“Of course,” she had the good sense to look a bit ashamed, “professional curiosity overruled good sense, I’m afraid.” She felt the commanding presence in him then, and not the one from their nighttime adventures. This was the General. This was the Executioner of Earl’s Crossing and she had to tred carefully.
But then there he was. Her Quinnley. Her General. She surveyed him, bashfulness at being caught gone completely. Clover licked her lips, held his gaze and smirked. “Why should we have to choose just one?”
And they didn’t. The following morning they even commandeered the kitchen and the dining table and the floor. Savages. Ravenous. Like their time apart had not dulled the ache for one another. Chloe was so spent after their time together, she fell asleep in the carriage on the way home, clutching her satchel to her chest. Cheek pressed so firmly against the tassels pillow from the carriage bench that when she awoke, blearily, strings were imprinted into her skin.
The General found his way to her shoppe on more than one occasion over the next two weeks. Once he even dared to summon her to Avondale, smirking charismatically when she arrived heated and angry at being called like a pet. But the smirk gave him away, he knew that she’d be furious and that her fury would be taken out on him. That night they broke furniture. That night she had never had a better apology.
Duties were not forgotten but she became even more efficient. She completed her tasks precisely and swiftly, in case he would come to her. She managed to receive word after a month that Marigold had be safely relocated with her child. Stolen in the night beneath the noses of this new commander’s spy-hounds. It had been a tedious task but Clover had been insistent to Aaron. The baker could identify her. Knew her name. Knew her face.
Even as she reveled in that small success, she felt a burn in her chest. She longed to share that success with someone other than her second-in-command. She felt this itch she couldn’t manage to scratch and her left her with a nervous energy for the better part of a week.
Coincidentally, it was the same part of the week where the Belvedere heir failed to materialized. Clover felt so strange. Strange, because suddenly she wanted to tell him about her day. She wanted to make him laugh. She wanted to lie in his arms, sated and happy and listen to him talk about everything and nothing at all. She wanted to feel the rumble of his snores beneath her head and how his fingers absently traced her spine even in sleep.
Chewing on the corner of her thumb, she wondered if she should send him a summons. Return the favor, so to speak. The idea made her smile but it felt too needy, it felt…well, it left her feeling exposed. Something less obvious, then. So she spent an entire candle and evening sketching. Snow fell outside the window in thick, heavy flakes as winter became to settle in. She felt the chill in her fingers ease with each brush of the graphite against the page. Clover finished in the very early morning hours of the following day, fingers gray from smudging and eyes a bit red rimmed. The seamstress didn’t even bother to move to the bed, as she fell asleep in the chair by the window.
Light streamed in the window, falling over the unconscious seamstress when the door open down in the shoppe. Wearily, she opened her eyes and rubbed her hands together before cursing herself for not washing up last night. Undoubtedly, she’d have some smears on her face. It took her a moment to wash up, change and become presentable for the day. Gray eyes caught sight of the sketch from the previous evening and she smiled. She removed the page from the very expensive sketchbook the General had gifted to her. She laid a scrap price of cloth over the image before she folded the pages and sealed it within an envelope she used for her customers. From memory and without pausing for a moment in the recollection, she scrawled Avondale’s address on the front.
The missive was off to Avondale before most of the other shoppe’s opened and she wondered if he would receive it tonight when he returned from Wymberly. She wondered if he was even in Thebes. Surely he would have told her if he was leaving? No. No what obligation did he have to her. She hoped he might have told her. For the cause of course. For the intelligence, naturally.
She felt her heart lurch at the thought of not knowing where he was. She worried of the danger he might be in. Something else crept up alongside all these emotions, foreign and warm. It slide along her skin, not like a serpent, but like a blanket. It enveloped her in a sense of comfort, of a new type of want.
And alongside of it, suddenly, fear. It wouldn’t be what she thought it was. Clover would not have been so foolish. The Resistance leader, lost daughter of Northam, would not have been so reckless as to fall in love with General Quinnley Belvedere, loyalist to the High Commander.
