He was still stunned. His body hadn’t yet recovered from the pleasure of their joining or the shock of their discovery. Theirs was certainly not the first marriage to be negotiated on such terms, he told himself. And he had to marry someday.
“This is fate,” his mother was saying to Lian’s mother, who nodded sagely.
But throughout it all Lian refused to look at him. She kept her head bowed and her gaze averted, as if they were indeed strangers bound together by the whim of a matchmaker. As if she needed to impress upon him that she was demure and innocent and pliant. All of which he knew wasn’t true. Well, except for her innocence—until he’d taken it in a moment’s passion.
Baozhen knew he should be sorry, but it was hard to be sorry when his pulse refused to stop hammering at Lian’s nearness. She sat just beyond arm’s reach, yet she might as well have been on the other side of the empire. The sullen look on her face twisted his stomach into knots.
He finally caught up to her as the engagement party started to disband. He’d had to make an excuse about using the privy—a request which Lian’s father had obliged with a knowing air. He found her at the far side of the garden, before she could slip away to the women’s quarters.
“Lian.” He took hold of her wrist when she turned to flee. “What’s the matter?”
She looked ill as she regarded him. Was it possible she was with child? Would the symptoms already be evident?
Gently, he pulled her behind the shrubbery in the garden. Almost the exact spot where he’d attempted a kiss just days earlier. “I know this isn’t what we expected, but we’ll do what we must.”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and her face pale. “What’s done is done,” she said miserably.
Her words struck him square in the chest and he let her arm slip out of his grasp. His fingers had gone numb.
“You wanted Jinhai, didn’t you?” he asked coldly. “Maybe you still do.”
Her eyes flashed at him as she shot him a look like an arrow. This was the Lian he’d known all his life.
“I don’t care a thing for him,” she said bitterly.
“Then why do you look as if this were a funeral instead of an engagement?”
She was the one who had all but demanded he kiss her. He certainly hadn’t protested—but neither had she. And her skin had been so soft and her lips so pink. And he hadn’t been a virtuous man to begin with.
“Lian—”
The gray cloud in her eyes stopped him cold. Her expression was one of anguish. There was shame there, and regret.
“I didn’t think it would go that far,” she protested.
He hadn’t meant for things to happen this way either. There was just something about being so close to Lian and the touch of moonlight on them that night.
“We’ve known each other for so long,” he began gently. “This isn’t the worst of fates.”
He stepped toward her, ready to make promises. They would make the best of things. He would mend his ways. And he did, at the end of all things, care for her.
Lian shook her head fiercely. “No, Baozhen. You should know... You should know that Liu Jinhai and I haven’t only just met.”
Jinhai again. The sound of his name was starting to feel like a thorn in his eye. “What does that scoundrel have to do with anything?”
“We’ve met before,” she went on, looking more tortured with each word. “Long before. And Jinhai is a scoundrel. Completely unsuitable for me and he knows it. But he was willing to play along.”
Baozhen had held his hand out to her, but he let it drop now to his side, like a dead weight. “You care nothing for him?” he said dully, echoing her words.
She shook her head miserably.
“Then...?” He tried to piece together the fragments of the last week. Her sudden interest in one of his acquaintances...the rendezvous in the park...all the while taunting him—
“You little she-demon,” he proclaimed.
Lian didn’t deny it, but her expression was far from triumphant. “I never meant to trap you. I...I just wanted you to notice me.”
With that, her shoulders slumped, and she appeared at once both small and uncertain. Nothing like the scheming creature he knew her to be. Now her look of regret made sense. Lian had been responsible for all of it—every single moment.
Wordlessly he stepped away from her, forgoing a farewell as he turned on his heel.
His mind was spinning.
He might have had a reputation for having three girls in the morning and four in the evening, but it was all talk. Lian’s parents were known as the most skillful negotiators in the city and Lian was apparently as shrewd and clever as they were.
Baozhen might be a wolf, but he’d been completely ensnared by a fox.
* * *
Lian sat alone in an unfamiliar chamber, upon what was to be her bridal bed. She was still dressed in her embroidered wedding robes, though she had cast aside the ceremonial veil as soon as she had been led to the bed and left alone. The wedding banquet continued in the main part of the house, where Baozhen would be accepting good-natured toasts and fending off well-wishers before making his way to her.
The wedding procession hadn’t had far to travel earlier that afternoon. Only the mere twenty paces that separated their households. And yet Lian felt as if she had traveled a thousand li. She had often visited the Guo household, but Baozhen’s private chamber was unknown to her.
As the muted sounds of the evening banquet droned on she searched for signs of him. The furnishings were tidy, but not stringently so. A stack of books lay upon the desk. The fragrance of rosewood and cedar surrounded her, making her think of dark and distant forests and the remote places where Baozhen had traveled.
He had been beside her for the wedding ceremony, but she’d been prevented from seeing him by the red veil draped over her face. All she’d had to sustain her was the tug of his hand opposite hers upon the symbolic red ribbon that had joined them together. He’d been a silent, forbidding presence.
They hadn’t spoken a word since she’d confessed her scheme to him after their engagement. Lian was beginning to worry. Neither of them had expected to be married so hastily, and his last words to her had been far from passionate.
“What do you want me to do?” he’d asked. The heat of desire had faded and there had been nothing left but a sense of duty weighing down his shoulders.
It didn’t matter. What was done was done.
The minutes stretched into hours, during which Lian had nothing to do but sit there and try very hard not to think of how many girls her husband had kissed before her. Baozhen was staying away for too long. He had no business staying at the banquet and enjoying the festivities. Wasn’t an eager groom supposed to extract himself from his guests in a timely manner?
Finally the door creaked open and she shot to her feet. Baozhen stopped just inside when he saw her, and closed the door behind him. He was dressed in a heavy robe of blue brocade and his hair was covered by a ceremonial cap. Her heart pounded. She hadn’t realized how hungry she’d become over the last few weeks for the sight of him.
“Why were you away for so long?”
Lian cringed at the unintentional shrillness in her voice as he blinked at her in surprise. Her first words to her newly wed husband and they sounded like an accusation.
Her mistake was immediately evident. Rather than coming to her, Baozhen sank into the chair beside his writing desk. He leaned back to regard her, his shoulders tense.
“It