13. Aldric
ALDRIC
I’ve been standing outside the master bedroom for the better part of an hour, rehearsing.
This is a new low, even for me. I once addressed three thousand men before the siege of Falkenberg without a moment’s preparation. Now I pace the hallway of my own keep, muttering apologies to a door.
“Clara. I have come to express my regret—no. Too stiff.” I pivot on my heel, my boots stomping. “Clara, I behaved like a… like an asshole.” I test the word she used on me. “Yes. Surely modern.”
The door opens before I finish my next rotation. There she is, her cheek creased from sleep, her silver hair tangled on one side, a chair leg visible behind her where she barricaded herself in. Against me. In my own home.
“Oh good,” Clara says, her voice rough from sleep. “You’re lurking.”
“I am not lurking. I’m standing. In my hallway.”
“Outside my door.”
“It’s my door. Everything here is—” I stop myself. Poorly begun. I inhale, though I have little need of air, and start again. “Clara. I wish to apologize.”
Her eyebrows climb. She leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms, and I do not look at the way the motion presses her breasts together. I am a lord. I have discipline. I look for two full seconds, then drag my gaze back to her face.
“I’m listening,” she says.
“Last night, in the library, I spoke to you as a commander speaks to territory.” This feels like extracting a tooth. “You are not territory.”
“Wow.” She blinks. “That’s almost a real apology. Keep going.”
“I frightened you. That was not my intent. My intent was to keep you, which I understand now is—” I search for her word. “Rapey.”
Clara’s lip curls in disgust. “Aldric.”
“You said—”
“I know what I said. Hearing you say it in that voice is like hearing my grandfather say ‘twerking.’ Please never again.”
“I don’t know what twerking is, and based on your expression, I will not ask.” I straighten my waistcoat, gathering the tattered remains of my dignity. “The point stands. I will not force you. I have never forced a woman, and I will not begin with the only one who matters.”
Something flickers across her face, and she blinks hard.
“But you’re still not going to help me leave,” she says after a moment.
“No.” One word, the meaning very clear.
Clara sighs, the motion making her chest move. “So we’re just repackaging the same captivity with better manners.”
I cross my arms and force myself to look at her face. “I am apologizing, woman, which I have not done once, and you are making it remarkably difficult.”
My little intruder’s nostrils flare in a most fetching way. “You’re apologizing while refusing to change the thing you’re apologizing for! That’s not an apology, that’s a customer service script!”
“I don’t know what customer service is, but I resent being compared to it.
” I step closer, and to her credit, she holds her ground.
Schmetterling inserts himself between our feet like a furred chaperone.
“Clara. I cannot help you abandon me. Ask me for anything else. Food, warmth, safety, books, the finest chambers—”
“Freedom.”
“Anything else.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“I am aware!” The words crack against the stone walls, and I force my voice down. Seven hundred years of command do not unmake themselves in one hallway conversation. “I am… aware. I am trying, Clara. I’m centuries out of practice at wanting something I cannot simply take.”
She studies me for a long moment. The morning light through the high window brightens her eyes, blue shading into violet, and I would burn down another town for the privilege of drowning in them.
“Fine,” she says at last. “Here’s the deal. You don’t get to touch me, corner me, growl at me, or press any part of your undead anatomy against any part of my alive anatomy unless I ask. Explicitly. With words.”
“Agreed.”
She raises both silvery eyebrows at once. “That was fast.”
“It is an easy bargain.” I allow the smile to spread slowly, the one that used to make duchesses drop their fans. “Because the next time we are intimate, little intruder, it will be because you begged me for it.”
Clara laughs. “Beg. Me. For you.”
“On your knees, most likely.” I smirk. “Though I am flexible on positioning.”
“That will never happen,” she assures me with a wave of her hand. “I have never begged for anything in my life. I once waited forty minutes for a table at a restaurant out of pure spite rather than ask the hostess twice.”
“Mm.” I let my gaze travel down her body, slow and deliberate.
The longer I look, the higher the flush climbs her throat.
Her arms loosen from their defensive cross, her weight shifts, all of her going soft and languid against the doorframe like warm wax.
Her body remembers my hands even while her mouth argues.
“Stop that,” she hisses.
“Stop what? I am standing. In my hallway.”
“Stop looking at me like—” Her stomach interrupts her with a rumble loud enough to echo. Schmetterling’s ears swivel toward it. Clara closes her eyes as if praying for the floor to open. “Not one word.”
“I would not dream of it.” I am already turning toward the stairs. “You require a proper meal. Salad and stolen strawberries cannot sustain a woman. I will prepare fish for you. Fish, and a salad, since you seem fond of eating my garden.”
“Fish.” She follows me, bare feet slapping against cold stone, then doubles back for her boots and hops after me while pulling one on. “Where are you getting fish? Is there a fish pantry? Please tell me there isn’t a seven-hundred-year-old fish pantry.”
“There is a lake.”
She stops mid-hop. “A lake?”
“On the grounds. Through the forest, past the orchard, perhaps half an hour’s walk.
Stocked with trout, pike, and carp, though the carp are not worth the bones.
” I descend the stairs, and her footsteps hurry after me.
“The witch was thorough when designing the boundaries of my curse. I am imprisoned, but I am imprisoned with amenities.”
“I’m coming with you.”
I pause at the base of the stairs. “You wish to accompany me.”
“Yep.”
“To watch me fish,” I say slowly.
Her voice is deceptively bright. “Sure. Fishing. Love it. Very relaxing. All those… lures.”
I turn and look down at her. She meets my gaze with a face of such transparent innocence that I nearly laugh aloud.
She thinks the lake’s edge might hold a gap in the curse.
A gate the witch forgot. She thinks I cannot read her, this woman who broadcasts every scheme across her lovely face like a herald with a trumpet.
“You intend to search the treeline for an exit.”
“That’s—” She deflates. “Okay, yes, obviously, but I also want to see the lake.”
“By Saint George’s lance.” I drag a hand down my face.
“You spent yesterday walking in circles through that forest and arriving back at my walls, and still you plot escape while your legs can barely hold you. You come apart in my arms, you tug at my piercings like you mean to keep them, and yet you cannot flee me fast enough. Do you have any notion how maddening you are?”
Clara’s mouth falls open. “Says the man who won’t let me leave and calls it hospitality.”
“Says the woman who moaned my—”
“We’re getting fish,” she announces to the ceiling, the walls, and possibly God. Her cheeks have gone the color of my strawberries. “Fish. That’s what’s happening. Get your gear, Lord Broods-a-lot.”
I retrieve the rods from the storeroom off the kitchen, along with the wicker creel and the tin of hooks Konrad kept sorted by size until the day he died. Clara watches me gather it all with open curiosity.
“You made those?”
“Repaired them. A man with eternity acquires skills. I can fish, farm, cook, cobble, thatch, keep bees, and shear a sheep in under four minutes.”
“That’s the most unemployable résumé I’ve ever heard,” she says dryly.
“I don’t know what a résumé is, but I am confident it is another insult.” I shoulder the gear and push open the garden door. The morning is bright and cool, dew still silvering the cabbages. “Keep pace. The path is overgrown.”
“Everything here is overgrown. Your whole aesthetic is ‘overgrown.’”
Schmetterling trots ahead of us down the garden path, tail high, and stations himself at the orchard gate as though he has appointed himself guide.
“He’s coming?” Clara asks.
“He always comes when I fish. He is under the deranged impression that the first trout belongs to him.” I unlatch the gate. “He has held this belief since approximately 1740. I have never once agreed to it, and he has never once failed to collect.”
She snickers. “So you lost a negotiation to a cat.”
“I lost a war of attrition to a cat. There is a difference, and the difference is three hundred years.”
She laughs then, and the sound goes through me like a blade between the ribs.
Birds startle from the apple trees. The sun catches on her hair and turns it to white fire, and I have to look away toward the treeline before I say something possessive again and ruin the first hour of peace we have managed.
“Half an hour, you said?” She falls into step beside me on the forest path, close enough that her sleeve brushes my coat. Elderberry and basil. I could find her blindfolded across a battlefield.
I can’t resist teasing her. “For me. For someone with legs like a newborn foal, perhaps forty minutes.”
Clara snorts delicately. “My legs outran the Italian mafia through this exact forest, thank you.”
“Your legs ran in a circle back to my gate,” I counter.
“That was the curse, not my cardio.”
“Of course,” I say gravely.
Schmetterling pauses on the path, looks back at the two of us bickering through the trees, and gives one long, weary meow.
“Not a word from you either,” I tell him.
Clara grins up at me, wicked and bright and alive, and God help me, I would carry a thousand buckets up a thousand stairs to keep that look aimed in my direction.
“So,” she says, swinging the creel she stole from my shoulder when I wasn’t watching. “Tell me about your pike.”