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susieyl

Jun 28

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With Sympathy, You Will Remarry: 3

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Shamrock Figarland x Reader Rating: 18+

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The room was sweltering. The townhome bedrooms had never been built for purposes like this one, sized as they were for cast-off women and widows meant to live small and quiet and alone.

Shamrock Figarland was not a man any such room could contain, nor his intentions. He overran the narrow twin bed and its prim white lace, the matronly quilt stitched with its embroidered little kittens, all of it absurd beneath you both now. His pants strained, the white material stretched thin over thigh muscle, every divot and swell revealed. His shirt hung open, loose at the shoulders, and what it revealed was a chest worked hard, covered in fine red hair, with just enough softness over the muscle to hold on to. One thick leg spilled past the edge of the frame, bracing the scene. The rest of him did the labor, his pelvis rocking the entirety of the bed, reminding you without a single word who it was that held the upper hand here. Whom it was that made the decisions.

His burgundy hair, the part of it usually tied back so neatly, had rolled loose, falling in a curtain that closed the two of you in and shut the rest of the room out. His claret eyes stayed half-lidded, almost cold, giving you nothing but that laser focus that made even the mightiest of Mary Geoise step down. But the small huffs of his breath gave him away, and you took them as the truth his glower contained.

You may keep your pretty little life, your sweet cushions and quietness, but he would be there.

As if to settle the matter, his volume rose just as your eyes rolled back, the first sparks flooding your head to toe. And there, when he had you, the most devastating, dashing smirk began to break across his face.

And just as you reached it, that sacred place you had only ever reached alone—

“MOOOMMMMMMYYYYYYYY!”

You woke with a gasp, drenched and tangled in the sheets, the pretty white sheets torn clean away.

You lay there a moment, heart still going, the last of the dream burning off like fog. The quilt was twisted around your legs. The window was shut. The room was, in fact, sweltering, which was the only detail the dream had gotten right.

“MOMMY.” The door banged open against the wall. Lisette stood in the gap, nightgown askew, hair a small storm, with an outrage only a child woken too early can summon. “I have been calling and calling and calling.”

“I heard you,” you managed, tugging at your nightgown, to get air.

“You did not. I called eight times.” She climbed onto the bed without invitation, planting herself squarely in the center of it, the frame making not a sound. “There is a noise. In the wall. Or under the floor. It goes scritch.”

This was a common complaint from Lisette. She hadn’t enjoyed moving to the smaller house.

“These houses settle at night.”

“It is not settling. It is scratching.” She folded her arms, unconvinced, a small magistrate ruling against you. Then, peering closer with merciless attention: “Why are you all gross? Are you sick?”

“It is warm,” you said.

“It is coldddd.”

“It's a grown-up thing. When women get older, they sweat even when it’s cold.”

She accepted this the way she accepted most adult nonsense, with a narrow look that filed it away for later use. But she burrowed in against your side anyway, scritch and indignation both forgotten the instant she had what she had actually come for. Within a minute, her breathing had gone slow and heavy, one small fist closed in the fabric of your nightdress as though she meant to anchor you there for the duration.

You stared at the ceiling and did not sleep.

It had been nearly a week since you had not answered Shamrock Figarland, and while things had quieted down, most people were content to assume the whole engagement rumor had been some manner of joke.

You had played along as gracefully as you could manage. Because it had to be a joke, surely, only a fool would believe Commander Figarland had proposed to an aged widow.

You knew the men of this place far too well not to recognize a trap when it was laid before you, even one as elegant and prettily constructed as his. Even one with a contract.

But the unfortunate truth was that your own psyche had not received the memo.

Because Shamrock Figarland was handsome to a degree that ought to have been illegal—and your very repressed and very poorly disciplined desires had decided, without consulting you in the slightest, that he made excellent raw material for their nightly productions. You had granted them no permission. They had not thought to ask. For the better part of a week now, they had been staging their little operas, unbidden and uncommonly well-cast, and they always ended the same way: badly, and at the worst conceivable moment, undone by a small voice hollering down the hall.

You pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes until you saw colors.

Across the city, you had no doubt, the man himself slept untroubled, composed even in unconsciousness, his hair no doubt still in perfect order. The injustice of it was almost enough to make you furious with him, which would at least have been a simpler thing to feel than what you actually did.

He could have no notion that he was being conscripted, night after night, into the service of a widow’s least governable impulses. The intentions of the accused were clean. Mostly. And who, after all, could fault a widow for dreaming, when her waking hours were so hard and drawn along such sharp lines of propriety? If she found a quiet moment, alone, to ease a little of that pressure with the thought of a handsome Commander, she would hardly be the first woman in this place to do so and say nothing of it after.

Lisette stirred, murmured something stern to whatever she was scolding in her sleep, and went still again. She had not forgotten the Commander’s promise. But it was losing its force the longer he stayed absent from your lives. At first, you had thought you might have to leave Mary Geoise entirely, should he return to press his scheme. Instead, he seemed to understand that silence was its own reply, and a boundary besides.

You eased your arm from beneath her by slow degrees, as she had only just consented to sleep, and lay listening to the house settle around you both. No scritch. Perhaps Lisette had imagined it, but it was more likely, like most nights, she felt lonely since the death of her father.

But there was only her breathing now, soft and untroubled, and beneath it, fainter, the small treacherous part of you that had already begun, against every instinct you had cultivated and trusted, to wonder why your mind could not be persuaded to surrender the image of the commander’s tight white trousers.

It was a discipline problem, you decided. Nothing more.

Every Holy Knight seemed to take a certain pleasure in clothing that bucked tradition and allowed them to actually work. The Celestial Dragon regalia were notoriously poor for the swinging of swords. But the Commander’s whites bordered on a public lapse in judgment. They were acceptable, technically, right up until he twisted, or knelt, or did anything at all that required the cooperation of his thighs stretching fabric.

Far too much time was spent, in the better gossip circles, debating just how genuine the packaged goods of each Holy Knight truly were. It was a serious science, conducted over tea, au rigor of nobles who had nothing else to fill their free time with. Shamrock Figarland, however, required no debate and was convicted of no controversy. Barring specialized padding, which the assembled experts agreed only Sommers Shepherd would stoop to (a verdict reached through liaisons no one would name aloud, but everyone seemed to possess, the conclusion was beyond dispute). The man was, by every available measure, generously and comprehensively endowed with the full inventory of masculine virtue.

Your own departed husband had brought rather less to the table, and you had often wondered, lying obediently still while he saw to himself, whether something of greater proportion would have answered the ache in you or simply made a fresh argument against it. A question now safely beyond resolution, Sheamus having taken the experiment to his grave.

Pleasure was never the point for women such as yourself, bred to ensure the bloodlines continued their stately march into the future. Most women of your acquaintance agreed that the whole unsavory business was a matter of procreation and posture, and that any further attention a husband required could be foisted onto the slaves, who were, after all, for exactly such inconveniences. Only a stubborn few ever troubled themselves to argue that the act might be made as agreeable for the wife as the husband.

What poppycock.

Still, if those few wished to volunteer for the labor of keeping a husband’s wandering interest, you wished them every success and a strong constitution. It was honest work, you supposed. It simply was not yours.

The only glory in such elevated marriages lay in the optics, since no experienced woman in Mary Geoise seriously entertained the notion that her husband might remain faithful. Faithfulness was for ballads and the newlywed. And once a woman had discharged her duty and produced the requisite proof of it, she was free to stray in her own turn, provided she was pragmatic enough to leave no inconvenient heirs in her wake.

Commander Figarland would surely find some other woman soon enough, one willing to fulfill his wishes and even feign delight in his considerable assets. The position would not stay vacant long. Men of his particular endowment rarely advertised twice.

Your own thoughts, you told yourself firmly, would be reined in by morning.

They had simply gotten above themselves, the way servants did when left too long without supervision. A good night’s sleep would put them back in their place. You closed your eyes and arranged yourself for it, certain of your discipline, and did not think about white trousers at all, except to note, in passing, how very firmly you were not thinking about them.

The man who owned those white trousers, and the assets beneath them, was in fact getting even less rest than you. And much like you, he had been driven to more unorthodox methods of relieving the strain.

A fist met the marble wall of the shower. Not hard enough to crack the tile (the masons of Mary Geoise built for the occasional tantrum), but hard enough to brace himself against the punishing cold of the water. He had set it to freezing on purpose, to attempt to cool the tempestuous anger that had been plaguing his blood.

It was, he was beginning to understand, accomplishing nothing whatsoever beyond making him cold and furious in equal measure. This left the man twice as wounded as before and now also shivering.

Thick red hair clung to his face and the broad plane of his back as he braced there, jaw set, permitting himself only the smallest and most grudging of sounds, as though noise itself were a concession he refused to grant the situation.

And unlike his prospective bride, Shamrock had abandoned even the pretense of pretending he was not thinking of you beneath him as he wrung himself dry.

He had tried, briefly, like checking whether a door is locked before giving up and climbing through the window. The whole effort had lasted perhaps a minute.

Now he simply gripped himself, set his forehead to the cold marble, and thought of you with a grim, single-minded focus he usually reserved for matters of life and death, which this had begun, alarmingly, to resemble.

It had been a week. A week of him growing steadily more morose and short-tempered, snapping at his butler Destin over nothing, pettily finding fault with his breakfast, the light, the angle of the sun as it had the gall to rise on yet another morning that brought no word from you. He had waited. He had been, by his own estimation, monumentally patient, a man practically canonizable for the restraint he had shown, and you had sent him nothing. Not a refusal. Not an acceptance. Not so much as a line of cool courtesy to acknowledge that the offer had been made at all.

And somewhere in the long silence of the past few days, he had finally been forced to the conclusion he had been outrunning all week: you were not simply going to reply at all.

That, more than the cold water, was what had driven him into the shower at this hour. The offer had been generous. The offer had been, if he said so himself, rather elegantly composed. And you had received it with all the urgency a conman might reply to a tradesman’s invoice.

And worse, far worse, his father had been correct about it, as his father was correct about most things, a quality that did not become more endearing with repetition. Garling had said as much discreetly, with that maddening secrecy of his, the kind of man who delivered a prophecy and then declined to elaborate, leaving you to discover its accuracy at your leisure and entirely alone. Because Shamrock’s own mother had not accepted his father’s love until she was properly tied down, and even then she had made the man work for every inch of ground he gained, and even then—

No. He pushed the thought off before it could finish. His sweet Lettie had none of whatever poorly-set wildness that had manifested in Shamrock himself (and moreso in his brother). But you had been raised properly, with grace, schooled into a refinement that had somehow survived years yoked to a bore who plainly hadn’t deserved a moment of it.

You had every advantage of breeding and temperament his mother had lacked, everything that ought to have made for a solid, opportune marriage agreed upon between suitable people.

And still you hadn’t said yes.

It seemed, he thought darkly, his head braced against the cool stone, the water still hammering its useless cold protest against his back, that the patient approach had run its course. He had tried courtesy. He had tried a generous offer, elegantly composed, and the dignified silence of a man content to wait for a sensible woman to reach a sensible conclusion. It had earned him a week of nothing and a shower that would not fix the problem at hand, no matter how long he stood in it. Or a cock that would not cooperate unless he should have you under him.

It was time, he decided, to take a more assertive stance.

Patience was clearly wasted on a woman of such overdeveloped modesty. You simply required a man on your doorstep, in person, declining to leave until you gave him an answer he could live with. Perhaps it was time to let loose that wilder, stalking thing in him, the part his lineage demanded, that greed his training had spent years teaching him to keep leashed and well-mannered and politely out of view.

It was not, he conceded, the most refined strategy ever devised. But he had exhausted refinement, and pointless refinement had exhausted him. There was a great deal to be said for the kind of plan that ended with him standing over you, both of you naked, rather than him dripping and alone in his own bathroom, losing an argument with the plumbing.

And this must be right, for the idea of having you right where he wanted you, finally, was just enough to push him over the edge and out the other side of it, into something far more productive: resolve. He braced his hand flat to the marble and let the last of the tension leave him in one long breath, and when it had gone, it took the indecision with it.

He shut off the water for good this time and watched the evidence of his conflict swirl pale down the drain.

Joanna had braced herself for another tense and uncomfortable morning, a sort of new routine for the bachelor household of the Commander of the Holy Knights.

Away from the Figarland Estate and the prying eyes of his father, Shamrock had elected to live within the depths of Mary Geoise itself, and in relative simplicity, all things considered, given the wealth and titles attached to his name. None but the staff and the Master himself were permitted into the townhome, and most of Mary Geoise hadn’t the faintest notion of who owned it, so quiet was he in his comings and goings.

He was a quiet sort of person, most of the time. Save for when his temper flared.

And it had been very hot that week.

Seven days of the Master moving through his own house like a stormfront that had not yet decided where to make landfall, and the whole staff adjusting their barometers accordingly. The footmen had taken to walking quietly. The cook had stopped attempting anything ambitious, on the sound reasoning that a simple egg gave a displeased man less to find fault with than a complicated one, and had still, somehow, been informed that the egg was wrong. Joanna had served this family long enough to know that a house takes its temper from the man at the top of it, and the man at the top of this one had spent a week being thoroughly, magnificently impossible. The only silver lining was that Shamrock disliked switching staff frequently, and disliked blood on his things even more, two preferences that had combined, over the years, into something the household had quietly learned to regard as job security.

She found Destin already at his post in the corridor outside the breakfast room, standing with studied muteness. Joanna had known him long enough to read the set of his shoulders.

“Another bad night,” she said. It was not a question.

“The Master,” Destin said, with delicacy as the butler had spent nearly a week being snapped at over the angle of the sun, “has been somewhat out of sorts over the… Saintess Mar—Miss Bavette.”

Joanna had overseen Shamrock Figarland grow from a boy to a man. She had seen him sulk over lessons and brood over slights and stand at windows pretending he was not watching for a mother who did not come. She folded her hands and considered the closed door. “He’s waited a long while for his lady,” she said. “Miss Bavette is a modest sort and restrained in her wants. I suspect she’s grown suspicious over such a quick declaration. Her husband’s not been six months in the ground.”

“Perhaps he should leverage his status a touch more,” Destin muttered, glancing about first. “No need to negotiate, at his level.”

Joanna paused a touch. It was the sort of remark that made sense only to a man who had never watched the boy refuse to take anything he could not earn outright, and who had certainly never met the late Lady Figarland, who would sooner have married a fencepost than a man who reminded her, even once, of her own usefulness to him.

But how could a simple butler understand the entirety of the Figarland history of wives with just a mere five years serving only one? Destin was promising, but the previous butlers of House Figarland had been as well. These days, the Supreme Commander didn't even bother with a valet; he found them so useless.

“That,” she corrected, “would not be wise. The Master could have had any number of women by leveraging his status. He doesn’t want any number of women.” She smoothed her apron, the matter settled in her mind if nowhere else. “Take care of your opinions.”

Destin quirked a brow.

“Come now, Jo. Give me more than that. Was the Supreme Commander like this with his lady?”

Joanna’s wrinkled mouth puckered at the corner, and she glanced around the empty foyer. While Master Shamrock had been generous in commandeering her from his father, and in elevating her to housekeeper, there would always be a red line between a slave and a master, however softly the household chose to step around it. A thing did not stop being true for going unmentioned. She was getting old, she thought, to be so loose with her tongue at this hour.

But the foyer was empty, and the Master was still in his rooms, and some stories were too good to take all the way to the grave.

“The late Lady Figarland made the Supreme Commander quite cross, you know. And she was very pleased with herself the entire time.” She nodded at the door, the gesture carrying a whole genealogy of stubbornness within it. “It runs in the women the Figarlands choose as much as the men who chase them. They enjoy that sort of chase—”

“That’s quite opinionated, housekeeper.” Ice crawled up Joanna’s back. “Do all the staff talk this much about their poor masters?”

Shamrock appeared from the nearby office, not from the stairs. He was already dressed, dry, and entirely civil.

Damnation.

She and Destin bowed swiftly to the ground.

“Apologies, Commander.” No excuses. She knew better. Excuses were for staff who imagined the offense might be argued away, and Joanna had served this family far too long to insult him with the attempt. She kept her head down and waited for whatever was coming, and beside her, she could feel Destin doing the same, both of them braced for the temper that had ruled the house all week.

So both she and Destin were greatly surprised when Shamrock merely motioned them up.

“Learn some discretion,” he said, and shockingly, there was no heat in it. “I am to have a shy wife soon, and I’ll not have her insulted by gossiping staff before she’s even through the door.” He paused, and something in his manner eased a degree, the closest thing to good humor the house had seen in seven days. “Joanna. It’s time to open the spare rooms. The children’s rooms as well. See to it today.”

It took Joanna a moment to understand the size of what he’d said. The spare rooms had stood shut and shrouded for the six years he had had the house, dust sheets going dusty over furniture no guest had ever used, because the Master kept no guests. She had always wondered why he bothered with more than a flat most days, but it seems he had a long-term plan.

Master Shamrock then went to breakfast as though nothing of consequence had occurred. He took in the spread laid out for him and found, against all precedent, nothing whatsoever wrong with it. He ate quickly, and when he rose, he even thanked a slave for the coffee, as though the past week had been an unfortunate rumor concerning some other gentleman entirely.

Then he left. Alone, on foot, with his cloak and no indication whatsoever of what he was about. Joanna and Destin stood in the wake of him and listened to the front door close.

“Well,” said Destin flatly. “That was odd, but fortunate. I’ll keep our conversations to the kitchen next time.”

Joanna just stared at the shut door. A slow understanding was arranging itself in her mind, piece by piece, like a puzzle she had watched assembled once before, a long time ago, by another Figarland, in a vastly different setting.

A man of Shamrock’s wealth could have lived anywhere he pleased, and he had chosen here: this quiet and unremarkable townhome tucked into a quarter no one would think to look for him. Away from the immense Figarland estate. Away from where his father could hen over him and offer advice he had not asked for, and women he detested. A place just a touch too large for a single bachelor.

Joanna had always thought the Master was simply being private because he was inclined to introversion. He was a lonely sort, after all, and she had never seen cause to look past that. But the obvious, she saw now, had been a screen he designed to misdirect anyone who might think too hard about him. And Joanna realized she may have spent the better part of the last couple of years declining to think too hard, because she had been enjoying no longer living under Garling Figarland’s glare.

Was it as she guessed?

For there were two places within an easy walk of this door.

The first was the children’s elementary school, a large building she often passed without a second glance, the sort a man might find himself strolling past quite naturally each morning on his way down to Shangara, and again each evening on his way back, should he happen to keep such a route. Should he happen to want to.

The second was the Saintess Bavette’s new home, only a few blocks off, near enough that a man could stand at his own upper windows of an evening and tell himself he was merely taking the air. From the top floor, she suspected, one might very well make out the widow’s front porch.

Joanna realized she had been wrong. Shamrock hadn’t left the Figarland Estate because he wanted privacy. He had wanted proximity and dressed it up as privacy, and let them all believe whatever spared them the trouble of noticing.

He had seemed to know, somehow, just which house the lady might end up in, should she ever find herself a widow. And he had taken up his vantage point well in advance of her needing one, which was a thought Joanna found she did not wish to follow any further down the path, it was so plainly inviting her to walk.

Joanna let out a long, slow breath through her nose.

Let it be no longer upon her to carry such suspicions. The first Figarland marriage had been eventful enough for one lifetime, and she had the grey hairs to show for every chapter of it. Perhaps it was time, at long last, to buy out her contract and go somewhere below. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere green, with no marble and no Holy Knights and no widows being courted from upper windows by patient men who arranged their whole lives around a porch.

Somewhere far, far away from Mary Geoise. Far from the Figarlands and their doomed wives.

You hadn’t gone to many of your usual spots while the gossip of the city was busy circling you. Still, with no engagement announced and no proof to be had, most of your neighbors had eventually come round to treating the whole affair as another rumor gone feral, the truth of it grossly misunderstood somewhere in the retelling.

They were wrong, but you weren’t about to be the one to correct them.

So, as the next mothers and daughters picnic came around, and Lisette begged, with the shameless commitment of a five-year-old, you relented. You had kept her home from school the better part of the week, vaguely and without good reason beyond your own jangled nerves, and the guilt of it had been quietly accumulating. A picnic was a small enough penance to pay it down.

The lawns set aside for such gatherings sat under a sky scrubbed obscenely blue, the kind of weather that felt personally disrespectful to a woman determined to brood. Linens had been laid in their tasteful rows. Baskets had been unpacked by hands that did not belong to the women unpacking them. The daughters ran in shrieking loops across the grass while the mothers arranged themselves in their accustomed constellations. The whole event proceeded with a serene, well-oiled certainty that Mary Geoise had been perfecting for generations: the business of appearing entirely at leisure while watching one another’s mistakes with the focus of border guards.

Lisette was gone the instant her shoes touched grass, folded into the shrieking knot of children without a backward glance, which left you precisely where you least wished to be.

Alone, visible, and available for conversation.

You found a place at the edge of one of the linens, near enough to the other mothers to satisfy form, far enough to discourage anyone from mistaking your presence for an invitation. It was a fine distinction. The women of Mary Geoise had been raised to read exactly such distinctions, and to ignore them at the worst moment possible.

“Saintess Marcus.” Saintess Corvin lowered herself onto the adjacent linen with slow ceremony, arranging her skirts as though laying out a board for a game. “We had quite given up on seeing you. You’ve been such a stranger lately. My little Rosette was quite distraught at not seeing Lisette.”

“I’ve been at home,” you said apologetically. “Lisette has had a cold.”

“Ah.” The single syllable carried a freight of meaning it had not earned. “Poor lamb. There’s been one going round, you know, half the nursery’s been sniffling. So glad she’s recovered.” It was said with real kindness; she was never unkind, only relentless, and she folded the two together so smoothly you could not have said where one ended. “And here we’d all assumed you were simply too… occupied to come out.” She hesitated, dainty and deliberate, set down like a teacup. “What with everything concerning the Commander?”

There it was. You let your gaze drift to the children, to the small head of your daughter somewhere in the scrum, and pondered the silence she had left so invitingly open.

“It’s a lovely day for it,” you said. “But I assure you, everything is normal with us. Unfounded gossip can be very wild with so little entertainment these days.”

Saintess Corvin smiled, recognizing the wall for what it was, and being far too well-bred to do anything but smile.

“It is,” she agreed warmly, as though the two of you were the dearest of conspirators and not a duelist and her chosen target. “Though I confess I’m surprised you wouldn’t at least play with the idea.” She reached for a grape, examined it, and ate it. “But then, you always were more mature than the rest of us. I’ve said so for years. Haven’t I always said so?”

You smiled as convincingly as possible.

“Unfounded.” The word arrived from across the linen like a dropped plate, and you did not need to look to know it was Saintess Vauclair. She had been a great beauty once and had never entirely forgiven the world for moving the conversation along. “Is that what we’re calling it. How interesting. Because I had it on very good authority that Commander Figarland sent word to your household personally. Through his own housekeeper, no less.” Her smile was lovely and cold as a window in winter. “But of course, if it’s unfounded, then the Commander is simply in the habit of sending personal letters to widows for no reason at all. How busy he must be.”

This entire statement was filled with venom. The rancor of a woman who had spent considerable effort being noticed by the Commander, and had not been, and had watched the attention potentially land instead on someone who had done nothing to earn it but exist within walking distance.

“Oh, leave her be, Vauny.” This from Saintess Nesta, who had settled herself at your other side some minutes ago with a plate of bread and an unbothered air, clearly having decided long ago that none of this was worth the energy it demanded. She was perhaps the only one present you would have called a friend, insofar as the word survived translation into Mary Geoise. “Are you really making such a petty accusation based on hearsay? A man writes a letter, and you’d have the poor woman tried for it. If receiving correspondence were a crime, half of us would be in irons, and you’d be serving a life sentence.”

A small, scandalized laugh went up from someone, quickly stifled.

“I’m only saying what everyone’s thinking,” said Vauclair stiffly.

“You’re the only one thinking it loudly,” Nesta returned pleasantly, and offered you the bread as though nothing had happened.

And then, because no gathering of this size was complete without her, Saintess Thessaly leaned in from two linens over, having tracked the scent of the lemons across the entire property. “Is it true, though?” she breathed, eyes bright, already composing the version she would carry home. “I heard, and I’m only repeating what I heard, mind, that Commander Figarland’s been seen about Mary Geoise very frequently these days.” She pressed a hand to her chest, delighted.

The world tilted, very slightly, beneath the linen. You closed your eyes and gave a pretty laugh, the best guard against such things.

“Goodness, what speculations.” You let the laugh settle into something rueful, a woman bowing to the inevitable. “I suppose I’ll have to reveal the embarrassing details, and you must all give me mercy. It’s hardly the romance you’re hoping for.” You let your gaze drop, just enough. “All that happened was that the poor Commander visited the school, as he occasionally does. And my poor Lisette, still so sore with grief over her father, asked him, in front of everyone, if he would be her new papa.” You shook your head with fond despair, the very picture of a mother undone by her child. “She’s grieving still, you understand. She’s only five. She doesn’t yet know that you can’t simply ask a man such a thing. The Commander, to his great credit, gave her some kind word out of pity, and that, I’m quite certain, is the whole of the engagement. A child’s question and a gentleman’s mercy, misheard down a very long line of very bored people.”

It was a good lie. Better than good. It had the shape of truth, which is the only quality a lie truly requires; it explained the Commander, it explained the talk, it cast Lisette as the innocent and you as the embarrassed, and it dared anyone present to be so unkind as to interrogate a grieving child’s longing for a father.

You watched it land. Saintess Corvin softened at once, one hand going to her heart. Nesta caught your eye with the faint approval of a fellow wit. Even Thessaly looked briefly deflated, a juicier story dying in her hands.

Only Vauclair was still watching you with that cool, unconvinced winter smile, and only Vauclair said, lightly, “And the missive? What of that?”

The group seemed to hold its breath. Beside you, Nesta went still over her bread. It was outright rude for her to demand such knowledge.

You did not let the break stretch long enough to be an indication of guilt. “The missive,” you repeated, with gentle puzzlement, as if you were trying very hard to follow. “You mean the Commander’s note? Saintess Vauclair, you wound me. A man writes to the mother of the child who accosted him in a schoolyard, to assure her there’s no offense taken and the little one needn’t be scolded, and you would make a courtship of it.” You let a thread of weariness into it, the put-upon air of someone forced to explain a kindness to people determined to misread it. “It was a courtesy. The sort any gentleman of breeding extends. I’d have thought you, of all people, would recognize one, given how often you must watch for them.”

A beat too late, you smiled, to take the edge off and leave only the sweetness, and let her decide which she had been handed.

It was a small cruelty, but a precise one, and the women around you registered it the way they registered everything, without a flicker, filing it away. Vauclair’s smile did not move. But something behind it cooled another degree, the smile of a woman who had not, to her own satisfaction, confirmed quite what she had come here to confirm.

“How fortunate Lisette is,” she said haltingly, cheeks going pink, “to have such a sharp mother.”

“Very sharp indeed, Saintess Vauclair.”

A masculine voice, behind you all. It dropped into the gathering like a stone into a pond, and the ripples went out in a cacophony of rustling skirts and indrawn breath. Flowers and a sweet green scent filled your senses all at once, and you jerked to look up.

For all its success, your performance had carried one fatal flaw. While you’d been busy spinning your silly little tale, holding the whole table rapt with the grieving child and the gentleman’s mercy, you had failed to notice the encroachment of a rare and catastrophic invader.

The picnic was closed to the insolent grown men of Mary Geoise. There were only a scarce handful of exceptions that had ever been permitted past its invisible wall.

Commander Figarland, it seemed, was one of them.

He was behind you, in person. He had come, more damningly, with flowers, a great fragrant armful of them, the source of the sweet scent now settling over the whole assembly. And he was holding them out to you. Publicly. In front of every watching, breathless, delighted mother on the grounds, in front of Vauclair’s pink cheeks and Thessaly’s shining eyes and Nesta’s slowly dawning grin, he was offering them to you.

Every remark you had just sworn to. Unfounded. A child’s misheard question. A courtesy, nothing more. And here came the courtesy itself, in tailored uniform, carrying magnolias.

You may as well have worn a sign reading liar across your forehead.

You turned where you sat, slowly, the way one turns toward a sound in the dark that one is praying not to have heard. He was looking down at you. There was no apology anywhere in him, no flicker of awareness that he had just walked through the careful fiction you’d spent the last quarter hour building and collapsed it like a tent. If anything, the set of his mouth suggested he knew precisely what he had done, had timed it to the syllable, and considered it a morning well spent.

“Saintess Marcus.” He inclined his head, grave and impeccable, as though the two of you were quite alone and not the sun around which the entire lawn now helplessly orbited. “Forgive the intrusion. I was told this was where I might find you.”

Told? By whom, you could not ask. Behind you, you could feel the silence of all the women leaning in as one, every last performance of indifference abandoned for the far greater pleasure of watching yours come apart.

Heat rose, your entire body going hot at the humiliation of the scene. What the hell was he doing? What could he possibly imagine he was accomplishing, beyond confirming every word out of Vauclair’s mouth and setting fire to every remark out of your own?

You took a breath of unimaginable composure, drawing it up from some reserve you had not known you possessed, and smiled stiffly.

“Commander. Gracious. How surprising.” The word came out admirably even, considering. “Is there something you needed?”

It was the right note. Cool, faintly puzzled, like he was a vague acquaintance who had wandered somewhere he oughtn’t and would surely realize it any moment now. A tone that said, for the benefit of every straining ear, that you had no notion why this man stood before you with an armful of flowers, and rather wished he would explain himself and move along.

He did not move along.

He looked down at you, and something flickered at the corner of his mouth, the faint, infuriating beginnings of amusement, as though your composure were a charming little performance staged entirely for him and he intended to enjoy it before dismantling it.

Then he kneeled.

Kneeled in his tight white trousers and let the entire yard see him dirtying his knee for you.

“Needed?” he repeated, turning the word over as if testing it for soundness. “Indeed, I do.” He extended the magnolias another fraction, closing what little distance remained, leaving you the choice of taking them or letting them hang there in front of everyone. “I came to bring you these. And to ask, since I find I’ve grown too insistent on waiting on whether you’d do me the honor of a quick answer.” A pause, perfectly placed, perfectly merciless. “I eagerly await your approval of our engagement.”

A sound went through the gathered women. Not quite a gasp. Something softer and far more damning, the sound of a dozen stories being solidified at once.

You must be the heat of the sun. There was no other possibility. You could feel the heat of your own face, the absolute and total ruin of every careful word you had laid down not five minutes past, the verbal annihilation he was performing on your reputation. Our engagement. He had said it. Out loud. With witnesses. With the worst possible witnesses, hand-selected by fate to carry it to every corner of Mary Geoise before the magnolias had time to wilt.

Somewhere to your left, Thessaly made a small ecstatic noise, like a woman who had bitten into something far sweeter than she’d been promised.

Vauclair had gone white where she had been pink.

And the Commander remained poised before you in his tailored uniform with his flowers and waited, serene like he had already won and was merely observing the courtesy of letting you discover it.

You gaped.

And as if to perfect the humiliation, it was at that exact moment that Lisette saw him.

At the top of her considerable lungs, she came tearing across the green, small legs pumping, rumpling every pretty white sheet in her path and overturning at least one unattended cup of lemonade in her wake. She did not slow. She did not consider the crowd, the linens, the dozen watching mothers, or the careful and now thoroughly demolished fiction her own mother had constructed on her behalf. She saw only the one thing in the world that mattered to her, and she launched herself bodily into the Commander’s arms with total faith.

“DADDY IS HERE!”

The Commander caught her without so much as shifting his weight, one arm folding her up against his chest as though he had been catching her his whole life, the magnolias somehow surviving the collision intact. He settled her on his hip. She wound both arms around his neck and beamed out at the assembled women with a radiant, total triumph whose entire universe has just been confirmed correct in front of an audience.

The lawn detonated.

There was no other word for it. Whatever soft and dangerous sound had been building before was nothing to this. Thessaly actually clapped a hand over her mouth. Saintess Corvin’s eyes went enormous. Nesta put her face in her hands, though whether from secondhand horror or helpless humor you could not tell and would never ask. Even Vauclair seemed, for once in her life, to have run entirely out of things to say, which on any other day you might have savored.

You sat in the wreckage of every word you had spoken, sun-colored, speechless, your grieving and misheard and entirely innocent daughter perched in the arms of the man you had just sworn meant nothing to you whatsoever, calling him Daddy across the loudest, most attentive grounds in all of Mary Geoise.

He did not gloat. He had nowhere near the poor taste required for it, and in any case, the child had said it for him, more eloquently than he ever could. He merely held your gaze over the crown of Lisette’s head, that one infuriating corner of his mouth tilting, and let the flowers in your hands do the rest.

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