ARAMIS entered the room, as the Duchess de Chevreuse sealed her letter, dropped it on her desk as something of little importance, and turned towards him with a smile. “My friend,” she said, and extended both hands.

The Duchess de Chevreuse had to be close to Athos’s age. Aramis wasn’t sure exactly how old she might be, but he knew she was on her second marriage and that her son, Louis Charles D’Albert, a godson of the King’s, was now six and that she’d given birth to a daughter just the year before. But no one would have believed it, looking at her.

Blond, with soft, well-shaped features, Marie Aimee de Rohan, Duchess de Chevreuse-or Marie Michon [4], as she called herself in the midst of her impetuous adventures and intrigues, which had made her the scandal of France and the amusement of the rest of the world-looked no more than seventeen.

Her hair retained the intense gold shading which was usually the mark of the very first youth, and her intent blue eyes projected an expression of complete innocence.

Yet she stepped into Aramis’s arms with the ease that betrayed a woman who had had more than one husband and who, at this time in her life, entertained several lovers from various orders of nobility.

Aramis received her body in his arms, with a sigh-half of relief and half of desire. He was no fool. He knew that she was no Violette. Oh, he might have thought when he’d first started seeing Violette that he was only one of the musketeers and servants that she took to her lonely bed that her husband had spurned.

He might have continued to think so with his brain, but in his heart he knew that Violette was his and his only. As he was hers. He would have been offended-and fought a duel-had anyone told him that his Violette was seeing anyone else.

It wasn’t like that with Marie. In fact, he had no illusions at all. He thought of Marie as he supposed Athos thought of the bottle. Something in which to lose himself when the pain grew too intense to bear and the futile longing for what could never again return so strong that he could hardly think against the force of it.

For the last several months, when that longing got too strong, its buffets impossible to resist, he’d come here and satiated them on the warm lips, the pliant flesh of the Duchess.

Now he kissed her, ardently, his tongue invading her mouth, his hands roaming the heated expanse of her velvet-dressed body. She responded in kind, her hands bold and searching, loosening his doublet and slipping beneath it and his linen shirt to raise a hundred points of desire from his flesh.

“Ah, D’Herblay,” she said, as he pulled away to draw breath, and she looked up at him smiling, her eyes dazed with desire. “Nothing like the sword to make the muscles of a man stand out.” Her hands went lower and struggled for a very brief time with the fastenings of his breeches, then found their mark. Clutching it, she looked up and favored him with a dazzling smile. “I do so love a man with a good sword.”

Aramis groaned, and picked the lady up by her waist, surprising a delighted squeal from her. “Ah, Marie Michon,” he said, because he knew it pleased her to be addressed that way. “I’ve heard you’re quite good with the sword yourself, now and then.”

She giggled. “Only when some gentleman lets me borrow it.”

“Well, my friend Porthos was the one who gave fencing lessons, but I learned from him, and well enough to win duels, so let me see if I can teach your grace something useful.” Joining word to action, he dropped her on the bed, and pulled up the mass of her skirts and petticoats, beneath which she was, of course, bare. He ran his hands up her stockinged legs and caressed her, until her eyes looked wholly unfocused, the eyelids half-closed over them, “D’Herblay!” she said.

He grinned at her. “Are you begging me to unsheathe, milady? Is this where you wish to test my steel?”

“Yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” she said, impatiently. And then, as though remembering herself and her sense of humor, “What good is a duel if all you do is brag to the other man about how fierce you are, but you will not show your mettle?”

Aramis unfastened what remained fastened of his clothes and plunged into the safe haven of her body, so suddenly and so completely he raised a small shriek from her, though not one that could in any way be considered a protest. He took a deep breath. “Have I wounded you?”

For her only response, she raised her body and pressed against him, and he lowered himself upon her, kissing her beautiful face, her soft neck, burying his own face into the soft, scented mound of her breasts.

Anything, anything at all, to avoid thinking of another body, another pair of breasts, now taken from him by the only rival he could not hope to best.

Violette’s breasts had been smaller, but firmer, her neck longer and her features, though not as universally celebrated as those of this Duchess, had a sort of arch sweetness that made him fall at her feet at the sight of them. And while he had not been her first lover, nor the second, nor, indeed, he very much doubted, in the first dozen, she was somewhat less bold than De Chevreuse. Or at least she liked letting him set the rhythm and rarely pushed against him in that impatient manner, telling him to stab forcefully or not at all.

And yet, this woman too was sweet, and her scent of spice and some indefinable exotic mixture tantalized his senses. And his body responded with deep-seated pleasure to her advances and, in the way of things, he pursued release eagerly, till his body gave it to him, blotting out thought and-for a moment-breath and awareness of self with it.

He came to while being rather rudely shoved aside, and because the lady was inconstant, but never rude, he opened his eyes in shock, to find her glaring at him. “D’Herblay,” she said, crossing her arms on her not inconsequential chest, from which he seemed, somehow, to have torn enough lace and ruffles that her left nipple stood up among such a nest, looking like a slatternly version of its more demure right-side sister, still sheltered by fabric.

“Yes?” he asked, dazed, as he pulled away and fastened his own disarranged clothes.

To his surprise, she answered him with a bubbling laugh and, looking up, he found her sitting up and smiling at him. “It won’t do, my friend. It won’t do. This is much like sending a challenge to duel to the wrong man.” She shook her head. “At the very least, you’ll offend the offended yet more, and you’ll offend a whole other group of people.” Looking up at what must be his very bewildered expression indeed, she laughed again. “How abominable you are, D’Herblay. You have no idea at all what you have done, do you?”

He shook his head, checking that he was indeed now decent, and adjusting his doublet.

“Who is Violette?” she asked.

The name, pronounced in the light of day, made him tremble all over and look up. “Vio-” he said, but could not pronounce the rest of it. Not here. Not in front of this woman.

“You don’t even know, do you? I’m sure,” she said, drawing herself up in turn and rearranging her clothing. “She would be heartbroken if she knew you forgot her name as soon as she left your bed. And yet”-she gave him a calculating look-“you remember her in the throes of pleasure, which seems to indicate that she has bitten deeper than I would have expected. Who is she, D’Herblay? Are we going to hear the announcement that you have decided to forsake your vocation and to marry, after all?”

“No,” he said, horrified, wishing she would drop the subject. Sometimes he found himself quite willing to agree with Athos that women were the devil.