Morning broke, and sunlight came streaming into the lavish room, announcing the start of a new day to a woman still sound asleep on a plush bed, sprawled out in a position of total relaxation.
Eloise bolted upright with a stretch that cracked something pleasantly in her back.
"Ah — a good, dreamless sleep."
Then she caught sight of the clock and clicked her tongue. She was already late for breakfast. Well. Since she was already late, she reasoned, there was no sense hurrying now; she might as well take her time getting ready.
The clock ticked steadily along while she went through her morning routine entirely unhurried. When she finally rang the bell for the servants, she was quite certain that by this hour Ian would long since have left for work, which left her free.
The maids came in to help her dress, and she savoured the anticipation of a peaceful breakfast eaten alone, at her own speed, with nobody across the table.
She strolled leisurely down the hallway in a beautiful new dress, light and free as a bird let out of a cage, humming as she went and mulling over where she might go out and play today.
The smile died the instant she stepped into the dining room.
Ian was still sitting there, reading the newspaper.
Eloise stopped dead. Why had this burden of a man not disappeared yet? What was he still doing in the building?
"Why are you still here?"
She could already feel the indigestion coming toward her like weather.
"Is something wrong?" Ian asked coldly.
That attitude made her so furious that she genuinely considered grabbing a fork and skewering him with it. On reflection she decided the knife looked more effective, and glared at the knife beside her plate with real longing. Then she remembered that he was a top-tier swordsman she could never beat in a hundred years, swallowed her rage, and sat down.
"Why," she said through her teeth, "are you sitting here?"
"I'm having my meal," Ian said nonchalantly, still holding the newspaper up in front of him.
Eloise was deeply disappointed. For one brief, foolish moment she had allowed herself to hope that he had stayed behind in order to apologise for last night. She shook her head at her own gullibility. You could not expect a heartless man to turn considerate overnight, and it was unfair to the man and to herself to keep—
"My lady."
Ian set the newspaper down. His expression was serious.
"I've given some thought to this training you mentioned."
Eloise smiled brightly and began privately guessing which excuse he would produce. A palace duty. An unavoidable meeting. Some obligation to the royal knights that had regrettably only just been scheduled. She gripped her fork tightly and vowed that whatever came out of his mouth, she was not letting him back out of the deal.
"I've decided to give you the entire weekend."
She was so far into composing her refusal on his behalf that her tongue tripped over itself trying to stop.
She froze.
"Really? Both days?"
"Those were the exact terms you proposed," Ian said, unbothered.
Eloise sat there thoroughly baffled, wondering whether this man had hit his head on something in the night to produce a personality flip of this magnitude. Her hesitation lasted a beat too long, and he began, visibly, to take it back —
"No! No, no." She waved both hands. She would be a complete fool to pass up a chance like this.
Ian nodded to seal it and stood up, resolute, preparing to leave.
She studied his uniform. The palace, then; that was the formal collar again. Which meant he had waited the entire morning at that table — through her sleeping in, through her leisurely dressing, through the whole extravagant delay — simply to deliver one piece of news.
He turned back at the door.
"My lady."
"Yes?" she said coolly, while her heart went considerably faster than that, having no idea at all what he was about to pull.
He looked, unmistakably, a little bashful.
"Give it an honest try."
Eloise froze up again. Round two. Her mouth opened and closed without producing anything at all.
"That whole tit-for-tat thing you mentioned," Ian said. "Try it."
And with that he turned and walked off without a backward glance, leaving her sitting alone in the dining room in stunned silence, watching his retreating back with a face that held equal parts confusion and genuine doubt about the meaning of life.
The weekend arrived quickly, like a gust of wind, and brought a wave of nervous anticipation with it.
In the meantime Eloise had ploughed through an entire stack of romance novels and taken a walk in the garden every single evening, searching for some brilliant strategy hidden in the pages or in the hedges.
In the end she concluded that a direct, head-on approach was best. She had a tea party laid out under the trees and waited for her husband like a soldier waiting for a battle to start.
Ian arrived and looked at the table without enthusiasm.
"You're monopolising my entire day off," he said. "For tea."
Eloise sipped calmly, her elegant demeanour brushing his grumpiness aside without visible effort.
"The first session should be light," she said, smiling. "Just to get comfortable with one another. Consider it a warm-up."
Inside she was screaming, because she could not bear that piercing, scrutinising stare of his, which appeared to be attempting to bore a hole through her face and out the back of her head.
"Changing habits takes time," she went on. "And most importantly, before anything else, I need to gauge my student's current level."
"Gauge my level," Ian repeated.
Zero, Eloise judged silently. A flat, round zero. No decimal places required.
And the plot agreed with her, because this man was utterly hopeless at communication — so hopeless that when Diana went away to study, even the fans had felt sorry for the heroine over how coldly he brushed her off at the end. The memory surfaced whole: Ian drawing a firm cold line under his friendship with his childhood friend, right before she left, in the fewest words available to him.
Eloise's blood came up to a simmer. There was simply no way this man could ever understand a woman's feelings. A total block of wood.
She set the memory down and came back to the garden.
"We're still strangers, you and I," she said gently. "I think we should spend some time getting to know one another."
Ian agreed. Reluctantly, but he agreed.
"A year from now," Eloise declared confidently, "you'll be thanking me for this, Your Grace."
He raised an eyebrow. "You talk as though you can predict the future."
Cold sweat. She laughed it off at once. "I'm only guessing. Roughly. Broadly speaking."
That had been close.
Ian sighed, and there was the faintest colour along his cheekbones as he agreed to try having a conversation — a small effort, but a noteworthy one, and she filed it.
"We'll start with the basics," Eloise said. "Simple daily greetings."
"We already saw each other this morning."
"Seeing each other is one thing," she corrected him immediately. "Properly greeting each other is another thing entirely. People living under the same roof ask one another how they slept. They remark on the weather. Even the servants know to do that much."
Ian considered this with the seriousness of a man reviewing a map, and then applied the pure logic of a military genius.
"I can tell that you slept well simply by looking at your face," he said. "And you have set up a tea table outdoors, which already proves the weather is fine. So why would either of us need to ask?"