Page 25 of His Bride

“Oh, of course! It would be my pleasure! What a pretty young thing you are, Lady Darken. And such gorgeous coloring. You could wear pink or blue quite easily. Pink is in this season. Perhaps that would be the choice.”

She speaks as though the store contains anything that isn’t pink. I cast a pleading look over at Lydia, in the hopes that she might rescue me, but apparently she is only going to save my life, not my pride. She is standing against the doorway, her eyes roaming the street outside. She is guarding me from danger, and ugly clothes aren’t technically dangerous.

Over the next hour or so, I get festooned with various dresses, none of which feel flattering. There is so much material, and it is all so bulky. I am getting lost in it. The assistant seems to think I want something dramatic to make a scene, but I would be more than happy simply to fit in.

“What is taking so long, Lady Darken?” Lydia eventually notices that this is consuming an inordinate amount of time.

“You’ve taken me to a place that is going to dress me like an overgrown infant,” I complain. “I need something sophisticated to wear!”

“Any dress would make you look young, because you are,” Lydia says. “And most of these dresses are designed to make the wearer look younger than they are, because most of the time women think men like that.”

“Is that it?”

“I have no evidence it is not it,” she says.

“I don’t think that’s the reason… the pink ruffles are too much. The full skirts are too much. The bright fluorescent colors are too much. I want something simple.”

Lydia finally takes pity on me. “The colors of Lord Darken are black and red, so perhaps that is the color scheme we should be looking for.”

“I saw so many stylish and elegant ladies when I left the airport yesterday. They weren’t wearing anything like this.”

“They were wearing street clothes. You are shopping for a formal occasion. The requirements are different.”

“But I’ve never been to a formal occasion here. And nobody I’ve encountered so far is any help.”

I am trying to keep my voice low, so as not to insult the saleslady, who is very excited by her bright pink cacophony of fabric.

“Thank you very much,” I say. “The dresses are all so lovely, I will have to think about which of them best suits.”

Her face falls. She knows what that means. It’s nice to know that some social cues remain the same across our societies.

“Thank you for gracing the store, Lady Darken,” she says.

Lydia leads me out of the place.

“I hope we can find something actually suitable,” I say. “I don’t know why you took me there.”

“I thought you’d look cute in that sort of attire, and you did, but you are right. You would clash with the Archon-General terribly.”

“Are you trying to set me up to fail, Lydia?”

“I’m trying to please you, Lady Darken. You’ve arrived here wearing a beige sack, more or less. I thought anything would be an improvement.”

She really can be quite snotty. Maraline would have a robust argument with her, I am sure. She wouldn’t take any of the snide jibes lying down. She’d probably say something in turn about Lydia’s uniform, or maybe if she was feeling very catty, her eyebrows.

I, on the other hand, have already seen a much more likely shop not a few doors down.

Dark Desires,the sign on the shop reads. The sign is black, and the text is red, and I assume that because it is near the frilly pink dress shop, it’s probably something similar, just with different colors.

“This sounds better,” I say, striding confidently in.

I immediately find myself surrounded by leather garments, which at first seem to have some kind of promise, until I realize that almost all of them have phallic shapes attached to them, some of them in the interior, which makes my mind perform all kinds of gymnastics. There are other accessories too, mostly in the form of handcuffs and clamps and chains.

“How can I help you, princess?” A very tall man with cropped dark hair and an abundance of dark eye makeup approaches me with a grin I can now identify as being lascivious.

“I’m looking for a dress,” I say. “But this… what… hmmm.”

I look over my shoulder for Lydia, but she seems to have evaporated somehow.

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