you're too young & eager to love

Trying out new characters! I attempted to do a compare and contrast type of thing, but I ran out of steam. Oh well.

Cut for ~adult~ content. Ger's part is intentionally in past tense for emphasis.






The King expects her gratitude, and she is too well-trained to buck and earn his reproach.

So Abigail does not think of Gerhard or her small, private singular room that she had kept before. She tries not to remember the ornate writing desk in the corner or how the simple silken curtains had cast lazy shadows across Gerhard’s hips and stomach when he slept, calm as a house cat, on her slim feather mattress during the heat of summer. She misses the windows that opened to the breeze and the birdsong. She misses the intimacy and surprise of finding the younger Lance in her most personal of spaces, a prince who was remarkably at ease in her simple pleasures, admiring the books on their shelves, or her small rosewood chest open to display its rings and brooches and a string of pearls she wore on special occasions.

This new room is triple the size with an attached sitting room. It’s a suite – she has seen them before, in the Queen Mother’s quarters in the north tower, and in Gerhard’s rooms – but the overall effect seems gaudy and intimidating now. The fireplace should welcome, but it suggests coldness instead with its harsh stone mantel and dark, gaping hearth. The chased silver candlesticks and vessels that stand atop the sideboards are as silent monuments, judgmental idols to her indiscretions. The huge bed of dark oak with a scarlet coverlet, sewn with hundreds of tiny twinkling gems and bits of gold and silver, offers a thousand prickly jewels to bite into her flesh. As cold as distant stars.

The far wall is hung with a tapestry of men and women in the Royal Hunt, looking out with ever-vigilant eyes. She doesn’t have to ask to know there is a door behind the tapestry, and behind that door a dark walk, a deep plunge.

For the first time in many months, Abigail feels trapped. She recognizes a cage, however gilded, when she sees one.

But the King expects her gratitude, so she reaches for the gold ribbon at her throat and unties the fragile knot there.




“You’re barely blushing,” he murmured into her ear, the heat of the fire making her skin flush, as well as the scratch of his beard across her neck and his gentle hand that crawled between their bodies to tease and caress the pearl between her legs.

“Do I displease, my Lord?” She teased – she did this often when they were in bed together, using his proper titles, fluttering her golden eyelashes as though she were a simpering milk maid he might find and devour beside the side of the road. Only Gerhard could not devour much; he was no wolf, and she knew it, so she traced her nails down his neck and rolled them, twisting their bodies till her long legs wrapped around his waist and she sat above him, her hips rolling, urging, ebbing. “Should you try harder? For a blush?”

He lifted his hips to meet her, laughing under his breath. His body, lean and sinewy, cradled hers. His arms wrapped around her, and he held her hips when he thought she was too far gone. This was his way. His mouth on her shoulder, his pace unhurried, his focus entirely within the moment as though he had never had her before or knew how she came with a gasp and a scratch of her nails against his back. This was the most exquisite of moments – when he thought nothing and saw nothing and likely heard nothing, when he was the pleasure he was feeling, when every sinew of him was taut with it and her.

When he came, it was with a muffled cry. That was also his way, that low, muffled, gentlemanly cry. Sometimes she covered his mouth with hers and swallowed it, as though she might taste the flavor of his undoing.

He liked to bury his hands in her pale hair afterwards, to trail his mouth across her small breasts, to keep them together until their limbs began to ache and turn stiff.




“Your Majesty,” she whispers, like a dove, dipping into a curtsey so low that her knees nearly touch the floor and the gossamer fabric of her night shift brushes her cold toes.

Renan lets her stay like that, watching her balance, the perfect line of her spine as she maintains the position. Her eyes are cast demurely down, her hair loose and lovely, framing her round face. She is beautiful, but then he has had countless beautiful women, though she will be his first as a King. As though she has sensed this honor, she has kept the expanse of sapphires and diamonds he gifted her across her slender neck. He is not displeased.

Lightly, finally, he dips his fingers under her chin and lifts her gaze. “Stand now, little partridge. And show me.”

He doesn’t mind the tremble in her fingertips because he sees how her shift scratches across her pale nipples as she strips it from her body and the way her skin turns rose.

“Ah, there it is,” he murmurs, voice like a rumble of thunder, hands already reaching to lift her hair from her neck as he circles her slowly. “That blush my brother spoke so highly of.”