"Merde," Adam breathed, standing stock still in the arched doorway to Belle's boudoir.
He'd come to fetch Belle for dinner as the hour was growing late and Mrs. Potts was making a noise unpleasantly reminiscent of her infuriated boiling whistle from the days of the enchantment about the status of the cheese soufflé that was the first course. He'd once pointed out she was a Sevres china tea-pot and not a kettle and had been roundly scolded that while he was aware of that and certainly she was, the witch had clearly not known her way about the kitchen and had muddled the spell, sir!
Belle could become lost in her thoughts or her work even more easily since the tension of the magicked castle had passed away. He was used to finding her with her stockinged feet tucked up under her skirt, figured velvet now instead of coarse wool, a thick book open upon her lap or gazing out a window at something more than the garden or the clouds, pausing to jot down incomprehensible equations or diagrams in the little notebook she kept hanging from a silk cord with her chatelaine. It was unusual to find her in their bed-chamber at this hour and he had been surprised to hear her abstracted voice bid him enter.
He had been about to ask her if anything ailed her, if there was anything he could do for her when she turned her face towards his and stole away every word in his head but the obscenity.
"You don't like it? How disappointing. Well, it won't take me long to change," she began but he interrupted.
"No. Don't. I just—I never imagined you like this, I didn't know," he said in a rush. She tilted her head in the way he knew meant she was considering what he said and formulating a question, perhaps several. That he could recognize but her face was a marvel.
She had found his cosmetics. The others he had used in the days before the enchantment and which, like everything else in the castle, had remained unaltered with the passage of time, still fresh and vivid. She had painted her eyes with the shades of blue he had always preferred, the paler turquoise and the rich peacock, had used the fine brush to trace the edge of her eyelids with gold and made such designs across her cheeks and brow with the gold and the silver and the pot that looked like crushed opal that he felt dizzy. Her mouth had been rouged more simply but she must have mixed in a touch of kohl for the depth of the color and shaken some of the gold powder onto a pouf of swansdown she'd run over them. Her hair was held back simply with jeweled combs and her gown was unadorned blue silk the color of an October twilight. He'd thought he'd known how much he could desire her, known it and acted upon it, but what he felt was entirely new in the intensity of the urge, the way want for her made him feel love as a fever, his body moving towards hers without his mind's awareness. He'd thought he'd known how much he loved her, but he hadn't expected to be so touched that she would spend her time to please him thus, that loving him could show her a new face in the looking-glass that she liked as much as he did. He wanted there to be a painting made of her looking as she did and he wanted no one else to ever see her this way; he wished for her to stay exquisitely pristine and to see all that color smeared across his pillow case and hers, for there to be streaks on his bare chest and across his thighs, the gold dust glittering on her breasts.
"Mrs. Potts must be the one disappointed," he added and that did confuse her. When she wrinkled her nose, the hues shimmered on her face and he just managed not to touch her with the hand that reached out to her.
"We shan't be in time for her soufflé," he explained. She smiled. Her eyes were the same lively brown, a shade unremarkable except that Belle's soul shone out through them, inquisitive and amused, determined and affectionate. And now a little libidinous—was it all for his reaction to her or had she felt the rise of her own longing drawing the brushes and feathers across her skin, with only her own gaze upon her?
"You do like it, then. It was not a mistake," she confirmed, taking his hand with her own.
"No, not a mistake. The furthest thing," he answered.
"Don't you be. The furthest thing," she said, pulling him towards her, the perverse beauty of the past perfected on her face, his present, their future.