“Even so . . .” He had to take a double step to catch up to her, his hand snagging her sleeve at the elbow. “You needn’t explain yourself to anyone? Be granted permission?”
“To entertain a guest? Certainly not!” Annalise plucked his hand from her elbow and settled it into the crook of her arm, her other hand atop it.
They earned a few curious looks from some of the novitiates, but Jacquin was the one straining his eyes to stare at everything. He went so far as to stop for a look in the open door of one of the classrooms, so that Annalise had to tug him firmly to move him. Even then he dragged his feet like a child, goggle-gazed at all they passed.
“Jacquin, you act the part of a copperfish trying for a crumb. Close your mouth and mind your manners,” Annalise chastised.
He focused on her. “It’s nothing like I expected.”
She took him through a glass door and to a small courtyard, then along a stone path and through the scrolled metal gate toward the pond. “Allow me to guess what you expected. Near-naked women servicing the pleasures of men all over the place? Collared and bound, perhaps, or at the very least on their knees?”
Jacquin’s boots crunched on the gravel as he again caught up to her swift and unhesitating step. “Well . . . yes.”
Halfway up the hill, Annalise stopped and turned to tease him. “We only do that four days of the seven. You arrived on one of the wrong four days.”
Jacquin had ever known her humor and shared it, but this time his jaw gaped again and his eyes bulged. Annalise sighed and patted his arm.
“Love, I jest. You’ll find none of that in the Motherhouse. It’s our haven, after all, not the place for our patrons.”
He followed her again when she moved toward the pond and the gazebo beyond. “But . . . surely you must . . . I mean, everyone knows . . .”
“Everyone knows what? Rumors and stories, Jacquin.” Annalise glanced over her shoulder, watching his unsteady progress. Perhaps the shock had unsettled him, or more likely it was the heels of his fashionable boots unsuited for heavy trekking.
“Fair enough. But you can’t blame me for the thought. Tell me you believed differently when you arrived. Tell me how relieved you were to find it not so.”
“I was, of course. Ah, here. Sit with me.” She took a place on the stone bench in the gazebo and spread her skirts. She patted the spot next to her. “But it’s always possible I shall have to learn such skills.”
Jacquin drew forth a fine-woven handkerchief from his pocket to mop his brow and upper lip. When had he grown so foppish, so ill-equipped at the physical? Annalise thought she should’ve brought a jug of cider.
“Why?” He put away the hanky and turned toward her on the bench. “By the Void, Annalise, sure you can’t be serious about this. Your time here was never meant for permanence!”
They might have been any courting couple, though the fashion of her gown didn’t match the elaborate outfit Jacquin had chosen. Sky blue jacket with a matching waistcoat, shirt of pale blue gray linen, dark gray trousers, dusty now but of fine material. He looked every inch the dandy gentleman, complete with lace at his throat and cuffs.
Had it been only a few short months ago she’d found him so lovely to look upon? And now everything about him seemed overblown. Priggish.
“Things change, Jacquin.”
She’d spoken calmly. She might well have shouted, for the reaction he gave her, one hand on his heart and the other briefly at his brow. When he looked at her again, he’d gone a little pale.
“You can’t mean you intend to go through with this. Become a Handmaiden?” Jacquin slid closer to take her hands, and Annalise, taken aback, allowed him.
“That
is
the reason I’m here.” She said it more gently than she would have before her time here, and that, too, she recognized.
He thrust her hands back in her lap and stood to pace the gazebo’s wooden planks. “No. No, you’re not truly here to take your vows and enter the Order of Solace. That was only a ploy. A distraction. It was never meant to be real!”
“Much like our betrothal, you mean?” The words came out more cruelly than she’d thought. So much for training. She still had a long, long way to go.
He whirled to face her, the hem of his jacket swinging. “It was never meant to be such.”
She softened, reaching a hand he didn’t take. “It would have been. And you know it.”
“No. I told you then, as I tell you now, I would be a good husband to you. Better even than many who claim to wed for love alone and no other reason. At least with me, you’d know my intentions were ever to you and our family first, before all else.”
Annalise put her hand back in her lap and shook her head slowly. “A husband who cannot make love to his wife? You said you wished heirs, Jacquin. How would you expect to get them upon me, when the . . .” She swallowed at the memory, which still stung after all this time. “When the very act of touching me intimately caused you such distress?”
He paced afresh, boots clacking on the wood. “I was a fool. I allowed myself to depend too much upon the aid of worm and herb, thinking I needed—”
She stood, then, to pace herself. Heart pounding. Stomach just a little sick at the memory even now. “I don’t want a husband who has to drug himself to make love to me!”
“It would be different now,” Jacquin said in a low voice. “If you would only allow me to prove it.”
Somehow, Annalise found herself in his arms, her hands cupping his face. It seemed strange to look into his eyes without having to tip back her head or stand on her toes. Stranger to smell a whiff of pomade and sharp-spiced cologne.
“It’s true I came here for the wrong reasons. But I think now I’ve discovered the right ones.”
Jacquin shook his head, took her palms and kissed each one. His gaze bore into her. “I know you don’t believe me, but I do love you.”
“I do believe it. In your way.”
He let her go and stalked to the railing to look out across the pond. “I shouldn’t have let you go.”
“You had no choice.”
He shook his head without looking at her. “I had a choice. I could’ve kept you close to me. Brought the priests, had a wedding . . .”
She laughed. “You think you might have forced me to be your bride? Oh, Jacquin, I thought you knew me better than that.”
She frowned a moment later when she saw he was serious. “You mean it.”
“We’d have been wed a month already. My babe already planted in your belly, perhaps.” He turned to her, jaw set and eyes icy. “None of this nonsense with you running away, me having to face your parents—”
“My parents! You were happy to have me come here so that we might delay the wedding without dissolving it! So that you might still have the benefit of working at my father’s side without the mess of either of us being expected to find another partner! This was what we agreed together, Jacquin, yet now you make it out that somehow this was all my decision? All my fault?”
She stomped her foot, not calm or composed, unable to keep her voice from rising. “You blame me?”
“The only person who finds your service here worthy is your lady mother! And her only because she’s so far gone into her religious madness she believes you’ll be the one to do it, to provide your patron with that moment of solace that will at last fill Sinder’s Quiver.”
Jacquin had ever been respectful of her mother, no matter the woman’s fantasies. To hear him speak of her with such derision sent a wave of unease through Annalise. She swallowed the bitter taste of bile on the back of her tongue.
“Why did you come here?”
“When you didn’t answer my first letter, and weeks had passed without hearing from you, I realized how much I missed you, Annalise.”
She gave a soft snort at that. “Surely you had enough to occupy you, what with working for my father and your other pursuits.”
“None of it was as merry as my time spent with you, this I swear. I missed you. I understood why you left, and I wished to make amends. Where’s the harm in that?”
“No harm. But this changes naught.” Annalise leaned against the gazebo’s other railing. “Much has changed for me, in ways I’d never thought possible.”
“We have a contract,” he reminded her. “If you dissolve it, your father will have to pay the price. And it’s a steep one. The business has flourished since I joined him.”
Her brow furrowed. “Are you threatening me?”
“No, no. Land Above, no,” Jacquin protested. “I swear to you, not that. I’m merely telling you I’ve come all this way, at no great ease—”
“I know the hardship of the journey, Jacquin. I made it without benefit of your luxurious transportation, as a matter of fact.”
Solemnly, he nodded. “I know it. And I can see your time here’s been good for you. Made you . . . amenable. It’s most pleasing.”
This raised a brow. “Surely I’ve not changed so much.”
He laughed a little. “Sweetheart, you’ve ever been unhesitantly spoken and forward with your thinking. Why else have you found it so difficult to find a suitor?”
Anger, thin and cold, burned in her chest. “My difficulties with courtship cannot be traced to my personality, for I know full well my face and figure more than made up for it. Men—most men,” she amended with a slightly derisive look at him she didn’t bother to hide, “seem to put up with a lot in order to wet their wicks. If I had difficulty finding suitors, it was because of my father’s lack of business sense and the six sisters who came before me, eating up all the dowry.”
“All the more reason for you to renew our betrothal.”
“Why? Because I might never have another offer?”
“That’s not what I said.”
Annalise sniffed. “It’s what you implied, Jacquin, and you know it. I must be honest. If this is how you’ve come to plight your troth, you’re fair disappointing in the execution of it!”
“Please, please, sweetheart, can’t we talk about this? Will you not allow me to show I’ve changed? Not my heart,” he said quietly, “for that ever was yours. But my body.”
She allowed him to take her in his arms and kiss her. His mouth, so familiar, no longer urged her to sighs, but she parted her lips for him anyway to let him stroke his tongue inside. His groan startled her enough to pull away, but his hands gripped her hips and held her close.
“See?” He whispered against her mouth. “Or rather, feel.”
True, the heat and hardness of his groin between them seemed to indicate arousal. Annalise sighed into Jacquin’s kiss this time, closing her eyes and letting his tongue and hands urge a reaction from her. It wasn’t working, not when her mind filled with an image of dark eyes, dark hair, broad shoulders, and that stern, unforgiving mouth . . .
“See? Yes, sweetheart, you see, we could be good together.” Jacquin’s voice had gone hoarse. He pushed her to the bench to slide a hand between her thighs, her gown a barrier to his touch. “Just allow me to prove it, and I swear you’ll have no more qualms.”
They’d kissed many times before, much this way, and Jacquin was correct. It did feel different. It felt . . . wrong.
“No.” She pushed at his chest until he left off.
Breath hitching, pink on his cheeks, eyes a little glazed, Jacquin blinked. “What?”
“This isn’t right.”
“Of course it’s right. It’s as right as anything ever was. We’re betrothed, sweetheart. You agreed to be my bride and I your husband, and I’m here to show you it can work. It will work.”
He kissed her again, for even longer this time, but though his hands roamed over her body Annalise felt nothing but resignation. Was this what it would be like to serve a patron, she thought, her mouth taking his kiss but naught else.
“Where is your head?” Jacquin snapped, and got up from the bench to run a hand over his hair. “Not with me, I’m fair certain of that.”
“Your mercy,” Annalise said.
He turned. “You’ll not even give me a chance?”
“I . . . Jacquin . . . I . . .” Annalise sought words she couldn’t find.
He got on his knees in front of her, clasping her hands tight. “Sweetheart, I do swear to you I will be ever the most faithful of husbands to you, if only you’ll come back to me.”
Annalise kissed his fingers and put aside his hands, then stood. The wooden floor might well have worn through, the pair of them had done so much pacing. She ran a hand along the railing, skipping fingertips over the possibility of splinters.
“I believe you would be miserable,” she said at last and turned to find him slumped upon the bench, a cut-stringed marionette. “Look at you, you’re miserable now.”
He drew a heavy sigh, shoulders lifting. He gave her a naked gaze she couldn’t bear and yet refused to ignore. “Annalise, just come home. There are circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
He held out his hands, fingers spread. “Your father and I don’t see eye to eye on the business. I’ve made your father more money since you’ve been gone than he’s made in your entire lifetime, yet he balks me at every turn. He refuses to grant me the partnership he promised would be mine upon our wedding. Instead he holds me off with promises he cannot possibly produce. That would change if you came back. Became my wife, the way we’d planned. It would be a good life for you, Annalise, I can promise you that.”
Emotion, twisted and tangled, tightened her throat, hoarsened her voice. “But will it be a good life for you, love?”
Jacquin blinked, mouth pressing tight closed on whatever he meant to say. His shoulders sagged. And there it was, the truth of it all.
She went to him because she could, now, in a way that had been impossible for her even a few weeks ago. She went to her knees in front of him on the hard boards, her gown doing little to cushion but not caring. She took his hands in hers, this time, reversing the roles. She squeezed gently.
“I could never,” she said, “ask you to give up who you are to make a life with me. Not ever, Jacquin. I care for you too fully to expect such a sacrifice.”