Chapter 34 Riley
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Riley
It had been a few days, and Caelan had been groveling every minute of them.
It started with the gifts.
The first morning, I woke up to find a velvet box on the pillow beside me. Inside: a pair of earrings set with moonstones that glowed faintly in the light. Beautiful. Expensive. Absolutely unnecessary.
“Caelan, you didn’t have to-”
“I wanted to.”
The next day: a cashmere shawl so impossibly soft I wanted to wrap myself in it and never leave. The day after: a leather-bound journal with my initials embossed in gold. Then: a collection of rare first-edition romance novels I’d mentioned wanting once, in passing, weeks ago.
He’d remembered.
I stared at them, stunned. “How did you even get these? We’re in Lytopia.”
He just smiled mysteriously. “I have my ways.”
I didn’t want to know what favors he’d called in, what strings he’d pulled, what interdimensional nonsense he’d arranged to get me books from the human world. I decided not to ask. Some questions were better left unanswered.
Then came the more creative gifts.
A tiny sculpture of a white wolf, carved from some kind of glowing crystal.
A music box that played a lullaby I vaguely remembered from childhood, though how he’d found it, I had no idea.
A crown made entirely of woven wildflowers that he presented to me with such earnest sincerity that I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was absurd.
I wore it for an hour anyway. His smile was worth the woodland fairy princess aesthetic.
But the gifts were just the beginning.
Caelan discovered acts of service.
“I made breakfast,” he announced one morning, presenting me with a tray of... I wasn’t sure what to call it. It was supposed to be eggs, I thought. Maybe. They were a concerning shade of brown.
“Did you... cook this?”
“I’ve been taking classes.” He said it casually, completely matter-of-fact. “Since I first arrived in Lytopia. The castle chef has been teaching me. I’m getting better.”
The eggs were edible. Barely. But he looked so proud of himself, standing there with that hopeful expression, that I ate every bite and asked for seconds.
His face lit up. Worth the indigestion.
By day three, his cooking had improved dramatically. Apparently, werewolf princes were fast learners when properly motivated, and daily lessons were paying off. The pancakes were actually good. The eggs were recognizable as eggs. Progress.
Then he started doing my laundry.
My actual laundry. He carried my clothes to the wash house, scrubbed them by hand because he didn’t trust the servants to do it properly, and hung them to dry near the fire so they’d be warm when I put them on.
“You know there are people whose job it is to do this,” I pointed out.
“I know.” He folded a dress with careful precision. “But I wanted to.”
There it was again. That phrase. I wanted to. Taking care of me wasn’t an obligation or a performance. He actually desired to do it.
It was weakening my resolve. Significantly.
One morning, I woke at dawn to strange sounds: thumping, scraping, the occasional muttered curse.
I found Caelan on his hands and knees in the main hall, scrubbing the floor with a brush and a bucket of soapy water.
“What are you doing?”
“Cleaning.”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” He sat back on his heels, pushing sweat-damp hair from his forehead. “And the floors were dusty.”
I looked around. The floors sparkled. The entire cabin, actually, sparkled. Every surface gleamed. Not a speck of dust in sight. The windows were so clean they were practically invisible.
“Did you... clean everything?”
“I started at three.” He said it with a completely straight face. “The windows were streaky.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I settled for making him breakfast, turning his own cooking skills against him, and forcing him to take a nap. He protested. I threatened to sit on him until he slept. He slept.
The big bad wolf, defeated by a five-foot-six human with bedhead. I was clearly terrifying.
But the groveling didn’t stop.
Every time I sat on the couch, Caelan materialized beside me.
“Can I rub your feet?”
“I’m fine-”
He was already reaching for my ankle. His thumbs pressed into my arch, and my protest died in a groan. Okay. Fine. He could rub my feet. I wasn’t made of stone.
“Your shoulders seem tense,” he observed an hour later. “Let me.”
I let him. I was weak. Sue me.
“Are you hungry? I brought snacks.”
He’d brought an entire basket. Fruits, cheeses, chocolates, small pastries that melted on my tongue. I ate until I couldn’t move, and then he covered me with a blanket and offered to read to me.
That’s when things got interesting.
“I found these in your bag,” he said, holding up one of my smutty romance novels. “Do you want me to-”
“Oh god, no. You don’t have to-”
“‘His hands burned a trail down her skin,’” Caelan read, his deep voice wrapping around the words with dramatic intensity, “‘leaving fire in their wake. She arched into his touch, desperate, needy-’”
My face went scarlet.
“‘I’m going to make you scream my name,’” Caelan continued, completely straight-faced, “‘until the entire kingdom knows who you belong to.’”
“You can stop now.”
“But I’m at the good part.”
He was not stopping. He was, in fact, reading with increasing enthusiasm, adding dramatic pauses at all the right moments, occasionally glancing up at me with eyes that said he knew exactly what he was doing.
“‘His-’”
“OKAY.” I grabbed the book from his hands. “That’s enough.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“You love it.”
I did. God help me, I did. Hearing him read smut in that unfairly attractive voice was doing things to me. Dangerous things. Things that made it very hard to maintain my position of righteous indignation.
“Read me another chapter?” I asked that evening.
His grin was insufferable.
I was developing a serious addiction. An otherworldly experience, hearing the future king of Duskmere narrate explicit sex scenes with the gravitas of a Shakespearean actor. I’d never be able to read romance novels the same way again.
And through it all, he’d been asking to take me on a date.
“Let me plan an evening,” he said. “A real date. Please.”
I resisted. I was supposed to be making him work for it, after all. Maintaining some semblance of control.
But the foot rubs wore me down. And the smut-reading. And the way he looked at me with those golden eyes, so hopeful, so eager to please.
“Fine,” I relented. “One date.”
His smile could have lit up the entire kingdom.
We’d returned to the castle that morning. The cabin had been a wonderful escape, but real life was calling. And now I was being guided through the cold, a blindfold covering my eyes, Caelan’s hands warm on my shoulders.
Doors had opened and closed, and I’d lost all sense of direction. The air had changed, though. Warmer. Humid. Smelling of... flowers?
“Almost there,” Caelan murmured.
We stopped. His fingers worked at the knot behind my head.
The blindfold fell away, and I opened my eyes.
Holy hell.
We were inside a greenhouse. Not just any greenhouse, but a massive, sprawling cathedral of glass and greenery.
Flowers of every color bloomed in wild profusion: roses and orchids and lilies and species I didn’t recognize, their petals bright against the dark winter night beyond the windows.
Vines crawled up the glass walls, laden with blossoms. Trees stretched toward the ceiling, their branches hung with small lights that twinkled in the darkness.
It was magical. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“Do you like it?” Caelan’s voice was uncertain. Hopeful.
“I...” I turned in a slow circle, trying to take it all in. The colors. The scents. The way the lights reflected off the glass, creating an infinity of stars. “How did you...?”
“It was my mother’s,” he said. “She built it decades ago. For my father, actually. He loves flowers. She’s been maintaining it ever since.” He moved to stand beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. “I asked if we could use it tonight.”
“It’s incredible.” I reached out to touch a rose petal, soft beneath my fingers. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Come. There’s more.”
He took my hand, and I let him, letting him lead me deeper into the greenhouse. We passed through archways of climbing jasmine, past fountains surrounded by water lilies, past a section filled entirely with night-blooming flowers that glowed faintly in the starlight.
And then we reached the center.
A massive tree rose from the ground, its trunk twisted with age, its branches spreading wide overhead. Beneath it, a blanket had been laid on the soft grass, surrounded by pillows and more of those twinkling lights. Because there was actual grass here, growing lush and green despite the winter.
A picnic. He’d set up a picnic for me, under a fairy-tale tree, in a magical greenhouse. This man was absolutely unreal.
“This is...” I couldn’t find the words. “You planned all this?”
“I wanted it to be perfect.” He guided me to the blanket, helping me settle among the pillows. “You deserve perfect.”
“I don’t know about perfect.”
“I do.”
He sat beside me, close but not touching, and began unpacking the basket he’d hidden behind the tree. Wine. Fresh bread. Cheeses and fruits and delicate pastries. Food he’d clearly chosen with care.
We ate. We talked. He told me about the greenhouse, about how his mother spent years cultivating certain species, coaxing seeds from the most remote corners of Lytopia to bloom in this controlled paradise.
“She’d disappear for hours,” Caelan said, refilling my wine glass. “My father would find her here at midnight, covered in soil, talking to the roses. She claimed they grew better when you spoke to them.”
“Do they?”
“I have no idea. But she believed it.” His expression softened at the memory. “My father proposed to her under this very tree. She’d been working here all day, and he just... showed up with a ring. Said he couldn’t wait another moment.”