Page 2 of Beds and Blades

They were wrong.

Wars were won by intelligence. Insight. The willingness to look at the thing everyone else had already looked away from. The best commanders saw what others missed and understood the field better than their adversaries. That part came easily to me, and it was the part I trusted.

What didn’t come easily was the part that followed.

Intelligence only told you what should be done. It didn’t make you do it. That required decisiveness—speed, commitment, a willingness to act without full certainty. That was the quality I lacked. I could see the right move. I could map it, annotate it, and cross-reference it against every comparable situation in the historical record.

I just couldn’t always bring myself to take it.

There was evidence for this conclusion. My ex-fiancé, for instance.

The engagement had lasted two years longer than it should have. By the three-month mark, I could already see how it would end. The remaining time was spent rerunning the same analysis, reaching the same conclusion, and choosing not to act on it. I knew this was the exact failure mode I had devoted my academic career to studying. Scipio looked at New Carthage and moved; I looked at my own life and did not.

By every measurable metric, my ex-fiancé had been a reasonable choice. Stable, gainfully employed, and approved of by my parents.

What he lacked was the ability to make me feel anything remotely resembling the things that occupied my private thoughts. He treated intimacy like it was a scheduled obligation. I owned a vibrator that understood my preferences more fully than he had managed to in two years of earnest effort.

I had ended the engagement and told my parents that “incompatibility” was the reason.

This was accurate. But it was not complete.

What I wanted, what I had been thinking about in the eighteen months since ending the engagement, was to be overwhelmed. I wanted a man to desire me totally, with no hedging and no half-measures.

I wanted large, capable hands. A jaw shadowed with rough stubble. And yes, because I believed in thorough intelligence-gathering and had spent enough time alone with my imagination and the toys in my nightstand drawer to know exactly what I was asking for, I wanted a man who was generously proportioned in every dimension that mattered.

I wanted to feel claimed.

I wanted to be taken apart until I had no remaining capacity for coherent thought, let alone the finer points of Roman military strategy.

I paused on the slide showing the lagoon’s position. I had been doing this my entire adult life: presenting a controlled, analytical exterior while my desires ambushed me.

Two things running in parallel. The careful mind and the honest body, never quite in the same room at the same time.

Focus, Meghan Callahan.

Right. New Carthage. The lagoon. The man who had seen what everyone else had already looked past, and the fact that he had simply acted on it.

The fact that he had simply acted on it.

***

Also in the room, seated slightly apart from the committee, was Professor James Calloway.

He was not on my committee. Nothing required him to be here. He had apparently decided to attend for reasons that were not clear to me.

James was the kind of tall that made everything around him feel slightly disproportionate.

Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, solid in a way that suggested not just strength but discipline. The black shirt he wore clung without apology, outlining muscle that hadn’t happened by accident.

His hair was dark and a little too long, falling in loose, unruly waves that refused to stay controlled. It softened what might otherwise have been an uncompromising face—strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, a mouth that looked like it defaulted to restraint rather than ease.

There was stubble along his jaw, not careless, but not precise either. Intentional imperfection.

And then there was the stillness. Nothing about him was casual. It came from control and the habit of observing before acting.

I thought about his hands sometimes. Their size, relative to, for example, my waist. I thought about what it would feel like to have those hands settle at my hips. I thought about this involuntarily and at inconvenient moments.

His jaw. The way he filled a doorframe when he entered a room.