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We ate supper like two people at a formal dinner. He’d cooked something. I couldn’t remember what. It was probably wonderful. Ginger took one look at the table, picked up the lantern-jar with the sprite already waving inside it, and left through the cat door with as much dignity as she could drum up.

I’ll be in the barn, she said as she left. The beast and I have an arrangement. I’ll find you when I’m ready for breakfast. Fish. It will be fish or I will riot.

The hatch clicked. The house went quiet. And neither of us pretended to eat anymore.

“So,” I croaked. My voice had flown out the hatch along with Ginger. “No dressing changes due.”

“Aris said I don’t need to wear it any longer.”

“No plowing.”

“Only the one I hope to do in our bed.”

My grin was growing. I was finding my voice. “No villagers watching.”

“I’ll close the curtains.”

“No deliveries.”

“I dare them to bring one now.” He stood, and held out his hand, palm up, the way he’d handed me down from the wagon a hundred times. “Last term’s met, then.”

I put my hand in it.

“Terms met, farmer.”

He lifted me into his arms and carried me down the hall, my arms around his neck and the lamp left burning behind us. In the bedroom, he set me on my feet beside the big bed and looked at me a moment in the low golden light, sleet tapping on the glass outside, his not-purr already rolling through his chest.

“Say how you want to start,” he said.

“Start by getting where I can reach you.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, which put our eyes level. I stood between his knees and undid his shirt buttons one at a time while his hands rested on my waist, spanning it, his thumbs meeting at my front. The buttons took approximately one century to unfasten, because his mouth kept finding my shoulder, my forehead, the inside of my elbow. A witch could not be expected to work under these conditions.

Undressing went in the same unhurried manner. He handled laces like a male who could mend a harness in the dark. Every piece of clothing that came off me got set down carefully, and every piece that came off him widened my eyes further.

He was big. Mine. Scarred. Sitting on the edge of a bed being looked at with his chest thundering and his horn-bases dark.

I’d put my hands on him. I’d put my mouth on him. But I had never once had all of him with nothing in the way.

His cock thrust heavy against his belly, thick already.

The grannies’ book was conservative.

“You’re staring,” he said, tipping his head to hold my gaze.

“I’m appraising. It’s different. It’s a professional skill.”

“Rain.”

“You’re the best one,” I said. “Of everything.”

The sound he made then had no name I know. He reached for me, and I went.

He was more careful than any male had ever been about anything, and I let him be, because the fear was real.

He put his hands everywhere his mouth had already been. The oil made us both laugh, once, and then it very much stopped being funny.

“Tell me,” he said against my ear.