Page 7 of A Guard and a Gardener

Jiron glanced at me sharply, his brows furrowed, but his face began to soften as he searched my own. “You’re not...are you telling me the gossip hasn’t yet made its way to the gardens?”

I shrugged, leaning back on my hands. “The elms aren’t a particularly talkative bunch, and the carnations prefer to brag about themselves, you know?”

He laughed, startling me with both the unexpected sound and the genuine humour in it, and I longed to hear it again as soon as the air fell silent once more.

And then he sobered. “I do not know how to speak it,” he whispered. “I fear I cannot.”

“You could tell it backwards,” I suggested, rewarded by a chuckle this time. My heart and body both warmed, pleased I’d been able to draw such responses from him.

“Backwards, little one? How would that work?”

“Well,” I coaxed. “At the end of the story, you’re...”

“Here,” said Jiron, catching on. “With you.”

“An excellent place to start.” I paused and then dared myself to continue, unable to believe I was being this forward with a man I’d just met. “And finish.”

The guard immediately looked away and I silently cursed myself.

“I do not have to burden you with my tale.”

“That’s not...reallynotwhat I meant,” I said hurriedly. “Please continue.¿Por favor?”

“I was captured,” Jiron began. “It was not a...pleasant experience.”

I swallowed. He didn’t elaborate, which I was thankful for, but my imagination still ran wild with the horrors of what he musthave endured. And I was well aware that I’d lived a relatively sheltered life: not well off, but hardly in the depths of poverty that others were, born to a good family with a father who respected my mother and had only taken his belt to me when I’d seriously fucked up. To be subjected to the deliberate cruelty of another...

“Time did not hold meaning under their hands, but I’m told it was a few weeks.” Jiron’s thumb brushed against mine as he copied my pose, but he did not seem to react at the contact, staring up at the sky instead. I bit my tongue to hold in the gasp that wanted to escape, because the warmth of his skin was a sharp yet welcome shock to my system.

“Before that...well. My failure, I suppose.” Jiron’s chin lowered and he gave me a rueful look. “A group of rebels were hunting His Majesty. I was neither fast nor strong enough to kill them all like they deserved.”

I frowned. If the king had been captured, I was surethatgossip would have reached even my ears.

“But he got away,” I said, becoming surer of that fact when Jiron did not correct me. “You protected him.”

“I kept him – and his husband – from the rebels,” he admitted. “But left them both exposed to a whole host of other dangers when I fell to the enemy’s greater numbers.”

“Doesn’t sound like failure to me. You’re one man, Jiron. Even as...”

Deliciously fit...perfectly muscular...

“…well-trained as you undoubtedly are, no one can take on half a dozen men on their own and win.”

His mouth curled into the slightest of smiles at that, but he said nothing.

“Oh-hoh!” I cried excitedly, squirming around in the dirt to face him. “It was more than half a dozen, right?”

Jiron stared back silently, attempting to be impassive and professional, but I saw right through him.

“Ten?” I guessed, shaking my head as soon as I said it when his expression didn’t change. “No. Twelve? Fifteen?” His cheek twitched. “Dios, you took downfifteen men?”

“Fourteen, little one,” he said, shaking his head at me. The smile had widened now, clearly begrudgingly but quickly consuming his entire face. He was fucking gorgeous.

“Fourteen,” I breathed in awe. “By the Blessed Five, you must have been unstoppable.”

“Not to the fifteenth,” Jiron said dryly. I snickered, even though my insides ran cold at the image that conjured itself in my head: the brave guard on his knees, blades at his neck, exhausted and yet still so fierce. His enemy crowing their victory even as they stood among over a dozen of their own dead.

“Further,” I encouraged as Jiron’s face bled of all amusement and began to mirror the same horror. “Further back. What was before that?”

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