Now he was sure-as sure as he was of breathing-that milady had her share of acquaintances who were far more dazzling and interesting than D’Artagnan. Noble, beautiful and doubtlessly connected, she could have her share of titled heads. Even if callow youth were what she wanted, there were a good many young bucks of good family and better looks than D’Artagnan, men she could exhibit abroad, displaying her court and her conquests.

So why had she decided upon D’Artagnan, on the glance of a moment, on the pretext that he had saved her? Why had she conceived such a strong desire for him that she must drag him to her bed and attempt to have her very complex, and rather more knowing than he expected, way with him?

Unless, D’Artagnan thought, she was indeed Athos’s wife and had informed herself of the friendship that united the four inseparables, that friendship which had, at many times and different places been the saving-both physical and spiritual-of all of them.

If it were so, doubtlessly she also knew that Athos had stood in D’Artagnan’s heart in place of a father since D’Artagnan had lost his own father, or possibly before. And he thought-though he’d never dared ask-that Athos thought of D’Artagnan as a son.

What greater revenge was there, D’Artagnan thought, than to seduce the adopted son of the man who had tried to kill her, the man who had repudiated her? Having seduced D’Artagnan, she could either utterly destroy him or turn him against Athos, whichever offered. And even with his eyes open, in the full light of day, D’Artagnan wasn’t sure she could not do either of those. Even now.

She looked at him, her luminous blue eyes sparkling with mischief. And he thought that were it not for his love for Constance, he would be succumbing even now. He thought of Constance ’s image, her beautiful face, and that smile she gave him when he had particularly pleased her.

He managed to look away from milady, and the way her hair fell, moonlight-like, outlining her shoulders, her breasts. She breathed deeply, and her breasts rose and fell. He started sliding his legs off the bed, a risky proposition, since he had not the slightest idea how far the floor was from here. But he was determined to find out. “I must be going,” he said. “I am sorry my stupid head made it so difficult for you last night that I must sleep in your bed, but truly I must be going. I have guard duty,” he remembered, with a pang that, in fact, he’d had guard duty the night before. He hoped someone had covered his lack and, though he counted on Monsieur de Treville to smooth things with Monsieur des Essarts, his brother-in-law, he wasn’t absolutely sure he could explain this to Monsieur de Treville.

As he was about to slip off the bed, she grabbed his shoulder in a surprisingly strong hand. “Stay,” she said. And giggled. “You’ve been no trouble at all.”

Her other hand, insinuatingly, curled around his neck and onto his chest, to rake nails very lightly over his heart and head downwards.

Gritting his teeth together, he thought, suddenly, clearly, that the nightgown, mostly transparent as it was on the front, was nonetheless utterly closed in the back, covering it up all the way to her neck. Which, if he understood, was not the sort of design used for this sort of garment.

While her hand explored parts of him he’d never meant anyone but Constance to touch-or at least not for a great many years-he pulled himself up onto the bed by the force of his arm, so that he was more firmly seated. This had the side effect of dislodging her from her position, half-draped over him.

She took it in good part. Now, facing him, she grinned, and lunged forward to kiss him.

D’Artagnan could no more have stopped what he did than he could have willed himself to stop eating or sleeping. Curiosity, his desire to know what was happening and what things meant, was his defining characteristic, his strongest need. Even as her lips met his, as he kept his mouth resolutely closed against her assault, he reached back and, with a strong hand, tore the flimsy cloth that covered her shoulders.

And then just as quickly, he pulled away from her and looked back there, to see, faded and obviously covered in cosmetics, a smaller than normal brand, in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. He blinked at it, and, shocked that he must still, after all, be under the influence of whatever she’d given him, heard himself say, under his breath, “The fleur-de-lis. You are Athos’s wife.”

If the woman who had shared the bed with him had suddenly transformed into a tigress, the change couldn’t have been more startling or more obvious.

She came at him, claws and teeth, tearing at his face, at his still wounded shoulder. He grabbed at her wrists. She pulled out of his grasp. Screaming in fury, she dove for her pillow, to emerge holding a long and vicious looking dagger.

Addled still by the aftereffects of whatever she’d given him, D’Artagnan only managed to roll out of her way just in time. But she pulled the dagger that had embedded in the bedclothes, and came after him again.

He rolled off the bed, hitting the floor with more force than he’d expected, because the bed was almost as high as his hips. On the floor, he crawled forward, until his head cleared and he could walk.

And then he realized she was right behind him. Stooping, to grab a bundle of clothes and a hat on a nearby chair, he picked up a pretty little statuette of Cupid, on a writing desk by the window, and used it, held in his good hand, to smash the window, then half jumped and half fell through the window onto the roof below.

Milady didn’t seem able to follow that action, or perhaps wasn’t willing to follow, as D’Artagnan ran, with more desperation than grace across the roof of the house next to milady’s lodgings, clothing firmly held in his hand. Instead, she stood at the window and screamed, “Murder, thief, rape!”

Any second, her desperate screams would attract the neighbors from their beds, and they would come after D’Artagnan. What else would they do, seeing him running naked along the roofs.

Desperately, he aimed for a corner of the roof, aware that he was still fully in her sight, and looked down at an intertwining network of stone-bordered balconies. He stepped on one, then swung onto the one below it, suspending himself by his good arm, which was already holding clothes.

It was slow progress, but progress, and he went from balcony to balcony, moving to the other side of the building as he did so, so that by the time he landed, in the dark alley beneath, he was in quite a different location than where milady would have seen him disappear.

It was only when he alighted in the alley and took a deep breath that he took a look at the clothes he was holding. They’d been resting on a chair, on the way to the window-and they were not even vaguely his. They consisted of a dark red dress, and a matching hat, with a very slight veil.

D’Artagnan looked at them in dismay. Well… he couldn’t walk naked through the streets of Paris. [9]