Chapter 10: What Is Mine

I locked the door of the east tower with my own hand.

Garrick stood in the middle of the round room, in the lamplight, with ash still on his boots.

He didn't seem to know where to put his hands.

"Sit," I said.

He sat on the edge of the high bed, and the straw mattress crackled under him.

I stood in front of him and took the pins out of my braid one at a time.

He watched every pin.

When the braid came loose, I shook it down my back.

He made a low sound in his chest at the long fall of pale hair.

"You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," he said.

I looked down at myself.

I am tall and wide, with a soft belly and heavy hips and thighs that have never fit a fashionable gown.

I have been told all my life what that means.

"You mean that," I said.

"I have never meant anything more."

He said it plainly.

I felt the last of my nerves go quiet.

I stepped between his knees.

He put his hands on my waist, the grey one and the good one, and stopped there, holding on.

"You can touch me," I said. "That's what the door is for."

His hands moved.

They slid up my back and down over my hips, slow and heavy and warm.

Then he pulled me forward until my knees touched the bed and his face pressed into my belly through the linen.

He breathed me in.

I put both hands in his black hair and held on.

"Take it off," I said.

He found the laces of my gown with clumsy, careful fingers, and drew them out, and the gown slid off my shoulders to the floor.

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