After the Wedding by Courtney Milan

Author:Courtney Milan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: 0
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Adrian barely saw her for days once he understood what to do with the plates. It didn’t matter.

He gradually came to realize that he had a problem over the course of those days.

He spent most of his time at Harvil Industries, working with his artists. Refining, looking for everything that was wrong, shaping the china designs again and again until the story meant more and more to each of them.

He came home for late repasts.

Camilla was always there. She’d tell him about something new she’d read in the ecclesiastical reports or another idea for when he had time again. They would talk, and he would like it, and he didn’t have time to think about how much he was liking it. He really didn’t.

He’d go to sleep and he’d think about china designs—about tigers chasing dreams, and…

And the plates weren’t about her. Really, they weren’t. Every one of the artists involved had a different opinion of what they meant. Mrs. Song didn’t precisely cry when they decided on that first plate, a tiger cub chasing that stylized dream over a waterfall into new and strange terrain, but it was close. Adrian felt a strange compression in his chest when they planned out the last one.

The plates weren’t about Camilla. They were about everyone.

Yet somehow, Adrian had started thinking of her as part of that everyone.

That yearning just got worse with every passing day.

Adrian had a problem, he realized after he’d been working on the design for so long his head was spinning with lack of sleep.

Truth be told, he’d had one for a while, but he admitted it to himself for the first time on a long night, while they were on the verge of finishing their designs.

He realized it at night, in bed, when he was alone.

It wasn’t cold, and he wasn’t lonely. Not in any traditional sense of the word. He wasn’t one of those sordid creatures who claimed that it was impossible to go for any length of time without having intercourse: any man who claimed such a need was hardly a man.

Adrian had nobody to blame for his problem but himself, and he should have seen it coming.

His problem was this: Adrian liked Camilla.

He more than liked her; he’d noticed that first dizzying swirl of sexual interest the first day they’d met. She was pretty and so easy to talk to. She listened to him and had her own thoughts. She’d adjusted to the whirlwind that they’d embarked on with a grace that few would have managed.

He knew what she’d gone through; he’d watched Rector Miles and the others she had worked with for only a handful of days, and even that alone had been mildly painful to watch.

She’d told him everything she had experienced, and as bare as her recital had been, he’d heard her loneliness, her worry. He knew how much she yearned.

And still, she’d looked him in the face and told him that she believed she would be loved.

It had sunk into his skin.

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