#regency vibes

Every time Garling murmured something into your hair, your pulse spiked clean through your thighs. A warmth had settled into your limbs and pooled low in your belly, insistent and sluggish. When his mouth came close enough that you felt the warmth of his breath at the corner of your lips, something electric moved through you that had nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with want. You kept your expression neutral with some effort. You held your wine glass. You nodded at things.

Garling, for his part, had misread your silence entirely. You could see it happening in real time: his attention turning careful when you stopped offering commentary, the slight adjustment in his posture that meant he was preparing for consequences. He thought he had overstepped and was already building his defense.

He had no idea that you had spent the last hour like a creature gone very still in tall grass, watching, waiting, and planning to pounce.

By the time the evening ended, a warm sensation had settled over you like hot water pouring during a shower. Not dizziness, exactly. More like the tide coming in by degrees, each small wave retreating just far enough that you noticed when the next one arrived. You were aware, in a distant academic way, that the wine deserved some of the credit. You were also aware that Garling’s hand had rested at the small of your back for approximately forty minutes, and that this may have been a contributing factor.

The carriage ride home was slow and warm and slightly unbearable. You watched the city pass in the dark beyond the window and tried to remember what your reservations were. Nothing came to mind.

The carriage ride home was not helping.

Garling sat across from you, very upright, with the expression that he was fairly certain he had done something wrong and was carefully calculating the extent of it. You had seen this before, how his cool demeanor went watchful and precise when he expected consequences, like a general revising his position before the other side had even fired. Whatever he imagined he’d done at the reception, he clearly believed he was about to be punished for it in full.

You looked at him. He looked at you. You said nothing.

This seemed to deepen his concern considerably.

But that warmth that had taken root in you at the reception had not gone anywhere. It sat in your chest and your belly and the inside of your wrists, patient and unhelpful, and every sway of the carriage that shifted you fractionally closer to him did nothing to improve matters. You watched the city pass in the dark beyond the window and tried to look like a woman composing her grievances rather than a woman composing herself.

He helped you out of the carriage, through the Figarland Estate, and walked you to your door with the solicitousness of a soldier picking his way through a minefield. Like any sudden movements might detonate your fury. Once there, he gently brushed your face, but thinking you wished to continue your cold shoulder, he reached past you to turn the door handle. This bent from his considerable height, as well as allowed him to press his lips to your temple (which seemed like it was a risk worth taking, as it was tradition by this point).

That was when you felt it. The line of his bearded jaw at close range, slightly rough with the end of a long evening, tipped toward you, briefly unguarded. Underneath was his refined throat, and his masculine scent permeated your senses like a drug.

Your decision-making, by this point, had been shipwrecked.

You turned your head and caught his mouth with yours before he could straighten.

It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t natural. But it mostly worked, and the hunger that had been sitting in your chest all evening roared to life as if you had finally, after a very long search, stumbled onto the right meal.

For one suspended moment, he went very still, that single breath of recalibration, then something gave way in him.

 He kissed you back with an intensity that knocked the air cleanly out of your chest, one hand finding the door frame on instinct, the other catching your waist. You felt the warmth that had been pooling in you all evening rush upward through your ribs all at once. His grip tightened when you swayed into him, your knees having quietly staged a resignation somewhere in the last ten seconds.

The hand at your waist was not on the door frame.

You noticed this distantly, in the part of your mind that was still capable of noticing things, which was not a large part. His grip had shifted without your registering when, no longer steadying but exploring, moving against the fabric of your dress with a greedy exploring that made your breath catch. Your neckline was modest by Celestial Dragon standards, but there was a sliver of chest above it, and his fingers found the edge of that territory with practiced, eager intensity.

Not that you saw any of it.

Garling’s mouth was hot and certain and tasted of the same wine you’d been sharing all evening. A heady taste, and when he tilted his head, and his jaw scraped against your skin, something sparked down through your throat and into your sternum and kept going. You had one hand twisted into his cape without any memory of putting it there, while the other had found the back of his neck, mussing his blonde hair. You did not remember doing that either, but he didn’t seem all that bothered by it.

The world had narrowed to the heat of him, the solid wall of his chest against yours, the low, unsteady pull gathering in your belly that wanted and wanted and wanted without any clear sense of what it was asking for, only that there was more. You intended to find it, your small mutters of more, more, more translating through tongue and spit.

He broke the kiss only to eagerly press his mouth to the curve of your throat, down and down, slower and slower until he was sucking red marks into the swell of your chest, tugging more skin free. Switching between nipping and biting, he worked to free a nipple, eagerly biting the freed skin into his mouth. 

And such great pleasure compounded and built, rising you into utterly new depths. Garling, for his part, seemed to surrender entirely, and you followed suit, legs parting wantonly and without thought, letting him pull you onto his thigh. 

The hand on your waist migrated to rest under the curve of your rear, tugging you forward and holding you up so he could simultaneously arch you over and slowly grind you over him. And while his long coat was of fine, thick material, it didn’t entirely conceal the long, hard rod between his thighs. Especially when the said jacket folded up, giving your thigh full access to measure considerable length hidden only by his pants, a touch of wetness there.

And still, that pleasure grew. 

More and more and more, and you were lost in it, drowning pleasantly, the reception and the carriage ride and every careful evening at your bedroom door collapsing into this single point of warmth and want and the smell of him and the scrape of his jaw and his fingers pulling down the edge of your neckline and finish the job—

Garling tore himself back.

Not stepped. Tore. 

He crossed to the far wall in two strides and put his back against it, one hand pressed flat to the plaster, legs planted apart, and he stood there and breathed. His chest rose and fell with an effort that matched yours, and his eyes, when he finally raised them to you, were dark and not entirely composed.

You became aware, slowly, of the state of yourself. Your hand rose to your throat, which was marked and warm and covered in him. The neckline of your dress had lost the argument it had been making all evening. You were gasping in a way that was not going to be easy to explain to anyone who might have ventured the halls.

You placed a hand over your mouth, touching the bruised skin, reveling in the delight still lingering.

Garling’s fingers flexed against the wall as he watched you like the apex predator he was.

You watched his jaw tighten. Watched him take one slow breath, then another, reconstructing himself from the outside in the way only Garling could, piece by deliberate piece, while his fingers pressed and curled and pressed again against the plaster like it was the only thing giving him clarity.

Then he smiled.

Slow, and wicked, and with rather too many teeth in it for a man who had just been clutching your waist like a lifeline.

“How much,” he said, “did you drink tonight, my love?”

The warmth in your chest curdled very slightly into indignation, which was at least easier to stand upright in. “I’m not drunk enough to not know what I’m doing.”

You folded your arms. This had the unintended effect of drawing his gaze somewhere it had been making inroads all evening, and he turned his eyes firmly to the ceiling with the air of a man making a significant personal sacrifice.

“You may not be entirely drunk,” he said, to the ceiling, in the voice he used for things he had already decided. “But I’m not going to bed my wife for the first time unless she is entirely cognizant. I am too prideful to accept anything less than perfect consent.”

The ceiling, to its credit, said nothing. You had plenty of words, many of them vulgar, but the most effective was the small whimper that escaped you upon the realization that you were not going to be ruined tonight.

“Garling.” You took half a step forward. He made a sound like a man in genuine pain.

“Go inside, my drunken wife.”

“I am not—”

“Go inside,” he said, with great feeling, “and lock the door. Because if you don’t, I will do something both of us will regret.” A beat. “I need a clear head for this. To be careful with you. I am not, at present, in any condition to be careful.”

The warmth in your chest dampened by several degrees, and your eyes, traitorously, filled. Not from sadness, exactly. From want, and the sudden enforced distance between you and the thing you wanted, which was close enough to the same feeling to be embarrassing.

Garling looked at your face, and something in him relented. He pushed off the wall and crossed back to you, his forehead coming down to rest against yours, one large hand curved against your jaw, and you could feel the restraint costing him in the slow, deliberate way he was breathing.

“Please—” Your hand found his lapel, fingers curling into it.

“My love.” His voice came out rougher than its usual register, stripped of something, and he closed his eyes. “Not tonight.”

You didn’t move. Your legs had not confirmed they were prepared to take instructions.

His thumb pressed once, briefly, against your jaw before his hand fell away, and the absence of it registered as an almost physical loss. He straightened, putting a careful inch of air between you, and looked at you with an expression you had never seen on him before and could not entirely name, though some part of you recognized it anyway.

“Go inside,” he said, quieter. “Shamrock is coming. I doubt you want him witnessing this.”

True to his word, footsteps sounded from somewhere down the corridor. Too dizzy and too warm and in no condition whatsoever to manage a small child, you finally went inside.

Unfortunately, tonight you remained a virgin.

The door closed behind you. You locked it, as instructed, and stood in the dark with your back against it and your heart making a considerable amount of noise, and thought that patience was a virtue neither of you was going to survive much longer.

Through the wood, you heard the low murmur of Garling’s voice, and then Shamrock’s, and Garling telling him to leave you be, that tomorrow he could have you all day.

You went to bed and collapsed into it face-first.

The next day, Garling received the cold shoulder.

It was not entirely due to anger, though you found anger the considerably easier thing to explain, including to yourself. Anger was clean and justified and required no further examination. The alternative required admitting that you had spent a portion of the night awake in a state of wanting that had no respectable outlet, and that the sight of him at the breakfast table, looking entirely composed. At the same time, you felt like a wrung-out cloth was doing nothing to improve matters. The hangover didn’t help matters.

So, anger it was.

You were perfectly civil. You passed him the salt when he needed it. You answered direct questions with complete sentences. You simply did all of this with the air of a woman who had no particular feelings about the man she was doing it for, which was so thoroughly untrue that you suspected even the housemaids could see through it.

This suspicion was not helped by the fact that you could, in your peripheral vision, observe two of them very carefully, not looking at each other.

Perhaps it was also not helped by the fruit tower. You had arrived at the table first and arranged it with some deliberation in the center, then seated yourself beside Shamrock on the far end, positioning the whole elaborate structure between yourself and your husband like a battlement. It was a very tall tower. Someone had stacked a pineapple on top, and you were not going to rule out that Hessa had done it on purpose, because when you glanced at her, she was examining a flower arrangement with the serenity of a woman thinking about absolutely nothing.

Garling had sat down across from you, taken one look at the fruit fortifications, and reached for the coffee pot without comment. This was, somehow, worse.

He hadn’t even pouted when he’d found you had woken early enough to deny him the walk from your door to breakfast. You had simply appeared at the breakfast table already dressed, already seated, already beyond reach of whatever the morning might have otherwise offered. A preemptive maneuver. He had registered it, you could tell, in the slight pause before he pulled out his chair, and had said nothing at all, which was its own kind of audacious.

You were not about to replay the previous night’s incident in the full light of day while still feeling more pent-up than a tea kettle. And if avoiding his morning greeting had also meant avoiding his mouth, well, that was his fault entirely. You were only a modest governess. A woman of simple habits and no particular passions. A woman who had identified her weaknesses and avoided them like cavities, which was the only sensible policy, and you would not be taking questions.

Shamrock, beside you, was eating his toast with the focused attention of a child who had read a room correctly and decided his continued neutrality was the wisest available position.

“Darling.”

Garling rose, having finished eating, and moved to your end of the table with unhurried confidence. The kind of ego that had simply decided the fruit tower was not a permanent obstacle. He adjusted his position until you had no choice but to look at him.

“Would you be opposed to visiting me for lunch today?” He paused, just briefly. “I find myself missing you fiercely.”

“I am opposed.” You said it so quickly that a maid nearly dropped her plate. “I’m afraid I’m otherwise occupied.”

Garling had half a second of alarm before composing himself again. “Oh?” A flash of white teeth. “And what has you occupied?”

“My sister.”

“Martha? But she isn’t—” He stopped.

“Isn’t what?”

“Nothing.” He said it easily, the way a man says nothing when he means something he has decided not to share. “I only thought she mentioned she had plans this week. I must have misremembered.”

You looked at him. He looked back at you with an expression of complete openness, which meant he was lying, or editing, or both, and you had no way to prove it without admitting you had invented Martha entirely, which you were not going to do.

“She was able to rearrange,” you said.

“Wonderful. Give her my warmest regards.”

He held your gaze for a moment, and then, with the air of a man who had won something without technically having played, he let it go.

“You look lovely this morning, incidentally.”

“I slept poorly."

“I’m sorry to hear that.” He said it with genuine feeling, which was the problem. The warmth was entirely unaffected and had no business landing the way it did. “You still look lovely. My door is open to you whenever you find yourself at liberty. Today or otherwise.”

You had braced, privately, for retaliation and for some quiet reference to the previous night, deployed with surgical precision and that particular smile. It did not come. He simply looked at you with that composed, patient attention, as though he had all the time in the world and was entirely content to spend some of it here, waiting for you to come around, which you were not going to do.

He was calm. He was mature. He was a shining example of chivalric patience, and he knew it, and he was deploying it like a weapon. There was absolutely nothing you could do about this that would not make you look like the unreasonable party. You could not be angry at a man for being kind to you. You had checked. There was no mechanism for it.

He didn’t appear to require an answer. He adjusted his cuffs, glanced at Shamrock, said something quiet and fond to him that you didn’t catch, and left.

You picked up your tea, praying the hangover away.

Behind you, Hessa had been reorganizing the sideboard for some time now, moving items in order to have something to look at that was not you. A maid to her left had developed a sudden and pressing interest in the window latch. Another had simply ceased to exist as a social presence, which was an impressive feat for someone standing four feet away.

“Not a word,” you said.

“Of course,” said Hessa, to a tureen.

You drank your tea.

Patience as a virtue, you had concluded, was a fiction invented by the elite to placate everyone else into quiet submission. The truly patient man was not virtuous. He was simply waiting you out. He had a longer horizon than you did, and he was comfortable with it, and this was arguably the most irritating thing about him, which was saying something given the competition.

When Garling had gone, Shamrock looked up from his breakfast, considered you for a moment with those unsettlingly perceptive eyes, and raised one small, brow.

“Are his kisses that bad?”

The maid by the window made a sound that she converted, with admirable speed, into a cough.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” you said, fingers to your forehead.

“You’re avoiding Father.”

“I am doing no such thing.”

“You got up before sunrise so you wouldn’t have to walk with him. And you told him you were visiting Auntie M, but Auntie M is enormous and in a terrible mood after balls, and she told you last week she didn’t want any visitors until after the baby comes. I was there.”

A brief pause.

“Women need support in trying times.”

Shamrock looked at you with an expression inherited wholesale from a specific parent: the raised brow, the quality of waiting. “You’re really mad at Father.”

You picked up your tea. “This is one of those personal, private things, Shamrock.”

“So the kiss was really bad.” He said it plainly, the way children say things they have simply concluded. “I thought Father would be better at it. He’s very old.”

He returned to his breakfast with the air of someone who had made his point and was content to let it settle. You watched him cut his toast into quarters, methodically, and thought that seven was frankly too young to be this perceptive, and that someone ought to have flagged it as a concern during the hiring process. You were, in fact, the someone. You had not flagged it. This was on you.

Behind you, Hessa had stopped pretending to reorganize anything. She was simply standing.

“The kiss wasn’t bad,” you said finally, with great dignity. “That’s not the issue.”

Shamrock said nothing. He had learned this from his father too: the particular weaponization of silence, the willingness to simply wait while the other person kept talking.

“It was a perfectly acceptable kiss.”

He ate his toast skeptically.

“Several acceptable kisses.” You were frowning now. You didn’t know why you were defending Garling. You hadn’t even liked him this morning. You still didn’t, technically, like him.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Shamrock said. “I already know Father did something right and then messed it up somehow. He was in a very good mood this morning. He woke me up early, and we did two hours of sword drills, and he was humming.”

The image of Garling humming at six in the morning over sword drills did something complicated to your chest that you were absolutely not going to examine at the breakfast table, or anywhere else, on this particular day.

One of the maids drifted toward the door on some urgent, invented errand. The other had developed a consuming interest in her own apron.

“It’s a shame he got it wrong,” Shamrock continued, cutting his second piece of toast with precision. “How am I supposed to get a sibling if he keeps messing up? I could talk to him. I have ideas.”

“Finish your toast,” you said. “And do not speak to your Father about our private life. Under any circumstances. That is a direct instruction.”

Shamrock finished his toast.

Then he looked up at you one more time with those steady, ancient eyes, and said, very simply, “Don’t be too upset, Mother. I need a sibling soon, or we’ll be too far apart in age to play.”

You looked at your tea, which had gone cold. You looked at the window. You performed a rapid mental survey of the building’s roof access and whether you had any prior commitments that might plausibly require your presence up there.

Hessa cleared her throat softly.

“More tea?”

“Please. And perhaps a dash of something stronger.”​​​​​​​

Martha lived twenty minutes away and was, as Shamrock had accurately said, enormous. She also looked less than pleased to see you, so quickly after the ball. A ball she probably shouldn’t have insisted on attending in her state.

She was horizontal on a chaise with her feet elevated, a cold compress on her forehead, and the expression of a woman who had agreed to receive you only because turning you away required more energy than she currently had available. Her husband Daveed had let you in with a warm smile and the slightly shellshocked air of a man eight months into a siege he hadn’t fully anticipated.

“You look terrible,” Martha said, by way of greeting. “Hungover still?”

“And you look like—” The rudeness of it made her raise a brow. You were almost never sharp first thing in the morning. “—Sorry. Good morning.”

“It isn’t, particularly, but sit down. Daveed, she needs tea. She has the face.”

“I don’t have a face,” you said, sitting.

“You have the face you get when something has happened, and you’ve spent the night convincing yourself it happened differently than it did.” She shifted, grimaced, shifted again. “So, did Garling’s kiss at the ball upset you that much? If so, my advice is to get over it.”

“I am NOT upset over being kissed—” You stopped. Collected yourself. “That is not what this is about.”

“No?”

Martha’s expression shifted into something more interested. She reached up and removed the compress from her forehead, which meant she intended to give you her full attention, which meant she had already decided this was going to be worth it. “Did something more happen?” she said. “When you got home?”

You were quiet for a moment.

“There was. We—” You stopped.

Martha waited. She had always been better at waiting than you, which was deeply unfair given that she was two years older and had no particular claim to the moral high ground on any subject you could name.

“I kissed him,” you said. “After we got home.”

“And?”

“And then there was more kissing. And I may have.” You picked up the tea Daveed had set down beside you, needing something to do with your hands. “I may have had rather a lot of pent-up energy at the ball, and the kissing may have. Escalated.”

Martha’s eyes narrowed. Her grin widened. “Do continue.”

“I was perfectly willing,” you said, with some dignity. “I was the one who. I was very willing. Enthusiastically so, in fact, which is neither here nor there, the point is that it wasn’t—” You stopped. “He stopped it. Said he didn’t want to hurt me. That I was drunk.”

Martha stared at you for a moment. Then something shifted in her expression, softer and more surprised. “I mean. That’s actually rather lovely of him. So what’s the problem?”

You gritted your teeth.

“The problem, Martha, is that we finally got to the main event, and—” You stopped. Started again. “He saw me. And then he stopped.”

Martha blinked. “And?”

“And that’s it. That’s the problem. He saw me, and he stopped.”

A silence. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. Outside, a cart passed over cobblestones.

“You think,” Martha said slowly, “that he stopped because he saw you and didn’t like what he saw?”

“I think it is a reasonable conclusion.”

Martha stared at you with an expression you hadn’t seen on her since you were seventeen and had announced a similarly ill-reasoned theory about why a boy at a garden party hadn’t asked you to dance. It was the expression of a woman summoning patience from a reserve she hadn’t expected to need this early in the morning.

“But that shouldn’t even be—it’s not as though the man hasn’t seen—” She stopped.

Went very still.

The compress slid slightly sideways on her forehead. She didn’t fix it.

Looked at you with new eyes.

“No,” she said.

You looked at the window. The curtains were a pale yellow. You focused on them with great attention.

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

You said nothing.

“You’re not telling me I’m wrong.”

Daveed, who had been hovering near the doorway with the tea things and the politely averted gaze of a good husband, had gone quite still. The teacup he’d been drying was no longer being dried. His eyes had cut slowly across the room to you. He was no longer looking at the wall. He was not even pretending to.

“This cannot be,” Martha said. She pressed both hands flat against her enormous stomach as though she needed something to hold onto. “You have been married for months.”

“Martha.”

“He is Garling Figarland.”

“I’m aware of who I married.”

“Are you telling me,” she said, her voice dropping to the register she reserved for matters of genuine, world-altering gravity, “that you have been living in that man’s house, in that man’s marriage, and you have not—” She stopped herself. Looked at you. Looked at Daveed. Looked back at you. The clock kept ticking. “You’re still a—”

“We have a complicated situation,” you said, with enormous dignity, and took a sip of tea that had gone lukewarm while you weren’t paying attention.

Martha made a sound that was not quite a word.

“No. You cannot possibly—are you still a virgin? You’re married to Garling Figarland, the alleged god of sexual prowess, and you are still a virgin?”

“Not that it is any of your business, but—”

“You’ve been married for months—”

“Martha—”

“Is he an actual saint? Has he been canonized? Should we be notifying someone?”

Daveed set the teapot down very carefully on the nearest surface, which happened to be a decorative side table not entirely designed for teapots. The ceramic met the wood with a soft, final clink. He did not appear to notice. He was staring at you with the expression of a man who had wandered into a conversation well above his anticipated involvement and was now rooted to the floor, eyes slightly wide, the dishcloth in his hands completely forgotten.

“The Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights,” Martha said, mostly to herself, gazing at the middle distance as though reading something written on the air. “Living like a monk in his own house. With his own wife.” She turned to Daveed. The compress slid off her forehead entirely and landed on the cushion beside her. Neither of them moved to retrieve it.

Daveed appeared to be doing rapid calculations. “Can you imagine,” he said, his voice pitched low with the reverence of a man delivering news of cosmic significance, “how absolutely furious Veria would be if she knew?” He turned away from you, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. His shoulders moved. “All those years. All that. And he married a woman who has him waiting like a—” He could not finish. He faced the wall and composed himself with visible effort.

“My dear, dear sister,” Martha said, shaking her head slowly, something warm and wondering in her voice now beneath the disbelief. “This changes everything. Do you understand that this changes everything?” She pointed at you, finger crossing the parlor with great purpose. “And then last night you finally, finally—but you were drunk—and he—” She stopped. Her expression moved rapidly through several phases, like a woman reading a letter that keeps getting more surprising. Then it settled into something certain. “Oh. Oh, he stopped because he didn’t want it to be like that.”

“Or because he saw me and didn’t—”

“If you finish that sentence,” Martha said, “I will tell Mother.”

You gasped. “That is not a proportionate—”

“Your extremely patient, generous, apparently saintly husband stopped,” Martha said, each word placed down like something heavy and deliberate, “because he cared about you. Because he wanted you present for it. Because you matter to him and he didn’t want your first time together to be while you were three glasses past sensible and he was responsible for the consequences in the morning.”

You blinked at her.

“He cared about you,” she said again, slower, in case it needed a second pass.

The clock ticked. Somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed. The pale yellow curtains shifted slightly in a draft from the window you hadn’t noticed was cracked.

You opened your mouth.

“He is apparently,” Martha continued, before you could use it, “against all available evidence and reputation, a genuinely decent man who wanted you sober and present and actually there the first time he seduces you. And instead of recognizing this, you have come to my house before ten in the morning, still wound up like a watch spring, to complain that he doesn’t find you attractive.”

She exhaled slowly through her nose.

From the corner of the room, Daveed made a very small sound.

“Something to add?” you said, between your teeth.

“No,” he said. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He was looking at a fixed point on the wall with the intense personal focus of a man who had decided that particular patch of plaster was the most interesting thing in the room and intended to keep believing that.

“Go ahead, Daveed,” Martha said pleasantly. “It’ll be better if she hears it from you.”

A pause. Daveed appeared to conduct a brief internal negotiation.

“I think,” he said, still to the wall, with the careful diction of a man choosing each word the way you choose footing on ice, “and I could be wrong. But I think that the man in question would be genuinely horrified to know that the wife he loves, the one he obtained through what I can only describe as an impressive campaign of dubious maneuvering because he apparently desperately wanted her, had concluded that he stopped because he didn’t find her attractive.” Another pause. “In my opinion.”

The room was very quiet.

“No one asked your opinion,” you said.

“You’re right.” He collected the teapot from the side table with the efficient relief of a man who had said his piece and located the exit simultaneously. “I’ll get more tea.”

He left. His footsteps retreated down the hall at a pace that was not quite hurrying.

Martha watched him go, then turned back to you with the expression of a woman who had made her point and was now simply waiting for it to land.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I was at that ball. I watched him kiss you in front of everyone he knows. I watched his face when he did it.” She let that sit in the air between you for a moment, where it occupied considerable space. “A man who doesn’t like what he sees does not look like that.”

You could feel your face doing something you didn’t care for. “He made me feel so ashamed.”

“I know.” Her voice lost some of its edge. “But you were nervous. He kissed you in front of half of Mary Geoise, and you didn’t know what to do with that, so you found a solution in a wine glass. And the wine gave you what the kissing had already started. And he was nervous too, because you’d been cool with him all evening, and he was drinking as well, and when it came to it, he was the more functional of the two of you.” She looked at you steadily. “That is not rejection. That is the opposite of rejection, delivered with more self-restraint than most men alive are capable of, and given the reputation, I can only imagine what it cost him.”

There was a long silence.

“I don’t know how to want him without feeling so scared,” you said.

Martha was quiet for a moment. “I know that too.”

“I was cold to him this morning.”

“I heard about the fruit tower.”

“The—who told you?”

“Shamrock. Our gossip is his primary form of entertainment.” She shifted, pressing a hand to her side with a grimace. “So. Go to the spa. Use some of that infinite money you have and get your head on straight. And then, for the love of everything, talk to the man. He was decent about this when he didn’t have to be.”

You picked up your tea. Put it down. “I want to jump off a roof.”

“You can’t use mine. Too low. You’d only twist an ankle.”

Daveed reappeared in the doorway holding a plate of biscuits, took one look at your expression, and set them down beside you without comment. He had the instincts of a man who had learned when food was the only safe offering.

“Daveed,” Martha said, without opening her eyes. “Apologize to me.”

“For what, love?”

“For not being Garling Figarland. We’ve just been told the man has waited over a year to bed his own wife. You never do such edgeplay with me.”

“That long? What are we, savages?” He winked. “How about I show you my sword later?” You made a face.

“Please do.” She waved a hand. “Compress first. I need a moment.”

“You’re my wife,” he said, with comfortable certainty. “You’re about to have my child. And Saint Figarland would drive you mad. He’s not nearly gossipy enough for you.”

“He could learn.” But she was smiling, and when he leaned down, she caught his hand, and he pressed a kiss to her knuckles with the ease of long habit before disappearing back down the hall.

You watched this and felt something very small and very inconvenient turn over in your chest.

“Go,” Martha said. “Spa. Husband. In that order.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Stop making me jealous.”

Daveed kindly walked you to the door to show you out.

The spa was quiet at this hour, which was the only reason you had come. And you had used the back entrance, as Garling likes to keep his personal doings private, and paid well for it to stay that way.

The Figarlands had a standing account there, one of the many luxuries that had arrived with the marriage and which you had visited exactly once before, but as staff on an errand. The difficulty with being able to afford the best was that the spa was also full of people who could afford the best, and Celestial Dragons talked, and you were in no condition to be talked at. You had arrived early enough to avoid the bulk of them and given very clear instructions to keep it that way. The woman at the front had looked at your face and not argued.

The all-female attendants took your robe, administered the full shower and scrub with the brisk efficiency of women who had seen everything and were professionally unimpressed by all of it, and then deposited you in a warm room that smelled of eucalyptus and left you largely in peace in a giant robe. Which was the most you had asked of anyone today, and the first time you had received it.

You lay down on the heated stone and stared at the ceiling. It didn’t reveal any secrets, but it did help the throbbing behind your eyes, so you were prepared to call it useful.

You were doing this because Martha had told you to. Also, because the sort of woman Garling Figarland ought to have married went to spas and took mornings for herself and did not spend them constructing fortifications out of seasonal fruit. You were going to be that woman today. You were going to lie here in the warm, scented quiet and feel entirely at ease, and then you were going to go home composed and reasonable and not at all like someone who had spent the night wrung out over her own husband.

The stone was very warm. The ceiling was very unhelpful.

You sighed. Looked like you’d be doing this yourself.

Begrudgingly, you accepted the obvious. Martha had probably been right, though she had been very pregnant and extremely inconvenient about it.

Garling had been right not to let you seduce him drunk. You could see that now, in the eucalyptus-scented quiet, 

If he had taken the easy route, something would have broken. You would have woken up and known that he had let it happen because it was available rather than because it mattered. That he had taken an easy win while you were too far gone to weigh it properly. The thought sat badly, like something swallowed wrong. It would have been the end of whatever fragile, unexamined thing had been growing in the months since the wedding, and he had apparently understood that, even drunk, even in the dark, even when you had been, by all accounts, quite enthusiastic about the alternative.

Which was, when you lay it out plainly on a warm stone in a quiet room, rather a lot to take in.

It had never been about you not having desire. That was the part you hadn’t said to Martha. You had wanted him for long enough that the wanting had become chronic, something you worked around the way you work around furniture placed in an inconvenient spot. You had simply learned the shape of the room without it.

The problem with Garling was that he was not a man you could want lightly. He was the best, and he knew it, and wanting him properly meant admitting that, which meant admitting rather a lot of other things in sequence, like a row of small doors each opening onto a larger room than the last.

Because if you let yourself have this properly, you would not be able to stop. And if you could not stop, and he left, or grew tired, or looked at you one morning with the eyes of a man regretting a decision he’d made in haste, you would be ruined by it. Not in the social sense. In the other sense. The permanent one.

You had married him under circumstances that were not, in the strictest interpretation, entirely voluntary. You had been furious about this for a reasonable period of time. But somewhere in the months since, the fury had done what fury does when it is not fed, which was to slowly and inconveniently become something else entirely. Something that sat in your chest during breakfast. Something that had made five glasses of wine feel like a reasonable solution to a problem that had been building for months.

The question was not whether you wanted him. You had been resolved on that question for some time, whether you had admitted it or not. The question was whether you were brave enough to stop building walls out of fruit and cold shoulders and let the thing happen that was, by now, fairly clearly going to happen regardless.

You pressed your face into the warm stone.

It did not offer counsel. It was, however, very soothing, and you were prepared to take what you could get.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

You exhaled.

All right, you thought. All right.

You were still frightened. You expected you would continue to be frightened for some time. But you were going to go home and talk to your husband like a person, as Martha had suggested, without a fruit tower or any of the other arrangements you had been hiding behind.

You were also, you noted, still lying on a warm stone in an otherwise empty room, which was not nothing. Martha had been right about the spa, too, even if you were not going to tell her that. She had enough material already.

Garling could wait another forty minutes. He was patient. It was, at this particular moment, his most useful quality.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

You had assumed, after the spa, you would meander a bit. You preferred walking alone, which drove Hessa quietly mad and the Figarland household maids somewhat less quietly so, but Mary Geoise was the safest city in the world, and you were married to the reason why. No one was going to trouble you.

The irony was that no one was particularly going to notice you either. Only lesser Dragons walked, as well as slaves and servants, and so even people who had met you formally tended to do a small double-take when they passed you on foot, as though the brain refused to process a Saintess at street level without a second attempt. You found this restful. You could think.

You had been looking forward to it. The post-spa quiet, the warm, loose feeling in your shoulders, the fresh air, an afternoon of nobody requiring anything of you before you had to go home and be brave.

As soon as you stepped out of the treatment room into the private changing area, a Figarland maid appeared in the doorway with the body language of someone who had been standing outside it for several minutes, working up to knocking. Her face had the particular quality of a person who had recently experienced something they didn’t have the vocabulary for.

“Saintess.” She dipped her head. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, I really am, but—” she cleared her throat, “There’s—”

You furrowed your brow. 

“…The Master is here.”

You froze, one hand on your robe, stalling. “Pardon?”

“The… uh, Master Figarland. He’s here.”

“He’s here?” 

The maid bowed low.

“Outside, ma’am. He’s…He’s in the corridor. Just outside.”

You turned around fully. “He’s in the women’s side of the spa?”

“Yes, Saintess.” She looked genuinely pained. “He arrived about twenty minutes ago. The staff didn’t feel they could ask him to leave, given who he is, but they also couldn’t very well let him through, given where he is, so he’s simply been. Standing there. In the corridor. He has been there for some time now, and several guests have walked past him, and we aren’t entirely sure what your correct protocol is because there isn’t one, as it turns out, for this specific situation.” She took a small breath. “It seems he’s taken the day off.”

You stared at her.

“He took the day off,” you said. “The Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights.”

“Yes, Saintess.”

“And came here.”

“Yes, Saintess.”

“To the spa.”

“He’s been very gracious about it,” she said, with the desperate optimism of a woman trying to locate a bright side. “He told the front desk he found himself unable to focus without the goodwill of his wife and asked if there was somewhere he could wait. They said there wasn’t, not exactly, and he said that was perfectly all right and found the corridor himself.” A pause. “Several guests have commented.”

“I’m sure they did,” you said darkly.

“The waiting room was quite full at the time, ma’am. Some of them recognized him—” She hesitated, and you gave her a look. “—All of them recognized him.”

You sat down on the dressing bench. You stood back up. You picked up your comb and put it down without using it. You looked at the door, then at the mirror, then at the door.

“Those women are going to tell everyone,” you said.

“I expect by lunch, Saintess,” she agreed, with sympathy that did not quite conceal the rest of what was written on her face, which was that she had already told two people herself and felt the information was simply too large to contain.

You pressed your fingers to your temple. The eucalyptus was doing absolutely nothing for you now.

“Tell him I’ll be out shortly.”

“Of course, Saintess.” She turned to go, then paused at the door with the reluctant air of someone delivering a final piece of news they had been saving. “He also said to let you know there’s no rush whatsoever and to take all the time you need.” Another pause. “He said it quite graciously.”

Of course, he had.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 

You turned back to the mirror. Your reflection looked composed. Your reflection was lying. You pressed your hands flat against the dressing table and breathed in through your nose, eucalyptus and warm cedar, the last of the morning’s careful equilibrium.

You had been going to do this on your own terms. You had a whole plan. It had involved more walking, some additional thinking, possibly a light lunch, and then, eventually, at a time of your choosing, a mature and reasonable conversation with your husband.

Garling, apparently, had different scheduling preferences. 

“I will kill him.”

A perfectly corseted set of breasts was, in the right circumstances, something very close to a miracle.

Consider a man contemplating a significant life change, perhaps a man named Garling Figarland. A man who'd inadvertently fallen in love with his governess, but who also rightfully had many, many reservations about this development.

Among his many concerns was this: first, she was his son's governess. Second, he wasn’t really a man who got married, and third, the first two didn’t matter, but the last point did.

That being, perhaps the least dignified reason, but no less real: Garling didn’t know whether he was capable of leashing a libido as ferocious as his own. And whether inflicting that power upon a single soul for the remainder of his natural life was wise, fair, or even survivable for both parties involved.

And whether that libido would cooperate at all, given the woman in question.

Because the said woman dressed head to toe in modest, slightly baggy apparel. Governess apparel, taken to the extreme, which meant he must have loved you considerably, to be at this point—because he hated the clothes. They gave him nothing. Not a collarbone, not a wrist, not so much as a suggestion of a waist. The most he had ever been offered was a brief, accidental flash of ankle, and Garling was not the sort of man who could be reliably sustained by ankles.

He had considered this a safeguard. Garling was capable of loving a woman and still recognizing that no force on earth, celestial mandate included, would compel him to marry her if he felt nothing below the neck. The status quo that ensured this remained stable was kept in alignment by your frumpy uniform.

And he was glad for the arrangement. It protected everyone.

Then your mother had gotten hold of you before the ball.

Your dress itself was not extraordinary. It was perfectly ordinary, in point of fact. What was not ordinary was the amount of you it chose to display, and what that display confirmed about the silhouette that had been quietly existing beneath seasons’ worth of serviceable wool.

Garling had survived years of your modesty intact. Collected, even. Rather proud of himself, if he was honest. He respected you to the point that he hadn’t once imagined you naked.

One look.

That was it. That was all it took.

He very nearly didn’t survive the ballroom, because that quickly changed.

His first glance wasn’t even your chest. He almost didn’t recognize you at all. He’d caught movement from his vantage in the shadow of an exit, registered unfamiliar bare skin, and done a double take before his brain had fully caught up with his eyes. The back of your dress rested just below your shoulder blades, exposing the smooth line of your neck and the soft curve of your shoulders, and he stood there for a moment simply staring, which was not behavior he was accustomed to from himself.

You were lovely, though someone had taken extensive liberties with your hair and makeup. 

He could tell from the stiff way you moved, and the rigid architecture of your spine, that you were deeply uncomfortable. It was that detail, oddly, that gave him enough presence of mind to shake himself loose. You were surrounded by insects who preened and leered and were making no effort to conceal their hopes to see down your dress. 

You needed rescuing. 

He could be useful. He had a function here.

He intervened just as one of the room’s many determined gnats grew brave enough to approach rather than simply orbit you at a respectful, longing distance.

Could he blame the men? Sincerely?

No. He could not.

Because when you turned to tolerate a fellow, Garling caught his first full view, and discovered, with something that felt uncomfortably close to religious revelation, that he was perhaps a man of faith after all.

The altar, in this metaphor, was your corseted chest, framed in rose silk. 

He was going to have a very serious conversation with your mother. To thank her, or to arrange your immediate entry into a nunnery, depending entirely on how the next several minutes went.

He also couldn’t fault you for your lack of gratitude at his intervention. It was plain you had gone to some effort to placate her, endured the dress and the hair and whatever else the process had entailed, and the reward for your suffering was a ballroom full of men trying their best to undress you with their eyes. 

You had looked, when he’d materialized at your elbow, like you’d see death. Not encouraging, but he supposed it wasn’t always pleasant to see one’s boss when you specifically asked for time off.

For his own part, the rest of the evening required considerable management. He saved you, let you be upset, marked his territory, got one look down your dress, and was persuaded to commit to monogamy. He was so gratified by the sight, he failed to have a lick of common sense or manners, entirely forgetting that he would have to flirt very obviously if you were to understand his intentions. 

And when it concluded, he made a detour.

The personal ministrations he required, in the privacy of his own company, were somewhat embarrassingly decisive. By the end of them, he was a man entirely resolved. He was on a path, he understood, with no meaningful exit. He had made his peace with this.

But the breasts, he reflected, in the calm that followed, were genuinely exceptional. He also found, in that same calm, that he had no interest in seeing another pair. This was new information. He filed it accordingly.

It was for that exact reason he let the gossip run rampant. 

By the next morning, his last mistress had graciously withdrawn before he’d had to cut the metaphorical cord. She had always been perceptive, and as it was, they hadn’t slept together in nearly a month.

He then composed a letter to your father. Measured, cordial, carefully worded. He wrote three drafts, which was three more than he had written for anything in recent memory, including military dispatches with actual stakes. 

The substance of the final version was this: That he, Garling Figarland, was not only exceptionally pleased with you, their youngest daughter, as his son's governess, but that he and his son had grown very attached to you personally. To put it plainly, he found you delightful, and he wished to pursue a marriage forthwith. But so as not to overwhelm you. That said, the covenant was also to be quietly drawn up between your parents and him, because you were shy. Mostly, it would be of considerable personal assistance if the family could quietly refrain from entertaining other suitors in the meantime. He would gladly cover any costs and requested no dowry or addendums. Instead, for their trouble, he would ensure them a monthly stipend, ensure their business, and protect their family.

Your father’s reply arrived within the day.

It was not what he would call a warm correspondence. It demanded to know, in the blunt register of a man who had spent decades dealing with nonsense, who exactly was impersonating the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights, how they had obtained official stationery, and what they hoped to gain by it, because he had written to the man precisely four times in his life and both conversations had concerned tariffs.

There was a postscript. It said, ‘The nerve was impressive, he’d give them that.’

Garling arranged an in-person meeting.

Your mother, upon opening the drawing room door, went the color of old parchment and appeared to briefly lose command of her knees. She recovered with admirable speed, and by the time he had settled into a chair, she had executed a complete reversal of bearing, producing tea, a plate of biscuits, and a warmth that suggested she had just discovered an unlimited source of clout.

When she understood the precise reason for his visit, she nearly offered you up on the tea tray as well. Garling felt this was perhaps excessive, but appreciated the spirit.

The engagement was approved, the permissions signed, and the relevant documents produced with a speed that suggested your mother had been maintaining a small amount of hope for some time and had the paperwork somewhere to hand. He supposed your sister had quietly stepped in to arrange some details, and he had become friendly with her, and she proved to be an excellent tool to nudge you in the right direction. That was a limit to your obstinacy, and he had to peel it away. 

All that remained was your signature.

That was resolved shortly as well, though not without cost. He regretted, in retrospect, that obtaining it had required such a disruption to your comfort in his home. A foundation had been quietly building between you, and he would have preferred to continue constructing it at his own pace, in his own house, with you inside it where he could monitor progress directly.

But there was a kind of strategy in giving ground. He let you take your space. He let you return to your family, and he let you sit alone with whatever it was you were feeling, which Shamrock reliably reported was considerable. You had left, apparently, because you felt partial to him and found the proximity compromising.

He tried very hard not to be smug about this. He mostly succeeded.

The time you spent at home, he considered the engagement period in all but your awareness of it. He sent Shamrock over like his personal sleeper agent and reaped the benefits. Shamrock, to his credit, required no instruction. He simply went, and was charming, and dismantled your professional composure one visit at a time with the focused dedication of a child who wanted something and had identified the most efficient path to getting it.

Garling might have let it continue longer, just to ensure your compliant agreement. The arrangement suited him well enough. He genuinely missed you, but found that ensuring your family’s comfort, settling certain quiet financial arrangements, and overseeing the reordering of his mansion for your eventual arrival made for a satisfying way to spend the interim. He was a man who liked a project. This was several projects at once, with a prize that would provide decades of enjoyment and pleasure.

But then you began to notice things. Small things. The kind of small things that, assembled together, formed a picture a woman of your particular intelligence was not going to be able to unsee.

At that point, he decided, it was better he take the lead. Gently. With care. He would guide you himself to the discovery that you were, in fact, already his, and had been for some time, and that the only outstanding item was your paperwork, which was already signed, so really there was nothing left to discuss.

Surely you’d agree.

And if he was enjoying himself, who could reasonably blame him?

By the time you actually knew, he’d already moved your books into his library, alphabetized them into his own collection, and had the head housekeeper begin addressing you by your future title to smooth the transition. Then he quietly arranged for your preferred meals to be stocked in the kitchens on a standing order.

He had, perhaps, been slightly overconfident about the smoothness of the transition.

Your shock departed quickly. Your anger stayed. The next month was not nearly as enjoyable as the preceding ones. The mansion felt considerably more lonely without you in it, which was an observation he kept to himself because he was not going to say that out loud to anyone. Shamrock served as his intelligence on the ground, reporting back with the solemn reliability of a very small, very invested general. It helped that the consistent intelligence he sent was that you were not impervious. You were simply furious. There was, apparently, a meaningful difference, and he was expected to appreciate it.

He conceded the point. Privately.

In the meantime, he began establishing, with increasing visibility, that he was unavailable. Mostly, this was subtle. Declined invitations to women. Brief, closed appearances at functions he could not reasonably avoid. Then an audacious widow at a diplomatic supper decided that his current domestic situation represented an opening, and made her position known with an initiative he had to admire on a purely technical level.

He left her untouched, unencouraged, and in tears, which he did not feel particularly guilty about.

But he would not have it happen again. More importantly, he would not have you hear of it through whatever channel that sort of news traveled, and draw the wrong conclusions while you were already disposed toward drawing wrong conclusions about him.

He arranged, with surgical precision, for his marriage certificate to pass through the hands of four secretaries known, collectively, to have never kept a confidence in their professional lives. It was the most efficiently he had ever deployed paperwork.

Your return home was prompt.

It was not, however, the gracious return he had been anticipating. You came back with your spine straight and your jaw set and a quality of dignity that he found, inconveniently, even more attractive than the dress. What he gained was not access to your bed but access to the next stage of a puzzle he had not fully mapped, which was beginning to be a pattern with you that he could not decide whether he found irritating or compelling.

Both, probably.

Because somewhere between your uneasy composure and a certain clause in the contract, it became apparent to him. 

You were a virgin. 

He had suspected it, but to have it confirmed outright was different. He sat with this information for a moment. Then he sat with it for considerably longer than he was accustomed to sitting with anything.

This changed things.

Not his intentions. His intentions were the same as they had always been and were not up for revision. He was going to have you, he was going to keep you, and the sequence of events between now and that outcome was largely a matter of logistics. That part was settled.

The complication was the nuance of logistics.

He rarely slept with virgins, but this was not squeamishness; rather, it was risk management. In his experience, which was extensive and well-documented in his own memory if nowhere else, virgins cried. Not always during, but reliably after, and sometimes before, and occasionally at intervals with no clear cause for up to a week following. They became emotional in ways that required management. They attached, swiftly and completely, to whoever had been present for the occasion, with an indiscriminate devotion that had very little to do with the actual merit of the man involved.

He had watched perfectly sensible women rearrange their entire inner lives around men who did not deserve the square footage. It was a reliable phenomenon, and a tedious one, and he had spent years observing it with the detached curiosity of a man who had never been subject to sentiment himself. When he was younger, he dabbled a few times with some of the more disposable women, but quickly he moved on.

He was not, to be clear, worried about this with you. Not because you wouldn't become attached or feel obliged. He actually wanted you to rearrange your inner life around him. Enthusiastically, and at length. He had no ambivalence on that point whatsoever.

What he did not want was for you to do it badly, or have regrets, or be unwilling. He wanted you to arrive at him clearly. Annoyed, if necessary, but with both eyes open and functioning, the way you approached everything else in your life (including him, including your own feelings, which you were currently in the process of examining with the reluctant thoroughness of someone auditing accounts they had hoped not to find).

He wanted to be wanted by you, specifically.

Which meant patience. Care. A degree of restraint he was going to find genuinely, personally inconvenient, and which he was already finding inconvenient, and you had barely agreed to be in the same room as him.

He pinched the bridge of his nose.

There was also the secondary concern, which he was less comfortable examining but examined anyway, because he was not a man who benefited from self-deception.

He was an experienced lover. This was not arrogance. It was simply a fact, the way his height was a fact, or his record in the field. He knew what he was doing. He had never had complaints. He had, on occasion, had the opposite of complaints, expressed with a sincerity that left no room for misinterpretation.

But he had never particularly cared, before, what happened in the aftermath. Whether a woman left satisfied or merely finished had been, practically speaking, her own business.

The thought of you finding it unpleasant stopped him cold.

The thought of you enduring it and deciding it was a marital duty to be discharged efficiently and then moved past. Looking past him afterward with that stone-cold composure he hated, and asking if he required anything else before retiring.

He didn’t know what he’d do with that. It was an outcome he had no prepared response for, and the lack of a prepared response was deeply uncomfortable. Because you were the prize, and it was entirely possible if he didn’t perfectly navigate this.

A silver lining, he supposed, was that he would not have to kill anyone, which simplified things considerably. He didn’t think he could let anyone who caused this much jealousy live.

But the situation called for something he had never previously been required to apply to this particular area of his life.

Patience.

He was going to take his time. He was going to be restrained. He was going to check every relevant box, in the correct order, with appropriate attention to detail. When the time finally came, you were going to be so thoroughly convinced, so completely and specifically his, that the only thing you’d be capable of afterward was lying there reconsidering every life choice that had delayed the inevitability of this, and deciding you needed him again immediately.

He found that prospect, on reflection, highly motivating. He was very much looking forward to it. He was also very glad no one could see his face as he considered it all, locked away in his office.

And so he worked. Methodically. Months of it. The careful dance between proximity and patience, of letting you come to conclusions in your own time while making absolutely certain only the right conclusions were available to you. He did not rush. He did not press. He was, by any reasonable external measure, a model of restrained and gentlemanly conduct, and he was quietly insufferable about it in the privacy of his own head.

And then, after all of it, you had looked at him with that self-righteous tilt of your chin. The one he had learned to read very well by then, the one you wore when you had lost an argument with yourself and were experiencing the loss as a personal affront. You had the presence of a woman who had arrived at a conclusion against her will and intended to make it everyone else’s problem.

Then you demanded he kiss you. Right on the lips. As though the specificity were necessary. As though he might otherwise have attempted your elbow.

 But he hadn’t obliged.

Because he had come this far on patience alone, which was, he remained convinced, either a personal record or a minor miracle, and he was not going to spend that currency carelessly. If he could outlast his own libido for the better part of a year (which required divine intervention to explain and he intended to take up with the relevant parties at the earliest opportunity), then he could outlast this too.

More importantly, you had asked. You had asked, which meant you wanted, which meant you were going to have to sit with that wanting long enough to stop pretending it wasn’t there.

He needed you to come to terms with the energy between you both, without any remaining doubts, else this marriage would sink faster than a pirate ship at Sabaody.

And when you were finally, properly his, with no ambiguity left on either side, the experience was going to be genuinely extraordinary. The months of restraint were going to feel, in retrospect, entirely worth it.

He was a man of faith, it turned out. Who could have predicted it?

The altar remained the same. He was, however, now considerably more motivated to pray at it.

May the Great One bless his path. He had waited long enough. He was an impatient man by nature and by practice. But he had applied patience with what he felt was considerable grace and restraint, and he had been rewarded last night with the knowledge that his wife was, in fact, enthusiastically willing, which was all the intelligence he had required to move forward.

The only remaining obstacle between himself and pure marital bliss was his own chivalry.

He had no one to blame for this but himself. He had made the decision, and it had been the correct decision, and he stood by it fully, and it had cost him an extraordinary amount, and he was not going to think about that.

He was going to think about the next step instead.

Specifically: rearranging his schedule to take the next week largely away from Mary Geoise, somewhere quiet, somewhere his wife could not build fruit fortresses or find reasons to be busy, somewhere with a great deal of uninterrupted time and no Hessa appearing at inconvenient moments with institutional opinions.

Did the Five Elders highly look upon this? Not particularly. Supreme Commanders didn’t leave the city as a rule. They were the buffer between the Celestial Dragons and the upper brass, the fixed point around which a great deal of sensitive machinery turned.

Did he care?

He considered this for approximately one second.

No. They couldn’t replace him with Sommers. They couldn’t replace him with anyone, and they knew it, and he knew it, and the Five Elders knew it, and if they wanted to have that conversation, he was available after his honeymoon.

He adjusted his cuffs and continued to wait for his wife.

A wait rewarded shortly thereafter, as you came through the women’s section door at a pace that suggested the maid had delivered her message with the surrounding detail fully intact. You looked warm and clean and furious in the particular way you got furious when you were also embarrassed, which he had come to recognize as one of your more charming expressions. You located him in the corridor, crossed it in four steps, took his arm with both hands, and marched him toward the exit with the focused efficiency of a woman removing a hazard from a public space.

He went because he was cooperative by nature when cooperation suited him, and because your hands were on his arm.

The carriage door had barely closed behind you both before you turned on him. Hessa had redone your wardrobe with considerable taste, and he registered this fact with the calm appreciation of a man whose confidence had just received a small, entirely welcome contribution.

“What are you doing here, Garling?”

“Waiting for you,” he said, as though this were self-evident, which he felt it was.

“You were standing in the corridor of a spa.”

“There was nowhere to sit.”

“You are the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights.”

“I’m aware.”

“People saw you.”

“Several,” he agreed pleasantly. “They were very quiet about it.”

You stared at him with an expression that cycled through several things before landing on something that was trying very hard to remain outraged and was losing ground at a visible rate. “You told the front desk you couldn’t work without my goodwill.”

“It’s true.”

“Garling.”

“It was the most accurate explanation available.” He looked at you with the complete attention he always gave you, as though you were the most interesting thing in whatever room you happened to share. “I left this morning knowing you were upset with me. I found I couldn’t do a single useful thing with that knowledge. So I came to find you instead.”

The carriage moved. Outside, Mary Geoise continued its morning entirely unaware that its Supreme Commander had spent twenty minutes in a spa corridor and considered it time well spent.

You looked at him for a long moment.

“You are,” you said finally, with great feeling, “being very unreasonable.”

“Yes,” he said. “Have you eaten? The seafood at the Red Port is considerably better than its reputation suggests, provided it’s fresh.”

You should have been furious. It was outrageous, by any reasonable measure, that he had publicly cornered you outside a women’s spa to ensure you had lunch. It was audacious and excessive and entirely characteristic, and you had a great many things still to say to him, several of which were important.

“You ass.”

“If I had told you I was going to come find you,” he said, with the terrible reasonableness of a man making an airtight argument, “what would you have done?”

You opened your mouth.

You closed it.

You thought about what you would have done. The documented version of yourself, the one who had been almost somewhere for four months, who had been getting there by inches, who had a whole careful internal system for managing the getting there.

“I would have been more ready,” you said.

“Would you have?”

“Maybe.”

“Or would you have been in your head about it? Worried, and panicked, and looking for a reason to be busy?”

The carriage was very quiet.

“Perhaps,” you said, after a moment.

“Just like the kiss,” he said. “If I had told you beforehand, you would have been somewhere else entirely. Preparing yourself. Bracing.” He looked at you steadily. “Instead of actually being there.”

Instead of the overexposed whiteness and the hand in his lapel, and the room going somewhere distant and irrelevant. Instead of here.

“That’s very…something,” you started.

“Calculating?” he suggested.

“I was going to say presumptuous.”

“Am I wrong?”

“You assumed I would—”

“I assumed nothing.” He looked at you directly, without apology. “I watched you light up yesterday, and I made a decision. This morning, when I saw how hurt you were, I made another.” A pause. “I don’t debate the things that matter most to me. I act on them.”

You looked at him for a long moment.

You must have been in love, because instead of saying anything, you let him draw you onto his lap, tucked your face into his collarbone, and decided that the things you still had to say could survive another ten minutes.

For most of the ride, you both sat in companionable silence, which was rather amazing for the amount of stress you previously had about seeing him. You had not expected the silence to be comfortable. You had braced, somewhere in the back of your mind, for him to say something. He said nothing. He simply kept his arm around you and watched the city pass outside the window, and let you breathe.

It was, you thought, very like him. 

Outside, the city moved past in pale morning light, the white buildings of Mary Geoise catching the sun the way they always did, indifferent and luminous. You could see the top of the Red Port beginning to appear between rooftops, the glint of water beyond.

“Garling,” you said, into his collarbone.

“Mm.” He didn’t look directly at you, which was enormously helpful.

“I—” you rallied your courage. “I owe you an apology. About this morning and last night.”

He stiffened slightly, his hand brushing through a curl of your hair. “That’s unnecessary.”

“It isn’t.” You stopped. “I was being immature and difficult.”

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a gull crossed the window.

“You were scared,” he said, without edges. “I alarmed you. I thought giving you a kiss when you didn’t expect it would help you avoid overthinking it. I let my ego overrule your comfort and started something private that you had no ability to direct. It pushed you to drink.” A pause. “You had every right to be upset.”

You lifted your head enough to look at him, which was a tactical error, because he was looking back at you with that expression, the steady, unguarded one he didn’t seem to know he had.

“I was drinking,” you said. “But I knew what I was doing. I don’t regret it.”

His eyes crinkled, and something at the corner of his mouth moved briefly. “I’m glad to hear it.”

You put your face back into his collarbone before your own expression could do anything you’d regret.

He pressed his face to your hair and took a slow breath.

“In that case,” he said, after a moment, with the particular quality of a man raising a subject he has been patient about for some time, “I should mention that the seafood at the Red Port is, at this hour, not especially worth recommending.”

You stilled. “But—you said it was excellent.”

“I said it was tolerable when fresh.” A pause. “And that may have been generous.”

You pulled back to look at him. His arm tightened around your middle without apparent effort, keeping you precisely where you were. His expression was composed. Pleasantly so. The expression of a man who had said something mild and was waiting to see what you did with it.

“Then where are we going?” you said.

He looked out the window. “The port. Your boat was shipped out of Ennis Lobby two weeks ago. She’s just arrived.”

You stared at the side of his face. The elegant line of it. The absolute tranquility.

“My ship,” you said. “Here.”

“I had planned to surprise you in a few weeks, once the painting was finished,” he said, with the calm of a man who had been holding this card for some time and had chosen his moment with care. “But I thought you might prefer to choose her colors yourself. And her name.” He glanced down at you then with that steady, unguarded look that did things to your chest you had not permitted it to do. “And, if you’re open to it, to spend the night aboard. Together. Without the house. Without Shamrock.”

A pause, delicate as anything.

“Without interruption,” he finished.

The blood rushed to your head.

You became very aware of the arm around your waist. The warmth of him. The fact that you were on his lap in a moving carriage, being taken to a boat he had commissioned for you, and were being asked, very elegantly, with approximately three weeks of planning behind the question, whether you would like to spend the night alone with your husband.

“Garling,” you said, “was this—?”

“I planned the boat some time ago,” he said mildly. “The rest came together this morning, upon realizing that the thing I am most unable to tolerate is my wife being upset with me.” The arm around your waist was immovable, comfortable, and absolutely deliberate. “Hopefully, you’ll be somewhat less so by tonight. A week-long honeymoon is considerably more pleasant when the bed isn’t contested.”

“Honeymoon,” you said.

“Mm.”

“You’ve planned a honeymoon. On my ship.” You asked, trying to hide your delight.

“I planned several things,” he said, with the serenity of a man who had been three moves ahead since breakfast and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. “The honeymoon required the most coordination. We’ll need to leave tonight to reach the farther islands in a reasonable time, but the crew is ready.” A pause. “Hessa had your things packed before you’d reached the end of the street this morning.”

You stared at him.

“What about—”

“With your parents. He’s been given the run of the house and will be fine.” Garling said, sardonically, “Shamrock is perfectly capable of entertaining himself for a week. Thrilled, even. Now, my dear, is this enough to placate you?” He asked, mouth quirked. 

The carriage rolled on. Outside, the glint of the port was closer now, the smell of salt beginning to reach you even through the window. 

“You are mad,” you said, “Out of your mind, mad as a hatter.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Do you have a name in mind?“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Hessa was many things, but shy was not one of them.

She had held her position in Garling's household long enough to understand exactly what that position was worth, and she had no intention of squandering it. Garling respected her because she was correct with a frequency that made her presence feel less like service and more like infrastructure. She filled the gaps where you wavered, not out of doubt, but because a gap left open long enough became a problem, and Hessa had no patience for problems she could see coming.

That trajectory had recently expanded to include your personal life. Only slightly. A few careful touches, because Hessa was not a meddler. She simply recognized a problem the same way she recognized a drafty window, and felt an equivalent compulsion to address it.

She had benefited greatly from Garling’s newfound restraint, and she would be the first to say so. The years prior had involved a quantity of shooing she did not care to revisit. Women who lingered past their welcome, women who mistook a single evening for an arrangement, women who wept in hallways that were not theirs to weep in. It had been exhausting. Undignified, for everyone involved.

A wife was the best or the worst thing to happen to a large house. Hessa had seen it go both ways. A poor match, and the staff spent years navigating the wreckage of two people who had no business sharing a name. A good one, and the house ran itself, or near enough. Authority distributed properly, nobody overextending into territory that wasn’t theirs, the man of the house freed to be terrible at whatever he was terrible at in the world outside, because someone competent was handling everything within it.

Men like Garling wanted that. They didn’t always know they wanted it, but they did. They wanted a wife who took the house in hand and left them to their work, who was capable enough that they could defer to her without feeling diminished by it. Slightly bossy was how Hessa would have phrased it, if pressed, and then immediately declined to be pressed further.

You would be exceptional at it. She was certain of that.

The problem was that you didn’t know that. She knew that your modesty was not a calculated performance, not some long patience designed to snag a man worth snagging, though the fact that it had worked was saying something she did not intend to examine too closely. You were not being coy. You were genuinely, stubbornly, completely convinced that you were average, and had built an entire self around that conviction, the way people built houses on floodplains and then seemed surprised when it rained.

And Garling wanted to wait. To take his time, let you simmer until you broke first, convinced that patience was the same thing as strategy. To let you discover yourself and then him.

Hessa did not share the conviction.

You were not some mythical Kuja princess, crafted to specification, flawless in the way of things assembled to impress. You were a flawless emerald. Uncut. A little rough at the edges. The kind of thing someone with no eye for value walked past without stopping, and someone with a great deal of it did not. A perfect complement to Garling’s red, and the house would be better for it.

It would be a shame, she thought, to let you go on believing otherwise.

If Garling could simply get on with things, get you comfortable, confident, round with his children, and the particular ease that came from being genuinely wanted, you would take to this house as you had always belonged in it. Which, in Hessa’s estimation, you had.

But he was not moving at a pace that would resolve the situation before she lost patience entirely.

Which was why, when she conducted a thorough inventory of your wardrobe that morning, Hessa discovered, to her great professional regret, that all but the most scanty nightgowns appeared to have gone to the laundry. All of them. Simultaneously. On the same day.

She could not imagine how.

And so only the most exiguous remained to be packed. You did have the blue babydoll, at least. A pretty thing. Covered everything that strictly needed covering, and the sheer silk robe went over it nicely, and really, what more did a person need? It was, Hessa had noted with the clinical detachment of a woman doing inventory, particularly flattering through the bodice. She had observed Saint Figarland’s attention drift in that approximate direction on more than one occasion since Hessa had quietly suggested the lower necklines. She was a professional. She noticed things.

Of course, aboard your new ship, watching the crew prepare for departure, you hadn’t thought to check what had been packed.

You thought to check now.

You looked at the open trunk. You looked at its contents. You looked at the open trunk again, in case you had somehow misread it the first time.

You had not misread it.

“Hessa,” you hissed, to no one, since Hessa was twenty minutes away on dry land and therefore entirely safe, which you suspected she had also planned.

You lifted the blue babydoll by one thin strap and held it up in the lamplight of the cabin.

Outside, you could hear the small crew casting off. The ship moved, very gently, beneath your feet. You were, you realized, already at sea.

“Very daring of her, no?”

You jumped, dropping the offensive garment as Garling materialized behind you with the silence of a man who had spent decades moving without being heard and had never seen a reason to stop.

“Don’t look!” You kicked the babydoll sideways with your foot, which accomplished nothing. “It wasn’t—I didn’t pack this, I didn’t know she’d—”

He leaned over your shoulder and took a long, slow look into the open trunk.

The cabin was very quiet.

You watched his face. He had the expression of a man conducting a calm and thorough assessment, which was somehow worse than any other expression he could have produced.

“Mm,” he said.

“I’ll be speaking to Hessa when we return,” you said, head steaming with great dignity, from approximately four inches away from his chest.

“Will you,” he said, in a tone that suggested he found this unlikely.

“She has overstepped.”

“Considerably,” he agreed, and the corners of his eyes were doing the thing, the crinkle, the one that meant he was enjoying himself enormously and had decided not to hide it. He straightened, and his hand came to rest at the small of your back with the ease of a man who had been waiting for an excuse and had just been given a very good one. “Fortunately,” he said, “she has a week.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“A week,” you repeated.

“Seven nights,” he said helpfully.

“I’m aware of how long a week is.”

“Then you’ll appreciate that there’s no particular urgency.” His hand hadn’t moved from the small of your back. “We could have dinner first. The cook is excellent. The sunset from the bow is supposed to be remarkable at this latitude.” He said it with the pleasant tone of a man describing a nature documentary. “I thought you might enjoy it.”

You looked at him. He looked back at you with that open, patient expression, the one that had been dismantling your defenses by inches for the better part of a year.

“And after dinner,” he continued, in precisely the same tone, “you could change.”

You followed his gaze to the trunk. To its contents. Back to your husband.

“It’s a warm evening,” he said. “And we’re at sea. Very private.” A pause. “Hessa has excellent taste.”

“Hessa has lost her mind.”

“Hessa,” he said, “has done us both a considerable service.” He reached past you, retrieved the blue babydoll from where it had fallen, and held it out between two fingers with the composure of a man handing over a perfectly ordinary garment. His expression was pleasant and entirely unapologetic. “What do you think? Do you still have courage? Or do you need more time?”

You stared at him. He was baiting you. He knew precisely what he was doing and was doing it anyway, which was, you had come to understand, simply how he operated when he wanted something, and you were ready enough to accept it too.

“I’ll behave,” he said. The crinkle was back at the corner of his eye. “Mostly.”

He wouldn’t.

You took the babydoll from his hand.

He said nothing. He had the expression of a man exercising tremendous restraint and finding it only slightly difficult, which was its own kind of answer.

“Out,” you said.

He went, with the grace of a man who had already won and knew it, pulling the cabin door shut behind him without being asked.

You looked at the garment in your hands. You looked at the closed door. You looked at the warm lamplight and the small porthole beyond which the open sea had spread itself wide and dark and entirely indifferent to your predicament.

Fine.

You put it on. Under your dress, because you were not, whatever Hessa seemed to believe, a woman who simply appeared at dinner in a babydoll. The silk settled against your skin, warm and slight, and you pulled your dress back over it and looked at yourself in the small cabin mirror and thought: well. All right. It was not nothing.

You were on a ship. Your ship, as it turned out, was still an extraordinary thing to have become true. You were sailing the Grand Line on a honeymoon that had been planned in secret for what appeared to be quite some time.

You were anxious. You expected you would remain anxious for some portion of the evening.

You were also, underneath the anxiety and the dress and the frankly inadequate nightwear, fairly certain you were in love with your husband, which was, you supposed, the right direction for things to be going.

You opened the cabin door and went to find him.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The rest of the evening drifted into orderly fashion.

Dinner was excellent, though notably not seafood, which you did not comment on. Garling showed you the ship with the quiet pride of a man who had commissioned something he was pleased with and wanted you to be pleased with it too, which you were, though you were careful not to be too immediately obvious about it. The cabin was beautiful. The deck was beautiful. The little galley was immaculate. The two-man crew did their jobs with the focused professionalism of people who had been very clearly instructed not to exist unless necessary, and were committed to the brief.

At some point, between dinner and the wine and the remarkable sunset he had promised you, which delivered entirely on its reputation, you forgot to be anxious.

Probably around the time you were sitting between his knees on the bow with his coat around your shoulders and his chin resting on the top of your head, watching the last of the light go out of the sky in long bands of red and gold over the water. The Grand Line stretched out ahead of you in every direction, vast and dark and quietly extraordinary, and the ship moved through it with an easy roll. Garling was warm at your back, and it occurred to you, distantly, that you had not thought about fruit towers or spa corridors or any of the morning’s considerable drama in at least two hours.

“She needs a name,” he said, into your hair.

You looked out at the water. The first stars were beginning to appear at the edge of the sky.

“I’m thinking,” you said, “perhaps the Fine Print.”

His arms tightened around you, his laughter more felt than heard, a warmth through his chest against your back.

“In dedication to a certain document?”

“I can’t have your misdeeds forgotten so easily.” You retorted. “I still get mad over it.”

“Good,” he said. “Get as mad as you like. Just don’t leave me.”

You went quiet.

It was not a dramatic thing, the way he said it. As though it were the most reasonable request in the world, and he saw no reason to dress it up.

The water moved beneath you, easy and dark.

“Careful,” you said, eventually. “I have a ship now. You’ll have to catch me if you upset me again.”

His chin dropped back to the top of your head. “I would,” he said. “I’d travel seas to find you. You know I would.”

You did know.

That was, you thought, more or less the whole problem, and also the whole solution, and you were done pretending otherwise.

“Fine Print,” he said, after a moment. “She suits it. And you.” A pause, warm. “A beautiful ship for my beautiful wife.”

You meant to say something dry about that. You had something ready. It was quite good, actually.

But you made the tactical error of looking up to deliver it, and Garling caught your face in his hand, tilting it toward his with the patience of a man who had been waiting all evening and had decided, quietly, that the evening was sufficiently advanced.

He kissed you slowly. Deliberately. With none of the urgency of the night at the ball, and all of the intention.

The stars came out, one by one, over the Grand Line.

You forgot what you’d meant to say entirely.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It was one of those kisses that rearranged the synapses in your brain. One that stole something and made the world after it different, because it made you realize you hadn’t known much about the world before it.

You had been kissed by this man before, a couple of times. One time, so good, at a ball in front of everyone he knew, and you had had five glasses of wine about it afterward, which you had at the time considered a reasonable response. You understood now that the wine had been a completely inadequate solution to a problem you hadn’t correctly identified, which was that Garling Figarland kissed you like you were something he had waited a long time for and intended to take his time with now that he had you. No quantity of wine was going to help you metabolize that.

The Grand Line spread out around you in every direction, vast and indifferent and extraordinarily dark in the night, and the Fine Print moved through it with a slow, easy roll.

Garling’s hand was warm against your face, and when he finally pulled back, it was only slightly, enough to look at you, checking, the way he always checked, quietly and without making a production of it. To see if you were all right. To see if you were still there.

You stared back at him, breathing a little unsteadily, lips swollen, the stars doing something very unhelpful in your peripheral vision.

You were still frightened. You expected you would continue to be frightened for some time. But you were also hungry, in a way that had been building for months and had no interest in being managed any further, and a kiss, even that kiss, was not going to be sufficient.

“Inside,” you said. “Please.”

Something in his expression shifted. Settled into something certain and warm and entirely without triumph, which was, you thought, exactly right. Exactly him.

“Yes,” he said.

He helped you up with one hand, steady, and then he did something that you felt in the back of your throat: he let you lead. Followed you across the deck and down to the cabin door, and when you pushed it open and stepped inside and turned back to look at him, he was standing just outside the threshold with his hand on the doorframe.

Waiting.

Giving you the door. Giving you the choice. The same way he had given you the name of the ship and the colors and every other thing he had arranged so carefully and then placed in your hands without condition.

You looked at him standing there in the dark with the Grand Line behind him and the lamplight catching the side of his face, and you thought: You absolute menace.

And it was only then, as he locked the door behind him, that Garling let himself give in. Let his hands raise to his collar and slowly undo the buttons there. 

His hands rose to his collar.

One after another, each golden button was released from its prison and was freed from its place. Carefully, as he did everything, each golden button released one after another with the same calm efficiency he brought to most things, which you were finding increasingly difficult to be composed about. The cloak came away. The coat followed. 

Both fit him with the precision of things made specifically for him, and when they were gone, there was no suggestion of padding or structured boning beneath. His figure was simply his figure: wide shoulders, the clean descent of them into a chest that had no business being as distracting as it was, biceps thick with the kind of muscle that came from actual use rather than ornament, all of it barely contained by a thin undershirt that was doing its job poorly.

He looked, you thought, like something carved for a temple and then implausibly animated.

Then he raised one hand to his hair, and the tall elaborate arrangement of it came loose, and gold fell down his back in a wave, and you stood in the lamplight of your cabin on your ship on the Grand Line and stared at the husband you had accidentally acquired.

He looked at you looking at him, his toothy grin showing, which was unfair given the circumstances. Then his hand slid to his belt, and with his coat and cloak already cast away, it wasn’t particularly difficult to observe the entire anatomy of him, including the more private portions.

You had been correct, you noted distantly, to be frightened.

“Have you ever seen a naked man before?”

“In books,” you squeaked.

“Books,” he repeated.

“Your books, thank you.” You were looking at the porthole. The porthole was very interesting. “And some classical sculpture. Marble. Which is.” You stopped. “A different medium.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Come here.”

“I can see perfectly well from here.”

“Some things,” he said, “are better understood up close.”

“Looking is fine. The lighting in this cabin is excellent. Whoever commissioned it has very good taste.”

“Come here.” The same tone. The same patience. His voice dropped, unhurried as everything else about him. “I have wanted you for a very long time. Let me show you how much.”

His hand moved to his belt buckle.

You turned away.

The wall was very close. You were examining it with great personal intensity. It was a well-constructed wall. Excellent joinery. Whoever had built this ship had really committed to the craft, and you were extremely grateful to them right now.

“Are you,” Garling said, from behind you, with the careful neutrality of a man trying very hard not to laugh, “looking at the wall.”

“I’m admiring the woodwork.”

“The woodwork.”

“It’s very fine.”

A pause.

Then his hands settled on your shoulders, warm and certain, and he turned you around and tipped your face up, and looked at you with that expression, the unguarded one, except that now he was also smiling, properly, in a way that was extremely difficult to focus on.

Because he was entirely naked, the long press of him against you yielded no secrets. His desire was obvious and unavoidable and warm against your clothed belly, and you became very aware all at once of the significant difference between classical marble sculpture and the living article.

“Be with me,” he said softly. “I ache for you.”

Your heart did something completely unreasonable. The rest of you was not far behind.

“I don’t deserve to be with you,” you said, burning up as his hands glided to your waist, slow and deliberate. “You’re. You’re you, and I’m just—”

“Mine,” he said. Simply. As though that settled the taxonomy entirely.

“Garling.”

“You have been mine,” he said, “since before you knew it. Since before I had any right to say so.” His eyes were warm, his voice quiet, his hands drawing you closer with the patience of a man who had waited a long time and intended to be thorough about what came next. “I think, the moment you walked through my door, something in me knew. Something that refused to be reasonable about it.” A pause. “There is no deserving between us. There is only what we both want.”

You looked at him. The lamplight. The gold of his hair lay loose around his shoulders. The expression on his face that you had been trying not to look at directly for months because of precisely what it did to you, which was this, which was standing in a cabin on the Grand Line with your composure entirely gone and nothing left to hide behind.

“I’m still frightened,” you said.

“I know.” He drew you closer, slowly. “Let me take care of that.”

The kiss continued, but different now, deeper, his hands finally beginning to work with the same deliberate patience he brought to everything except that patience, here, was its own particular torture. Once he had you pliant against him, his fingers found the ties of your dress, loosening them one by one while his mouth stayed at yours.

The dress came away. By the time it did, you weren’t thinking much about anything.

He walked you back against the wall of the cabin and set his mouth to your throat, and you stopped thinking entirely. Hot and deliberate, the press of his lips, the drag of them, working circles into your skin that drew sounds from you that you had no particular intention of making. One hand steadied you against the wall. The other finished its work. It was better than the night of the ball, considerably better, because this time the wine wasn’t thinking for you and you were entirely present for every detail of what he was doing, which was extensive.

He pulled back to look at you in the babydoll and made a sound low in his throat, something involuntary, his hands tightening at your waist.

Then his fingers found the laces.

They fell away. You grew shy at the reveal, instinctive, your chin dipping, and he caught it with one hand and tipped your face back up with the quiet insistence of a man who intended to look and was not going to be discouraged about it.

He went very still as he properly admired your chest. 

His eyes moved over you in the warm lamplight with an attention that was almost unbearable in its thoroughness, like he was taking inventory of something he had been waiting a long time to properly see. Then his hand rose, deliberate and certain, and he touched you, and you made a sound you hadn’t anticipated, and he smiled, slow and satisfied.

“How perfect you are,” he said quietly. “My love.”

He was, it turned out, exactly as good at this as his reputation suggested.

Better, actually.

Which you were not going to tell him, on the grounds that he already knew and did not require the confirmation. The expression on his face as he looked at you said it plainly enough anyway, all that careful composure finally set aside, replaced by something open and certain and entirely focused on you. You had no defenses left to manage it with.

You found, to your considerable surprise, that you didn’t need any.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Even when he explored lower, using his mouth, which was beyond the scope of anything you had previously imagined on the subject, there was no more shame. He took his time, let off once in a while so you could breathe, and did not let you off until you were thoroughly, comprehensively undone.

Not until you sat flush in his lap, cheeks stinging, head tucked into the broad warmth of his bare shoulder. Loose wisps of his hair brushed your chest. One of his hands was tangled in yours, the other moving in slow circles at your back.

“You’re doing very well,” he said pleasantly. “Considerably better than the first attempt.”

“You’re bruising my cervix,” you said, into his shoulder. “You absolute brute. Could you not have a slightly smaller—”

“Is that a complaint?”

“It is absolutely not a compliment.”

You could feel his smirk against your temple.

“How inconsiderate of me. Next life I’ll arrange for a smaller coc—”

You smacked his arm. He laughed, openly and fully, in a way you had never heard from him, and the movement rolled your hips together, and you yelped, a shudder moving clean through you, the angle finding something that made your toes curl, and your breath snag entirely.

“There,” you managed, very quietly. “I think—”

He stilled. His hand tightened at your back.

“Yes,” he said, low and attentive. “I felt you.” A pause, careful and certain. “Is this all right?“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“Yes,” you breathed. “Don’t stop.”

He didn’t.

He moved with the same patience he brought to everything, which in this context was its own particular form of exquisite torment, deliberate and thorough and entirely focused on you, adjusting when you made sounds that indicated adjustment was warranted, which you made freely and without the shame you might have expected, because there was no room left for shame. There was only this. The warm cabin, the slow rock of the ship beneath you, his hands sure and certain and everywhere.

“Look at me,” he said quietly.

You did.

That was, you decided afterward, what undid you entirely. Not the angle or the pace or the considerable expertise, though all of those were relevant factors. It was the look. He was watching you with that expression, open and unguarded and certain, like you were exactly where he had always intended you to be, and he intended to remember every detail of it.

You came apart rather thoroughly.

He followed shortly after, his composure finally, completely gone, his face pressed into your hair, your name in his mouth like something he had been waiting to say properly for a very long time.

You lay there until your breathing slowed and the ceiling stopped moving, which took longer than it should have. His thumb traced along your spine. The lamp guttered softly.

“Was that,” you said, carefully, “representative of the week ahead?”

His chest rose. Fell.

“More or less,” he said. “But rather, consider it a lifestyle change.

You absorbed this.

“I’ll need you to know that I am still angry about the contract. Considerably less, but still.”

He laughed, that unguarded laugh that you were rapidly concluding was one of your favorite sounds in the known world, and pulled you closer. You let him, and outside the Fine Print carried you both through the dark water of the Grand Line toward no particular destination and every possible one.

Life in the Figarland Estate was generally a peaceful one.

Seven-year-old Shamrock Figarland had ensured it would be, after all.

He was not, strictly speaking, supposed to know about the honeymoon. He had known about it anyway, because Hessa had consulted Martha, and Martha was constitutionally incapable of keeping anything interesting to herself, and Shamrock had been in the next room. He had contributed one suggestion to the laundry situation, which Hessa had implemented without acknowledging that she had implemented it, which was how they generally operated.

He felt good about his involvement.

He had wanted a sibling for as long as he could remember, with the particular want of a child who had lost one and knew the shape of the empty space it left. And then the governess had arrived, and Shamrock had watched her for approximately one week and decided: yes. Her. She was funny and warm, and she read to him without being asked, and she looked at his father sometimes when she thought no one was watching, with an expression that meant everything was going to be fine.

So he had done what needed doing. Made himself agreeable. Tugged on the right threads. Let things unfold as they were clearly going to unfold anyway, just perhaps a little faster.

He was not sorry.

His father hummed now. Not where he thought anyone could hear, but Shamrock had excellent hearing and had caught it four times since the sailing trip. He didn’t particularly care about his father’s feelings as a subject of study, but he cared very much about the results.

His mother had come back from the trip with warm color in her face and her hand in his father’s when they came through the door, which she dropped immediately upon seeing Shamrock, then picked back up when she thought he wasn’t looking. He had run at her, and she had caught him and held on for a long time, her face in his hair, and he had decided that was the best thing that had happened in his whole life.

The estate was different now in small ways that added together into one large one. His mother’s things had migrated from her quarters to his father’s. His father came to breakfast before his correspondence, always with her. There was considerably less fruit in the center of the table and considerably more conversation, and sometimes in the evenings when Shamrock was meant to be asleep, he could hear them in the sitting room, his father’s low voice and his mother’s quicker one. Occasionally, his laugh, the real one, the one that meant he had forgotten to be careful.

He found this very satisfactory.

“You look very pleased with yourself, little lord,” said Hessa, appearing behind him in the garden doorway.

“I am a Figarland,” said Shamrock. “I am always pleased with myself.”

“Your father says the same thing.”

“Father is usually right,” said Shamrock. “So am I.”

Hessa made a sound that was not quite a laugh and went back inside.

Shamrock looked out at the garden, at the warm afternoon light on the stone, and listened to his mother’s voice somewhere inside the house, asking his father something, and his father’s answer, unhurried and low.

Six months, he decided. Maybe less, if his father was as motivated as he appeared to be.

He was going to be an excellent older brother. He had already given it considerable thought.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Valeria padded as quietly as she could down the steep stairs to the attic door, tying her dress closed as she went. She pressed her ear to the door and strained to hear who might be at the door. She heard the soft noise of one of her sisters’ house boots tap tap tapping across the room to the door, irritated muttering following, and the creak of the door being pulled open.

Silence, or at least nothing that would reach the attic, followed for many moments. Then her sister returning across the room, followed by the sound of much heavier boots. She heard her second sister’s harried footsteps up the stairs to the second level, where the door to the attic was, but headed away from Valeria as she banged on her step-mother’s door.

“Mother, we need you downstairs, we have a…guest,” her sister’s voice was strained, anxious. There was some disgruntled grumbling before Valeria heard her step-mother open the door and follow her sister down the stairs. Assured that all her family were downstairs, she slipped on her house slippers — not what she would normally wear at the start of the day, but much quieter than a pair of boots — and crept out into the corridor, following it down to the landing overlooking the parlor.

She was shocked to see a small contingent of soldiers lined up on the far side of the room nearest the door. Her sisters and step-mother were opposite them. The younger women stood just behind the matriarch, upright but exuding a clearly nervous air. And in the center of the room was the subject of Valeria’s idle musings, Emperor Solus.

“Census records indicate that you have a household of four, yourself and three daughters,” he was saying, making a show of reading over a document he held that he clearly already knew the contents of. “And yet, only two stand here now.”

“I have only two daughters,” her stepmother snapped, glaring. “You must be speaking of my servant.”

“A servant that shares the same family name?” he challenged.

“A distant cousin. We exchange her work for room and board.”

“Interesting, because here—“ the emperor pulled another document from the hand of one of the officers attending, “I see that your late husband had left everything in his will to a ‘Valeria’, until the year before his death, when the beneficiary was changed to you. Neither of the women standing with you introduced themselves as Valeria, so unless he was unusually fond of this ‘distant cousin’, you are a liar.”

From her hiding place, she could see her stepmother’s back stiffen. She couldn’t hear the next words Solus spoke, but she saw her stepmother give a stiff nod before turning for the stairs. Valeria barely had the time to hurry back to her attic room, carefully closing the door as quietly as she could to pretend she hadn’t been eavesdropping. She sat at the shabby vanity she’d been repairing since she was a child, pretending to fuss with her hair as she listened to the approaching footsteps thumping up the stairs, clunking down the hall, before the door squealed upon opening and the furious face of her stepmother stormed in. Valeria turned to act surprised, only for the other woman to greet her with a sharp slap across her face. Valeria grit her teeth, covering the spot with her hands, as her stepmother dragged her to her feet.

“You are becoming more trouble than you’re worth,” she snarled into Valeria’s ear as she dragged her out into the hall. “It would be a boon if they executed you for breaking and entering!” She stormed around Valeria to lead the way down the stairs, and Valeria hesitated for several moments before following, smoothing her shabby dress as she realized she was vastly underdressed for the company. She wondered if he would even recognize her as she started down the stairs.

“There you are, my dear,” he gave her a soft smile, only for it to vanish as he frowned at her bruised eye. He crossed to meet her at the stairs, taking her chin in hand and running one thumb over the weal on her cheek where she’d been slapped. He turned sharply to her family, releasing her face as he did.

“I’ll not mince words. If she accepts, I intend to ask Valeria to be my Empress. I’m sure it will be a great loss—“ the words dripped with sarcasm and fury in equal measure “—but consider it my price for letting you get away with blatantly lying to my face. Should she not accept, I can think of no small number of families that would be happy to adopt a woman with the emperor’s favor and treat her well. Either way, should she wish it, you are to never speak to her again.”

Valeria’s mind had gone blank when she realized what he said. He…wanted to marry her? Her? She was certain she must’ve fallen back asleep while getting ready for the day. Valeria gave herself a quick pinch on one arm, hoping she was being subtle about it, but all it did was leave a red mark on her arm. Perhaps her stepmother realized she had lost, because she only nodded, even as her sisters exchanged concerned glances. Valeria knew it had nothing to do with any familial concerns for her and everything to do with the fact that now they would have to do their own chores.

“Do you need to collect anything before we depart?” Solus turned to ask Valeria kindly, and she glanced up towards the attic door. After a long moment, she shook her head. If she was really, truly escaping this place, she wanted nothing to remind her of it. And most of it was only barely serviceable, anyway.

“Nothing that can’t be replaced,” she murmured. The emperor nodded before offering her his arm, and, after just a moment of again reflecting on how she didn’t look like she belonged on an emperor’s arm, she took it, letting him lead her outside without looking back. Outside, a chill wind blew harshly through the threadbare dress she wore. Solus signaled to a nearby servant, who brought over a long, thick cloak that he placed carefully around her shoulders.

“How did you even know where to look? I didn’t give you my real name,” she dared to ask, and he gave a small, amused smirk.

“You have a very loyal friend, dear.” Satisfied that the cloak would shield her properly from the cold, he led her towards a large machine, some magitek thing Valeria wasn’t familiar with that resembled a carriage. “She was ready to take your name to her grave if I hadn’t assured her I had nothing but good intentions. Her deal was that if she told me your name, I had to get you away from your family. Now I see why.” His gaze hardened again as he took in the bruising on her face.

“Y-you said you wanted… That you…”

“Want you to marry me?” He gave a soft smile as he lifted one of her hands to his lips, and, despite the cold, she felt like her face was on fire. “Would you?”

She hesitated. She barely knew him. They’d had a good time at the ball, it’s true, and he did just save her from a life of suffering with her family, but… She had no idea who he really was. Perhaps he could see the conflict in her face, because he dropped her hand gently, giving her space.

“You can tell the truth, I’ll accept it either way,” he assured her.

“I… It’s not that I don’t want to, but… we hardly know each other!” Valeria stared down at her slippered feet, growing colder by the moment. “I just… I always imagined being courted properly. You know, wooed, treated to dinners, getting to know the person I’m to spend the rest of my life with. I didn’t ever think I would get it, but… I dreamed.” She glanced up nervously, only to see a delighted smile illuminating Solus’s face.

“If that’s all, there’s nothing saying we have to get married tomorrow. If the lady wants to be courted, then that’s what she’ll get,” he opened the door, ignoring the officer that had stepped forward to do so, and helped her inside. It was far warmer than outside, and the interior was plush and comfortable. He took the spot across from her, the door closing behind him. She jumped as the machine rumbled to life and started to move.

“Is this your first time using magitek?” he asked curiously, and she nodded. “Much more comfortable than beast powered carriages. Faster too. We’ll be at the palace soon.”

“I’m sorry if it was presumptuous of me to not bring any of my belongings,” she apologized. He laughed.