Page 37 of Settle Down, Princess

“A good thief can’t go blundering into a situation based on assumptions. Best way to end up dancing on the other end of the king’s rope.”

So I needed to keep him off-centre tonight, that was clear. A serving woman approached the table with our meal, carrying the plates by balancing them up and down her arms. She set one before each of us, and the savoury scents of roast meat, gravy and vegetables made my mouth water. When she returned with our cutlery, inspiration struck. At my father’s tables, only blunt silver knives were used to cut our meat, as the cook always ensured our food was so tender you could cut with the side of a spoon. The serving woman set bone handled knives down on the table, a lot like the one my mother had given me, alongside some mismatched forks. I picked up one knife, sliding my thumb up and down the handle slowly.

“So we’re in Khean now?”

The Kheanian crest was etched into the knife handle. I traced the embossed shape of the rearing stag, their national symbol. I didn’t need to draw Silas attention to my actions, as his eyes were already following every move of my thumb.

“We crossed the border yesterday.” His voice had become rougher.

“So let’s eat this good Kheanian meat while it’s hot,” Arik said, from the head of the table. “There’ll be no sending your meal back to the kitchen for another if your food goes cold.”

No one argued with his command. They had been riding hard all day, and I had a night’s journey ahead of me. A companionable silence went up around the table as we all set to.

“You should eat more,” Creed insisted as I reluctantly set my utensils aside. “You have to be hungry. You’ve had only travel rations for breakfast and lunch and not many of them.”

“I’m fine—” I said, affixing a smile on my face as I had been trained to do.

A woman is to be slender, slight, willowy, where a man is big and tall. A woman shouldn’t show a healthy appetite for… well, anything. We were to be restrained in breath, voice, and action, and particularly so at the dining table, as if we were plants, needing only the sunlight to sustain us.

“You’re not.” He used his knife to nudge my plate closer. “Eat some more. You might be tiny, but you’ve barely eaten what a child would. You need more than that to sustain you.”

My smile was genuine for once. Unwittingly, he’d recognised a reality faced by all noblewomen in Stormare—I knew not about the other kingdoms—and had proposed a very simple solution to it. I’d spent my life hungry. Not when I was a little girl, as children were seen to be fragile things, needing a lot of nutrition to keep them alive, but the moment my first moon time came, that all changed. Portions got smaller, and any request for more was met with a stony stare. To maintain bird-like proportions, I needed to eat like one, no matter that my bones often felt hollow with hunger.

“You seem very concerned with my food consumption,” I said. “In Stormare, a man only comments on a woman’s plate if he sees her eating too much.”

“Oh, well—” he spluttered, his nut-brown skin flushing.

“Are things so different in your country? Do Kheanians prefer great buxom lasses?”

“Creed can’t answer that,” Roan said with a chuckle. “He’s studiously kept his eyes to himself until recently.”

His eyes sparkled as he glanced between the two of us.

“But no, we don’t try and starve our girls to a certain size. Kheanians are much more omnivorous. Big lasses with curves so wide it’s like climbing a mountain.” Roan flexed his fingers. “All the more to grip onto in my opinion. Little slender things like otters, that you fear will slip between your fingers, just makes you hold on the harder. Little tits set up high like cakes on a tray; big pendulous things that spill out of their corsets and into your mouth…” Roan was like some crude poet, as he rhapsodised about the wonders of something men didn’t discuss in polite company. “All of them are good, all of them are beautiful, each in their own way. So, eat up, lass, if you’re still hungry.”

Creed ignored Roan’s speech, focusing his attention on me and then dropping his gaze to my plate as he nodded for me to continue. He didn’t relax his concentration until I lifted my knife and fork again to apply them to my meal, and his eyes flared brighter when I sliced into the tender meat.

“What about you, Master Creed? Are wolf men just as accepting of feminine appetites?”

That pulled his focus away from my plate back up to my eyes, and for a moment I feared I’d mis-stepped. A small furrow formed between his brows.

“You know…?”

“I remember your claws from the night we met.” I shrugged nonchalantly. “And put two and two together. I apologise if I’ve offended you. It was not my intent.”

“Most outlander girls shiver in their beds at tales of the beast men of Khean.”

His voice was low and urgent.

“Do they?” I looked up from my plate. “If they do, it’s surely more due to ignorance than any real fear.” I leaned forward, exposing more of my cleavage, but Creed’s gaze remained locked with mine. “You have been every inch the gentleman on the trip so far.” My eyes slid sideways to where Arik sat, his mouth a thin line. “Unlike others I could mention.”

When my focus shifted back to Creed, to try and push my advantage further, I faltered. His eyes burned with a terrible fire and my stomach clenched at the sight of it.

Hope.

It had always been described to me as this fragile, beautiful thing, but it was only now that I realised how savage, desperate, and grasping the feeling could be. Your entire happiness was hitched to hope’s bridle, every fibre of your being desperate that it would be your horse that got over the finishing line first.

Because if it didn’t, your unworthy mount would be dragged out the back of the stables and given a bloody death for its failure.

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