"I want to do it one more time."
Then I wondered what he would say besides "You're not afraid."
*"I don't like that. It shouldn't be remembered as the memory of your first kiss."*
Even though we had been intimate several times and both knew we were husband and wife, my feelings surfaced as I found myself unable to let go of my attachment to this moment between us.
I covered my face with both hands. Then the man's head lowered toward me as if trying to understand what I wanted.
A soft sound escaped between my parted lips. Both of us were soaked to the tops of our heads, and though our lips merely grazed each other as if uncertain, the feeling of touching and then separating added to the bittersweet disappointment—like picking and eating unripe cherries.
It was then that Kaian, who had been letting me take the lead, made his move.
"Oh."
He wrapped his arms around my waist beneath the water and gripped the back of my neck with his other hand.
"A kiss—that's not how you do it."
"What? But—"
Kaian pressed his lips roughly to mine and invaded the space hidden behind them.
*Is there a different way to kiss?* The brief question contained in my "What?" melted and dissolved in the feverish intensity.
"..."
I was held in Kaian's arms, breathlessly sharing my breath with him. Sharing? It would be more accurate to say it had been taken from me.
The lukewarm lake water that had coolly surrounded my body moments ago became heated by the warmth between us, pooling against my chest.
"Ha... ha..."
When my lips finally separated from their demanding captor, I helplessly leaned my head against his shoulder and gasped for air.
Even with his arms still around me, Kaian unhesitatingly waded through the water toward the shore. My body, which had been floating in the water, was pushed onto land, and as gravity took hold, I immediately felt cold.
I hunched my shoulders and my lips trembled. But it soon improved.
It was as if a creature had emerged from the lake. The man rising from the water was swift and powerful. His huge, solid body pressed down upon the small woman's frame in an instant.
As if my chill had evaporated, other sensations enveloped my body.
---
It had been some time since Kaian first felt the urge to kiss Claudel.
During the nights that followed their first time together, Kaian had not kissed Claudel on the lips. He'd never been with a woman before.
Before the death of the previous Duke of Temnes, he'd been told that Queen Silvia had inquired about his potential marriage to Princess Bianque. The Queen had a brother and sister with blond hair and blue eyes who resembled her exactly.
He'd grown up with them more like true siblings than cousins, so when talk of marrying Bianque arose, he'd immediately thought of them as being too closely related—practically incestuous.
In the Kingdom of Oberon, marriages between cousins were quite common. Kaian knew intellectually that in other countries, there were even marriages between uncles and nieces, but the thought of him and Bianque becoming a couple filled him with strong revulsion—it simply wouldn't work.
At that time, Kaian had firmly stated his intention to refuse any discussion of marrying Bianque.
Temnes had raised its descendants in asceticism for generations, and as far as Kaian knew, his father had been with no women other than his mother. Of course, there might have been limits to a child's knowledge of their parents' private lives. Even now, he didn't know if his father had been with women without his mother's knowledge.
The reason he was strongly convinced there had probably been no extramarital affairs was because the previous Duke of Temnes had a personality that brooked no hypocrisy. He wasn't the type of duplicitous character who would preach to his child, Kaian, about the misfortune that a Lord's corruption would bring while secretly indulging himself.
Kaian respected that and considered it something to emulate. As a result, he'd never been with a woman. Occasionally he'd overheard the stories of men heavily drunk after fierce battles on the battlefield, talking as loudly as street ruffians.
*"Hehe, last night the woman let me kiss her."*
*"It's so incredible I could die."*
*"Haha! I'm just anxious to be worthy of such favor."*
The story of stealing a courtesan's kiss had been such a momentous achievement that it became a major part of their repertoire.
According to them, the one thing women who spent the night with men for money never allowed was their lips. They said you only kissed someone with whom you shared genuine feelings.
Afterward, Kaian had thought the man who first told that story must never have been granted such intimacy by a woman. Women were delicate and complex beings. So were his mother, his aunt Queen Silvia, and his younger maternal cousin Bianque.
There was no way such coarse men could have grasped the idea that women only gave their hearts to those they truly cared for. That's what he'd concluded. These men, covered in blood and wielding swords during the day, were boasting as if they'd acquired a unicorn's horn.
Nevertheless, the saying that women only allowed kisses to those they had feelings for seemed credible.
As he'd watched Claudel grit her teeth and keep her mouth firmly shut throughout that night, he'd thought the story he'd heard through gossip about women doing this was true. It seemed she'd shown her willingness to yield her body but not her heart.
Kissing a woman with her eyes squeezed shut and an exhausted expression had seemed impossible in that atmosphere.
After her consumption improved, Claudel's lips—their color now restored—had hovered before his eyes like flower petals blown by wind, and sometimes like butterflies fluttering gracefully. But Kaian couldn't easily reach for them. It was as if he'd already been rejected, because Claudel had never shown that she wanted him.
*"Can I kiss you?"*
It had been Claudel who approached him first. A hand had touched his cheek as if asking permission. And the woman in his arms, looking up at his face, seemed to hold Kaian in her thoughts—as if he meant something to her.
He knew it couldn't truly be like that. Claudel of Vermont had been forced to marry Kaian of Temnes by the King's command. The only thing that should have captured her attention in Rowan lands was the tombstone lying cold in the castle catacombs.
Claudel hadn't come to Rowan to marry him. She'd been a woman who'd come here intending to die.
Kaian, who'd spent so much time contemplating having such a person as his wife, found the situation almost absurd. He'd been so enraged when he'd seen a woman trying to escape through death without his permission. So he'd saved that woman.
In the realm of the Lord of Rowan and Duke of Temnes, he existed to remind the woman who wanted to die on her own terms that there was nothing in this world that didn't bend to his will.
"Just a little slower..."
A faint moan passed through her lips, brushed his cheek, and drifted past his ear.
The baskets containing the food Claudel had prepared for him were pushed aside and scattered, and the flowers in the charming wreath she'd made were disheveled and crushed by their movements.
*Why did I say I was going to teach her how to swim?*
Kaian's throat burned as he gazed at the woman floating on the water. The woman's red hair rippling above the blue sky reflected on the water's surface seemed like a mystical halo. Sunlight fell gently upon her glistening pale skin.
Beneath the wet clothes that swayed with the water's flow, her body—which Kaian had once desired in exchange for ten cartloads of provisions—was revealed tantalizingly.
Looking at this, Kaian felt as if he were parched despite being submerged in water. It occurred to him that what he'd felt every night while watching the sleeping woman had merely been a warning leading him to this trial.
The golden eyes of the woman who opened them were so beautiful. Kaian had released Claudel's hand, forgetting that he'd promised to hold her and assured her he wouldn't let anything happen. Because he'd had the overwhelming urge to touch those eyes.
But he hadn't anticipated what the panicking woman would do.
*"Oh, you liar! You said you wouldn't fool around."*
The moment she'd grown angry at him and struck Kaian's chest with a fist that could hardly be considered threatening—his heart had ached.
Every time Claudel's small fist hit his chest, something had stirred in his heart. The kiss was permission and acknowledgment. Did the fact that she'd placed her lips on his mean she was at least willing to accept him as her husband?
But it wasn't the time to question such things.
"Duke..."
Wet clothes couldn't impede his access to Claudel. As kissing was added to their intimacy, her responses became incomparably more passionate than before.
Was this the same sensitive area she used for eating and speaking? Kaian craved Claudel's lips. But the more he possessed what he'd been dreaming of, the more he felt as if his soul was being drawn away by the woman with each kiss.
*Father, as the Lord of Temnes, I did as you taught me to avoid corruption.*
He'd never once done anything shameful as a successor and had never wanted to escape the heavy responsibility placed upon him. Why hadn't his father warned him that he would become so captivated by the person who was his wife?
He might gradually attach deeper meaning to and become obsessed with the woman he'd first been intimate with. Rather than simply teaching him not to complicate the family lineage with affairs, it would have been more appropriate to teach him how to control his insatiable desire for the woman he'd taken as his wife.
Kaian greedily caressed Claudel before pulling back from her body. It wasn't an action born of restraint but preparation for what would follow next.
He observed that the area around her eyes and her lips, which had been thoroughly kissed, were flushed red. As soon as she met his gaze, Kaian's urgency intensified.
When he tried to remove the wet, clinging clothes, Claudel panicked.
"No, Duke!"
"No one comes here."
It was a place where no one could approach—arranged specifically so the two of them could spend time together in private.
Claudel seemed overwhelmed by Kaian's intensity, so she shook her head and trembled.
"But... this doesn't make sense. We can't..."
Kaian kissed her again, seeing that reason was returning to the woman's dazed eyes.
"Ah..."
The breathy voice was entrancing. The sounds made by the impassioned woman resembled the plucking of a harp's finest string.
"Duke, please stop."
However, as he showed no signs of relenting easily, the woman lying in the flower field kept trying to restrain him.
"Claudel."
When he called her name, the woman's eyes—bright as the noonday sun—widened.
"Say my name too."
Her fist, which had been pushing against Kaian's shoulder, relaxed and crept up to the back of his neck as if to embrace him.
"Kaian."
The man whose name she'd granted permission to use pressed forward into the opening that had appeared.
---