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I raised my hand from the water, extending it toward him with my palm open.
“Come in.”
He did not move or speak, standing at the edge of the pool with the damp cloth held tight in his grip. The quiet between us stretched, heavy and still, while cherry blossoms drifted across the moving surface of the water.
I waited for him.
Chapter 2
He still had not moved.
There was a moment in my village, every new moon, when the eastern clouds rolled in across the rice fields. Heavy and violet, holding the warmth of dusk in their bellies, they lingered until the precise moment the valley needed the rain. I had stood at the edge of my mother’s field a hundred times watching those clouds, waiting for them to break. The longing of a cloud before it falls is a patient, heavy thing. It knows what it is going to do, and it chooses the exact instant to surrender.
Drystan looked at me with the weight of those clouds.
He did not move, and the silence held between us.
“Liora,” he said softly.
It was the only word for a long moment, left to rest in the space between our rising breaths.
“I do not know what you are doing to me,” he murmured, his voice low. “I have spent my life believing that nothing in this world could move me unless I chose to let it. And then I find you. In a forbidden grove. Beside a pool no king should have known existed.”
The earnestness in his face, combined with the dark longing in his eyes, recalled the ancient obsidian statues of the old gods at the temple. They looked that way during marriage ceremonies, when a hundred lanterns were lit at dusk and the carved stone gave back the firelight in warm, mysterious depths.
The corner of my mouth lifted. I pictured him at the temple’s humble altar, my hands crossed with his while the priest recited the old rites that mattered only to a man and a woman deeply in love. Both of us would wear simple clothes, because at the altar there was no empire and no village, only two who had chosen each other.
I had not realized I was imagining it until the thought was already there.
A breeze moved across the clearing, catching the wet skin of my shoulders. The water was warm, but the mountain air was cool, sending a sudden shudder along my arms and across the damp linen clinging to my body. My skin tightened beneath his gaze. He did not look down, keeping his eyes fixed entirely on my face with an intense focus that made my pulse quicken.
I brushed a wet strand of hair from my collarbone with the back of my hand.
“Well, my dear king,” I said, my voice quiet over the sound of the falls. “If you have granted yourself permission today, I suggest you take advantage of it and join the shivering maiden before she dives into the deep alone.”
Drystan laughed, a genuine, low sound. It was the laugh of a man caught, disarmed, and choosing to enjoy every second of it.
He began to undress.
I had seen glimpses of him over the weeks. The shift of fabric across his shoulders when he reached for a lead, the exposed forearm when he rolled up a sleeve, the hint of his chest beneath the soft fabric of his shirt when the wind pressed against him. Those fragments had taught me what to anticipate, yet they had not prepared me for the reality.
The velvet shirt came away from his shoulders, and the breath stopped in my throat. The dark cloth fell from his body, revealing skin and muscle honed across a lifetime of training and three centuries of imperial blood. The men in my village possessed hard, knotted muscles from long days behind the plough, but Drystan was carved with spare, powerful lines. Broad shoulders tapered into a lean waist, every line of his frame carrying the quiet authority of his lineage.
He still held my dress in his hand, having kept it since catching it below the cliff. He brought the folded fabric to his face once more, inhaling the scent lingering in the weave, fully aware now that I was watching him.
Carefully, he spread his velvet shirt over the grass. He then folded my humble dress and set it directly on top of the dark velvet, keeping the coarse cotton from touching the dirt. He had given my garment the protection of his own, a quiet gesture that settled deep in my chest.
He stepped to the edge of the pool, bare to the waist, his eyes locking onto mine across the steaming surface.
“The shivering maiden,” he said, “should not have to wait any longer.”
He entered the pool without a splash, the water yielding around his body as he moved toward me without haste, an easy grace in it. The azure depth soaked the fabric of his trousers as he cut through the current, closing the distance until he stood directly before me. The difference in our height left the water at his hips while it rested at my waist.
He reached out, his fingers brushing the tip of my chin before his hand opened to cup my cheek.
I leaned my face into his palm, closing my eyes for a fraction of a second as the warmth of his skin met mine. The surrender was absolute, a silent admission of how deeply I had craved his touch.
When I opened my eyes, he was watching me with an intensity that made the air feel thin. His index finger traced slowly down from my chin, following the curve of my throat until it reached the hollow of my collarbone.
