her.
    At least there had been one positive note to the night’s ordeal: Gaston slept downstairs, in his own room, the one he had given up during the King’s stay. Celine slept in one of the small upstairs bedchambers. She hoped that the distance and her duties meant she wouldn’t be seeing much of her surly husband.
    Even better, her room was just down the hall from the bedchamber Gaston had been using the night she arrived. As soon as she figured out how to return to her own time, her window of opportunity—as she had started to think of it—would be just a few steps away.
    She pulled the heavy woolen blankets closer, sighing with equal parts hope and misery. The room was not uncomfortable, really. A fire blazed on the hearth, and the homespun cotton sheets felt almost soft against her bare skin.
    When the cook had escorted her here, Celine had asked for something to wear to bed, but the woman’s incredulous look told Celine she had made yet another mistake. Medieval people, it seemed, slept in the buff. Too exhausted to debate it, unwilling to sleep in her grubby gown, she had stripped and kicked off her red slippers.
    At that moment, an image from The Wizard of Oz had danced through her head: perhaps all she had to do was click the heels of her ruby slippers three times and say, “There’s no place like home.” The crazy thought left her laughing until her sides hurt.
    Then she had tried it.
    With a wry little smile at the memory, Celine curled up on one side, watching firelight lick at the dark stone walls. She murmured the words again, under her breath. “There’s no place like home.”
    She whispered the phrase over and over, until her eyelids drifted closed and sleep finally claimed her.
    ***
    It seemed as if only minutes had passed when Celine felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake, though when she opened one reluctant eye to a slit, she saw that the fire on the hearth had burned almost out. “No,” she groaned, rolling away and pulling a pillow over her head. “Please  ... have to ... sleep.”
    The hand touched her again.
    Tickling her bare shoulder this time.
    A large, masculine hand.
    “It is time to awaken, my lady wife,” a familiar voice rumbled. “Your many duties await you.”
    Celine sat up with an exclamation of surprise—remembering too late that she had gone to bed naked. She gasped and grabbed the sheet to her chin, but not before Gaston, standing beside the bed, had gotten quite an eyeful. “What ... what ...” she sputtered. “What are you doing in my room?”
    He smiled down at her, a slow, lazy grin, his gaze lingering on that part of her anatomy she had just concealed with the sheet. “You seem to be forever asking that question of me, Christiane. And my answer is ever the same: the room is mine. I own all that is in this castle.”
    His eyes finally rose to meet hers. His quiet, firm voice and the way he had said “all” made her uneasy. The dying embers on the hearth cast his angular features in a faint golden glow. She couldn’t read