“Yes.” I’d left the shutter open inside my chamber, and light flickered on the wall from the guttering torch at the back gate outside as I drew her in. She laid her hands on my shoulders and walked me backward until the bed’s edge at my knees made me sit, and in a flash of torchlight I saw her smile, a slow delighted smile that crinkled her blue eyes. Amid the shock I’d been thinking sudden cautious thoughts about this good job I had, about Senator Norbanus and the penalties that would await me for touching his daughter, but everything fled after that smile. I pulled her into my lap and began kissing her again and her mouth opened sweetly under mine. “Why?” I muttered. “Why me?” Because this was more than I ever thought I’d get, more than I should get because girls like her just didn’t do this. “Why?”

“Vix, can we talk later?” Her lips moved to my ear. “I’m a little nervous about this, after all, and I’d rather we got on with it.”

I got on with it, because when you’re nineteen and you’ve got a girl pulling your head down and her skirts up, you stop asking questions. I gave up and laid her back on the narrow bed.

“Be gentle,” I’d been told once. By my mother, of all people, after I’d gotten caught two years ago in a compromising position with a neighboring farmer’s daughter. My father growled and said he’d thrash me if I got anyone pregnant, but my mother gave me a little sound advice, and some of it was, “Be gentle with girls, especially if they’re new to it.” Not advice I’d ever had a chance to use, since the girl who’d yanked me headlong into the pleasures of the flesh had been a cheerful big-boned Brigantian three years my senior who had been dragging boys off to her favorite haystack for years, and the girls I’d had afterward were all in the same general mold. But somewhere in the soft dark with the flickering torchlight shadows, I remembered the part about being gentle, and I tried my best. Don’t know how well I did, because at one point Sabina took a deep sudden breath and gripped her lip in her teeth.

I froze. “Did I hurt you?”

“A bit,” she said, her voice beneath me incongruous in the dark. “But don’t stop, please.” She twined her arms about my neck, drawing me closer, and I kissed her again as I tried to remember to be slow, to be gentle, until the point when I forgot everything including her name and probably my own.