How to Wed a Baron by Kasey Michaels Page B

Alina intoned severely, hiding her apprehension. “I asked you a question. Why should it matter if a woman…if she has pimples or handfuls?”
    â€œIt’s…um…the thing is, my lady—your mother said kisses give you babies?”
    Alina was beginning to feel very silly. “I sawJurgen in the hallway behind the silver room one day, and he was kissing Astrid.”
    â€œAstrid, is it? The girl is a round-heeled fool, tipping over for any who ask her.”
    Round-heeled? And what did that mean? Silly was rapidly escalating to uncomfortable. “That’s neither here nor there, Tatiana. We’re much of the same age, and I thought I should know what she was doing, as it was…she seemed quite distressed. Moan…moaning and everything, and saying in this absurd voice, ‘Oh, yes, Jurgen, my stallion.’ Um…so I asked my mother, and she told me that Astrid was a very reckless and uncouth girl, and that kisses lead to babies, and that was why I should have nothing to do with kisses until I was married and my husband kissed me, as she had done with my father, and as good and chaste people have always done.”
    Tatiana pulled a face, the more round-cheeked version of the same expression Danica had displayed a few minutes earlier. “And now Astrid has two babies and no husband. A stallion, indeed! Jurgen? But, see, my lady, your dear mother was correct in what she told you.” The maid turned companion sighed. “And that’s all she told you? Truly?”
    â€œYou know how ill she was, Tatiana. I could see that the subject distressed her, so I thanked her and left her to her prayer book. And…and then she was gone, and I had never dared to trouble her with more questions. I suppose I could have applied to AuntMimi, but I didn’t want her to…to know that I didn’t know. I…I’m supposing there’s more than just kisses, and I’ve heard things a time or two at court.” She shook her head in denial. “But they can’t possibly be true. Nobody would do that.”
    Tatiana looked about the room, spying out the small table with a decanter of wine that had been sent up by the baron, whose man said that it was safer by far to sip wine than to get within ten feet of the inn’s supply of water unless it was for one’s bath. She hesitated only a moment before pouring herself a full glass and drinking the contents in three nearly desperate gulps.
    Wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, she then sighed, replaced the wineglass and sat her bulk down on a chair without asking permission.
    â€œAh, that’s better,” she said, rubbing her palms together and looking at Alina expectantly. “Now, my dear, sheltered little girl, you tell your Tatiana—nobody would do what?”
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    T HE SMALL GILT CLOCK that had been a parting gift from the king chimed out the hour of ten o’clock from a small table beside Lady Alina’s bed. She sighed, supposing she would hear the lovely thing chime out every hour until dawn, her eyes still as wide and shocked as they were now, and staring up at the cracked ceiling.
    Tatiana had left her after an hour. Alina wouldhave given anything to have their discussion forever erased from her memory.
    That’s what Jurgen and Astrid had been doing? Her parents had done this? The whole world did this?
    Why? Why would anyone do this?
    Yes, her mother had explained her monthly bleed when Alina had first experienced it. But she’d called it Eve’s curse, which hadn’t meant much, even when Alina had gone to the Bible in the study and searched it thoroughly. The snake, the apple, she knew all of that. But she hadn’t found anything about a monthly bleed, and had to content herself with her mother’s assertion that it made her a woman, and no longer a little girl.
    That had seemed a fair enough trade. After all, men like Jurgen and Luka and Papa had to