Connor
"You're an idiot."
Iris is standing in the doorway of the study with her arms crossed and that look on her face that's half sisterly concern and half genuine disgust. I've been on the receiving end of this look enough times to know it usually means she's about to say something I don't want to hear and she's going to be right about it.
"Thanks," I say without looking up from the laptop. I'm going through the latest update from Declan in Dublin.
"You've been hiding in this room for three days,” she adds.
"I've been working."
"You've been hiding." She walks in and sits on the edge of the desk, directly in my line of sight, which is a power move she's been pulling since she was twelve.
"You're marrying that woman tomorrow and you've barely spoken to her.
She eats breakfast with us every morning and you sit at the end of the table like a gargoyle and grunt when someone passes you the coffee. "
"I don't grunt." I sigh and lean back in my chair, dragging my hands through my mop of hair.
"You grunt. Killian does an impression. It's very good." She tilts her head. "Connor. She likes you. Everyone in this house can see it except you, and honestly, I think even you can see it, you're just too stubborn to believe it."
I close the laptop because I'm not winning this one with avoidance. "What do you want me to do, sis?"
"I want you to spend time with her."
"We eat together three times a day, every day."
"We eat as a family. That's not the same thing and you know it.
" She leans forward. "Tomorrow you're standing at an altar with her.
She's wearing her mother's wedding dress.
She's giving you her entire future because she trusts you enough to bet her life on you.
The least you can do is spend some one-on-one time with her. "
The words land harder than she probably intended. Or maybe exactly as hard as she intended, because Iris doesn't miss.
"Where?" I ask.
"Urgh, why can’t men ever figure this stuff out for themselves?" She slides off the desk.
“It’s not like I’ve had ample opportunity, Iris." My words come out a little harsher than I’d intended but Iris softens so I take it as a win.
“Take her around the estate after dinner, just a walk. Let her pick one of the available buildings to make into a home. She has a creative streak she could put to good use renovating one of the older barns."
"You've thought about this."
"Someone had to." She stops at the door. "Connor. She's not going to break if you get close to her. But she might if you don't."
She leaves, and I sit there for a long time staring at the open doorway.
She's right. I know she's right. I've spent three days keeping Anya at arm's length and telling myself it's because I'm busy, because there's work to do, because the Baron is causing problems in Dublin and Liam needs me focused. But the truth is simpler and uglier than that.
I'm afraid.
I'm afraid that if I sit across from her with no one else in the room and let her see me without the buffer of family and chaos and logistics, she'll realize what she's signed up for.
A man who doesn't know how to be soft. Who's been hard for so long that the soft parts calcified years ago.
Who wants her so badly that he's been taking himself apart in the shower every night like a teenager because the alternative is knocking on her bedroom door and doing something he can't take back.
But Iris is right about the other thing too. Anya is putting on her mother's dress tomorrow. She's standing at an altar and handing me her future. And I've given her nothing in return except a proposal that sounded like a dare and four days of grunting over coffee.
She deserves better than that.
I’m an ass.
I head to my room and take a shower. Change into a clean shirt, dark blue, the one Iris bought me last Christmas that I've never worn because I don't go anywhere that requires it.
I look in the mirror for the first time in months because I need to check that I don't have toothpaste on my face or something equally stupid.
The scar stares back at me. The dead eye. The jaw that's too square and the brow that's too heavy and the mouth that doesn't know how to smile without looking like it's threatening someone.
I turn away from the mirror and head down to the conservatory, where I know Anya is curled up reading a novel from one of Ma’s many book shelves.
"Anya.” Her name still feels warm in my mouth, but foreign, like it doesn’t quite fit the shape yet.
She looks up from the page, resting her finger where she has read up to, and smiles so fully that my chest swells a little.
"Hi," she says, dropping her feet to the floor and sitting up.
"I thought we could go for a walk. Just around the estate."
She looks past me, dragging her bottom lip between her teeth as she takes in the way the sun is setting quickly behind the tree line. For a moment I think she is going to say no.
Then, the corners of her mouth lift. “I’d love to.”
She heads out of the conservatory into the foyer, where she pulls on her coat, the one from the night she arrived, and zips it up against the cool spring air. She slides her feet into her sneakers and turns back to me.
“Ready,” she says. Her eyes glitter. She seems…excited…to be spending one on one time with me, and I could get used to the way that makes me feel.
I pull open the front door and lead her down the steps and onto the gravel path that will take us through the trees and down towards the lake.
To my absolute shock, she slides her hand into mine. I look down at our entwined fingers and then back at her, to find her grinning like someone who did something brave and got away with it.
“Tell me about you,” I say, wanting to hear her voice. Her story.
She tells me about growing up with Diomid.
How he used to carry her on his shoulders through the garden when she was small, how he taught her to play chess and then got furious when she started beating him.
She tells me about her mother, carefully, like she's handling something fragile.
How Marina used to sing while she cooked, Russian lullabies that Anya still hums sometimes.
How the house went quiet after she died, and how Diomid filled the silence by becoming the kind of man who controls everything because he couldn't control the cancer.
"He loves you," I say.
"I know. He just loves me in a way that looks a lot like a cage sometimes." She bends over and plucks a pine cone from the ground. "That's why I ran here. Not because I don't trust him, but because trusting him and being trapped by his protection aren't the same thing."
I understand that more than she knows. The Orlov men love fiercely and protect violently and sometimes the line between keeping someone safe and keeping them prisoner disappears entirely.
"He was right to be angry," I say. "The Baron could have had men on that road."
"Yes. And I did it anyway." She looks at me. "Are you going to lecture me about it?"
"No,” I laugh a little, because the thought of lecturing her seems ridiculous. “I'm going to remember that my wife is the kind of woman who runs toward the dangerous thing instead of away from it, and plan accordingly."
Something shifts in her expression. Something warm. "That's the first time you've called me that."
"Called you what?" I ask, confused.
"Your wife."
I didn't realize I'd said it. But the word sits between us in the darkening sky, real and solid, and I don't take it back.
Anya moves a little closer.
We walk side by side, the gravel crunching under our feet. The house is dark behind us, warm light in a few upstairs windows but otherwise still. The world feels small out here. Just the garden and the sky and the woman beside me.
She stops at the bench in the small clearing before the trees open out to the lake. Her eyes are dark and serious.
"Can I say something honest?" she asks.
"I'd prefer it."
"We're getting married tomorrow." She says it like she's testing the words, turning them over. "And I'm not nervous about the wedding. I'm not nervous about the Baron, or the Council, or Diomid, or any of the politics. You know what I'm nervous about?"
"What?"
"The fact that we haven't kissed." She lets out a small, almost incredulous laugh.
"We haven't even kissed, Connor. I'm about to stand at an altar with a man I've been living under the same roof with for four days, and I don't know what his mouth feels like.
I don't know if we have... something." She gestures between us.
"I feel it. I hope you feel it too. But we haven't tested it, and tomorrow I'm walking toward you, and I just..
." She trails off. Shakes her head. "It's weird. That's all."
My heart is hammering. I can feel the pulse in my throat, in my wrists, behind my ruined eye.
She's standing beside me, and she just told me she wants to kiss me, and I'm frozen.
Because the voice in my head, the one that's been whispering for years, is saying she wants to kiss the man who saved her, not the man with the scar, and those aren't the same person.
"Anya..."
"If you don't want to, that's okay." Her voice is steady but I can hear the vulnerability underneath it, the bravery it took to say this out loud. "I just thought one of us should say it."
She waits. I don't move. And then she steps forward, closes the distance between us, and kisses me.
It's soft. Tentative. Her lips brush mine like a question, light and warm, her hand coming up to rest against my chest. She tastes like red wine and dessert, and she's trembling, just barely, a fine vibration I can feel through her fingertips where they press against my shirt.
She pulls back an inch. Looks at me. Searching.
Something breaks open inside my chest. Wide enough to let the light through. Wide enough for me to see her standing in front of me, shaking and brave and waiting to find out if I'm going to kiss her back.
I catch her face in my hands and press my mouth back to hers.
This one isn't soft. This one is every cold shower, every clenched fist, every night spent staring at the ceiling knowing she was sleeping twenty feet down the hall.
I kiss her like I've been starving, because I have, and when she gasps against my mouth, I swallow the sound and pull her closer.
My hands slide from her face to the back of her neck, into her hair, and she melts into me.
Her arms wrap around my waist and her body presses against mine, all warmth and softness, and I can feel her heartbeat hammering against my chest, matching mine beat for frantic beat.
I angle her head back and deepen the kiss, and the sound she makes, low and desperate and wanting, nearly takes my knees out from under me. Her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt, pulling me closer like our proximity isn't enough.
I want to consume her. I want to wrap myself around her until there's no space between us, until she can feel exactly how much I want her, until every doubt I've ever had about whether anyone could look at this face and want it burns to ash in the heat of her mouth.
I break the kiss before I lose the ability to stop.
We're both breathing hard. Her head is tipped back, her eyes closed, her hands still gripping my shirt. The last bit of light catches the edge of her jaw, the curve of her throat, the place where her pulse is hammering visibly beneath her skin.
"So," she whispers. Breathless. "We have that."
A laugh rumbles out of me, rough and genuine. "Yeah. We have that."
She opens her eyes and looks at me, and the want in them is so naked, so unguarded, that it takes everything I have not to kiss her again and keep kissing her until neither of us can think.
"Tomorrow," she says.
"Tomorrow," I say back.
She stretches up on her toes and presses one more kiss to the corner of my mouth, right where the scar ends, and the tenderness of it wrecks me more than the heat did.
Tomorrow, I marry this woman.
And tonight, for the first time since I was nineteen years old, I can look at my reflection and not hate what I see.