#fu cdpr

7. Whispering “I love you” between kisses.

Mignole looked up from her letter as a quietly grunted “fuckin’ bollocks” assailed her ears from beyond the window. She would have thought nothing of it—the gardeners were often quite ineloquent when they caught their thumbs on a rose thorn—but she was seated on the third floor of her considerable estate, and it was many hours passed supper time. The gardeners were all tucked up with their families. Mignole was under attack. She squinted at the fluttering curtains and slid silently from her desk.

It would be entirely untoward to summon her manservant at this late hour, so she would just have to deal with this intruder herself.

She snuffed each of the candles out with damp fingers and then picked up the candlestick with the greatest heft. On silent, stocking’d feet, she glided across the wooden floor and braced herself beside the window. The intruder swore again as a rotting part of the trellis snapped beneath his weight. Ha, she thought, let the whole thing tumble beneath you, you inelegant wretch.

The hulking form emerged over the windowsill, casting a long shadow in the silver moonlight, and she leapt into action. “What the—?” Her would-be attacker exclaimed, moving too swiftly to pass as human, and caught the candlestick in one gloved hand before it could collide with his temple.

“Be gone, you foul man. If you think me a simpering damsel, you have another thing coming, I’ll claw your damned eyes out, I’ll—.”

“Still yer tongue, yer feisty cow. It’s me! Mignole, Miggy—stop!”

Miggy. There was only one wastrel who would dare. “Mirry?” She asked softly, releasing the candlestick she had been trying to wrestle from his grip in favour of clasping her fingers to her mouth. “Can it be? Is it—oh, here, let me help you.”

“I’m fine—back up, oh, gods-be-damned knees, that used to be so much easier.” Vesemir clambered over the windowsill and groaned as he finally landed on solid ground. He clasped a hand to the small of his back beneath his swords and flexed. His spine gave several audible cracks. “Didn’t you used to live on the second floor?”

“Yes, I prefer the view from up here, I—,” she said softly, almost breathlessly. He didn’t have chance to pluck the red roses he had stuffed beneath his sword strap—hoping, perhaps, that she wouldn’t notice they had been cut from her own garden—before her hands were beneath his chin, her thumbs stroking over the wiry white bristles of his moustache. “How is it—that even after all these years—you look just as I remember you?”

“Devilishly handsome and debonair?” Vesemir chanced, but his eyes dropped shyly. It had been many years. A few letters here and there hardly made up for his absence, but Mignole wasn’t a fickle woman, nor was she one to hold grudges or labour under the false hope of childhood dreams. She was practical, no nonsense. On their first meeting, she had informed Vesemir that he was to take her virginity and then stay for the rest of the night, and she had maintained that ironclad control over her life ever since. She had married, inherited her fortune and secured a life that Vesemir could never have given her. And yet…

“So very boyish and sweet,” she corrected and, before he could muster a witty retort, she leaned in to kiss his face. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly, whispering her adoration like a mantra. “I love you, oh, my dearest rogue, I love you.”