Krew’s eyes briefly touched mine before meeting hers. “Always.”
* * *
“Come with me.”
I looked at Krew as if he was losing his mind. We’d had a luncheon with my mother, Flora, and Silvia, went directly from there into a meeting with the Assemblage advisor about the wedding the following day, and then we had to come back to shower to go to dinner with the king, Keir, Delaney, and Gwen.
We’d barely had a chance to breathe all day. Neither had Keir for that matter, as he was in charge of making sure the ploy for the sword went off without a hitch tomorrow.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Keir. I did. There was just so much riding on our ability to get that sword from the king.
And here we were, exhausted, and about to have the busiest day of our lives the following day. It was a day for us, but also at the same time, not at all for us. It was a grand show for the entire country; a woman from the lowest level of the kingdom was becoming a princess.
Something I myself had thought impossible. Yet here we were.
So knowing the slew of events the following day, and how early I would have to start prepping with Silvia and Flora, I felt like falling into bed. I wanted to love my husband in every way that a woman could, and then I wanted to fall into a deep sleep. With Keir’s plan in place for tomorrow, that was the only way I would be achieving any sleep at all.
“Please,” Krew begged. “Humor me, love.”
When he looked at me like that with his gray eyes and I felt down the bond how much this man adored me, I couldn’t deny him a thing. And he knew it too.
“Okay.” I sighed.
Without another word, Krew reached for something, scooped me into his arms, and shot us over the balcony to the ground below.
I hadn’t even had time to grab a jacket, or a blanket, or anything, before he’d grabbed me. And though it was spring now, the evenings up on this mountain could get quite chilly.
“Here.”
Krew took off his jacket and handed it over, moving the small container in his hands as he maneuvered out of it. Then out of nowhere, he also had a blanket which he handed over to me. He must have grabbed it just before we’d gone off the balcony.
I pulled the tailcoat around me tightly and sighed. The smell of his jackets like this. Rarely did I refuse his jackets. They were always warm and smelled of him.
Not wanting my thoughts to stray to darker thoughts of how I should possibly bottle the smell just in case I was forced to navigate life without the opportunity for a warm jacket, I looked back at the container in his hands. “What’s in the basket?”
Krew turned to smile at me as he took my hand in his and started leading me in the direction of the meadow. “Does that cunning mind of yours ever rest?”
“Not recently anyway,” I admitted.
“Nor mine,” he said on a sigh. “Which is precisely why this is what we should be doing.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I love this forest. I love healing the forest. But there arenumerousother things I would like to be doing with you right now.”
He sent me that smirk which promised all the best things. “All in due time, love. Just humor me.”
“Fine,” I relented. “What is it that we are doing?”
He was walking toward an area he must have scoped out ahead of time, stopping and then looking up at the stars. “This was where your tears first bloomed in the meadow.” He grabbed the blanket from me and threw it outward onto the ground. He held up the basket. “And this is an array of all your favorite desserts that I requested be made for us and this very occasion.”
Tears stung my eyes. “We are having a picnic.”
Krew opened the basket to take out a smaller container which held desserts and another small container that held candles. He stuck the candles in the ground next to the blanket, and with a snap to his fingers, the candles flared to life. “We are having a picnic,” he agreed.
He sat in the center of the blanket and reached a hand out to me. I took it, settling between his legs, my back to his chest. He handed me the desserts and I could see well enough to see that there were a variety of truffles and some bite-sized chocolate cheesecakes in there. I chose a truffle, smiling over the fact that our first meeting was over a truffle. A truffle that I was trying to figure out if I could drop into my bosom.
“We are having a picnic but also much more,” Krew whispered against me as he also grabbed a truffle and popped it into his mouth.
“You’re havingfeelingstoo then?”
