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He was over the side and in the tub with her before she had emerged, coughing and spluttering.

“I didn’t think you’d actually drop me!” she said indignantly. His arms had already closed around her, hauling her up against his chest. “Or, actually get in the tub with me,” she admitted breathlessly.

“I seldom say something unless I mean it,” he reminded her, enjoying the feeling of her body pressed against his.

“I expect the floor is quite covered in water.”

He glanced over the edge. “A few puddles, maybe.”

She was staring at him.

“What is it?”

She blushed. “You look so boyish, when your hair is forward on your face like that,” she said, tucking her wet hair behind her ears. “Like I remember you,” she admitted in a rush. “From those years we were promised.”

That gave him pause for thought. “I am generally considered to have a good memory,” he admitted. “But that period of time is, I confess, a little foggy in my brain.”

She screwed her face up. “Is that your tactful way of saying you do not remember me, my lord?” she asked.

He could tell she was joking, but for some reason he felt the oddest tugging in his chest. He put a hand over hers and placed it there. “I remember you, here,” he said. “Where it counts.”

Fen swallowed. “Oh,” she said and seemed to struggle for words.

They both looked at each other a moment.

“I remember that Solstice feast,” he said slowly. “When you held my hand, under the table.”

She drew in a breath. “You remember that, yet-”, her words broke off distractedly.

“Yet what?”

She recovered herself. “Yet, you do not remember the gift I gave you, of my dreadful tapestries,” she elaborated with a mock grimace. “Thank heavens for small mercies.”

He reached behind him for some leaves of soap and a washing cloth. “Yes, but that wasn’t what you were going to say,” he objected and squeezed the cloth between her breasts, watching the droplets of water trickle down the generous globes of her breasts.

Fen dropped down beneath the water, crossing her arms. “I can wash myself,” she protested.

“But I promised I would do it,” he tutted. “As you’re so worn out from my husbandly attentions.”

She gave a gurgle of laughter. “I never said that.”

“Well, then you can stand a few more, if that is the case,” he said maneuvering her round so that her back faced his front. “Let me wash your hair.”

She sighed as he ran some soap leaves through the length of her wet hair. “Oh, very well, if ‘twill give you pleasure.”

“It sounds like it gives you pleasure,” he teased, as she tipped her head back and closed her eyes.

“It does feel nice,” she admitted so artlessly, it made him ache for her again.

“Fen,” he started. Then found he had no notion of how to continue.

Her eyes opened, and she blinked up at him. “Yes?”

“I plan to apply to have your marriage to Thane legally declared null and void.” Where had that come from? In some dark recess of his brain, he had been turning that over. But he had not intended to raise it at such a time. Sometimes he astonished even himself.

“Oh?” Her gaze was wary.

“You’re not divorced,” he persisted, soaping up her hair. “Because you were never married to him in the first place.”