The Vampire Duke’s Forbidden Mate

Oranges Out Of Season

Sunlight woke her, thin and pale, filtering gold through curtains she hadn’t drawn the night before. For a long moment Maren lay still, disoriented by the unfamiliar softness beneath her, the scent of jasmine oil still clinging faintly to her skin, before memory arrived all at once—the ball, the lotus, the house that had seemed to know her before she’d ever set foot inside it.

She rose, dressing quickly in a gown laid out for her—soft grey wool, finer than anything she’d owned, though plain enough not to feel like a costume. When she stepped into the hall, she found Odera already waiting, hands folded, as though she’d been standing there the whole night through.

“Good morning, Miss Maren. I trust you slept well.”

“I did,” Maren said, and found it was true. “Better than I expected to.”

“Breakfast is laid in the small dining room. Come, before it grows cold.”

Small dining room, Maren would learn, was a term used loosely.

The table alone could have seated twenty, though only a single place had been set at its head—fine white linen, silverware polished to mirrors, a chair cushioned in velvet the color of moss. Maren hesitated in the doorway, certain some mistake had been made, before Odera gestured her forward with the patient air of a woman who had clearly witnessed this exact hesitation before, in other girls, on other mornings.

What arrived, once she’d seated herself, made her breath catch outright. A servant set down dish after dish—soft bread still steaming, its crust dusted with something that smelled of honey and rosemary; a bowl of berries so dark and glistening they looked almost unreal, arranged with slices of pale cheese and candied nuts; a small pot of chocolate, thick and rich, unlike anything she’d tasted in her life; eggs baked in cream and herbs she couldn’t name, golden and soft. There was fruit out of season entirely—oranges, their bright peel curled decoratively beside the bowl, though it was months from the time such things should have grown anywhere near the capital.

“This is—” Maren started, and stopped, unsure how to finish. Too much seemed the honest answer, though it felt ungrateful to say so.

“Lord Cassian instructed the kitchens to spare no expense,” Odera said, refilling a glass of something pale gold and faintly sparkling that Maren hadn’t touched yet. “He was quite particular. He wished your first morning in this house to want for nothing.”

“Even the oranges?” Maren asked, turning one over in her hand. “These shouldn’t grow anywhere near here, not this time of year.”

“There is very little that troubles Lord Cassian’s kitchens, once he’s set his mind to something,” Odera said, and there was something in the dry precision of the words that Maren couldn’t quite parse—admiration, perhaps, or something closer to caution dressed up as admiration.

Maren ate slowly, savoring what she could, though the sheer excess of it sat oddly against the plainness of her whole life before this one—porridge and honey, bread that had to last the week, oranges saved as a rare treat rather than laid out as though they cost nothing at all. She thought of her mother’s kitchen, the careful rationing of every meal, and felt a strange, guilty ache beneath all this abundance, as though enjoying it too freely might somehow betray the life she’d left behind.

“Lord Cassian has business this morning,” Odera said, once the plates had been cleared, “but he asked that you be shown the grounds at your leisure. Miss Bryn has already gone ahead.” A faint, dry note entered the housekeeper’s voice. “She was quite insistent about the gardens.”

Maren huffed a small laugh, grateful to set the strange ache aside for now. “That sounds like her.”

Odera led her down a wide staircase and through a set of doors into daylight, and Maren stopped short, breath catching. The gardens spilled out before her in tiers—roses climbing trellises in shades of deep red and white, a hedge maze she could just glimpse the edge of, and beyond it all, the glint of the fountain she’d heard the night before, water arcing silver in the morning light. It did not feel like the grounds of a vampire lord. It felt like something out of the stories her mother used to tell, back when Maren was young enough to believe such places existed only in stories.

“This way,” Odera said, and guided her past the roses to a smaller courtyard, where Bryn was already sprawled dramatically across a stone bench, one arm flung over her eyes.

“I have decided,” Bryn announced, without opening her eyes, “that I will never leave this garden. You may visit me here for the rest of my days.”

“You’ve been out here five minutes,” Maren said, sitting beside her.

“Five glorious minutes.” Bryn sat up, grinning, her hair still tousled from sleep, wine-flush long faded from her cheeks but the wonder still bright in her eyes. “Maren, this place is unreal. Did you see the size of my wardrobe? I counted eleven dresses. Eleven. I’ve owned eleven dresses in my entire life, total, and most of them were yours first.”

“I noticed you helped yourself to the rosewater already.”

“Generously,” Bryn agreed, entirely unrepentant. She tilted her head, studying her sister with a shrewdness that sat oddly on her usually carefree face. “You look happier this morning. Not just—performing happy. Actually happy.”

Maren considered the fountain, the roses, the warm gold light pooling over it all. “I think I might be,” she admitted, quiet with the strangeness of it.

“Good.” Bryn squeezed her hand once, sudden and sincere. “You deserve it. After everything.”

They did not speak of their father’s warnings, or the crying girl through the wall of the candidates’ inn, or the bell pull instead of a lock. For a moment, sitting in the sun with her sister’s hand in hers, Maren let herself simply exist inside the good thing without picking it apart.

She found Cassian an hour later, in a study lined floor to ceiling with books, standing over a wide desk scattered with ledgers and correspondence, sleeves pushed to his elbows in a way that made him look, briefly, almost ordinary—less the polished courtier of the ball, more a man simply doing the work of running an estate.

He looked up when she entered, and something in his expression eased immediately, softened, as though her presence alone had lifted some quiet weight from his shoulders.

“You found your way to me,” he said, setting down his pen. “I half-expected Bryn to have claimed you for the gardens all morning.”

“She tried.” Maren glanced at the desk, the neat stacks of parchment, a wax seal pressed with an insignia she didn’t recognize—a raven, wings spread, encircled by thorned vines. “You’re working.”

“Correspondence, mostly. The tedious business of a marquessate.” He waved a hand at the mess almost apologetically. “Duskmoor doesn’t run itself, unfortunately, however much I might wish it did on quieter mornings.”

“Duskmoor,” she repeated, turning the word over. It suited him, somehow—something in the sound of it dark and elegant at once.

“My family’s holding, north of the capital. Not so grand as some, but mine.” A faint smile touched his mouth, though something flickered briefly behind his eyes—there and gone before she could name it. “Mine alone, now, for some time.”

She thought of what he’d told her the night before—no family, no one left. She didn’t ask. Some griefs, she understood, were not meant to be pressed.

He came around the desk instead, closing the distance between them, and reached to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear with the same unhurried tenderness he’d shown her the night before. “How are you finding your first morning as lady of my house?”

“Overwhelming,” she admitted. “In the best way, I think.”

“Only the best way, from now on.” His thumb traced, briefly, along her jaw, and she felt the touch settle warm beneath her skin, chasing away some small, unnamed unease she hadn’t realized she was carrying until it eased. “I meant what I said, Maren. I intend for you to want for nothing here.”

She believed him. She wanted, badly, to believe him.

It was Bryn’s shriek, some hours later, that shattered the quiet of the afternoon.

Maren found her in the east wing, standing amid a small disaster—an overturned vase, water spreading dark across polished wood, shards of porcelain scattered like fallen petals, and a young manservant hovering nearby in visible distress.

“I was only trying to see if the roses in the vase were real or enchanted,” Bryn explained, with the particular dignity of someone who knew she was in the wrong and had decided to brazen through it anyway. “How was I to know they’d topple the whole thing?”

“Because vases are not built to be shaken, Bryn.”

“It was an experiment.”

The manservant, clearly torn between amusement and horror, hurried to gather the pieces, murmuring something about fetching a broom. Bryn, entirely unbothered, plucked one surviving rose from the wreckage and tucked it behind her ear with a satisfied little hum, as though the destruction around her were simply the cost of doing business.

“You’re going to get us thrown out before the week is over,” Maren said, though she couldn’t quite keep the laugh from her voice.

“Nonsense. Cassian adores me already.” Bryn twirled the stem of the rose between her fingers, entirely too pleased with herself. “Besides, a house this large can surely spare one vase.”

From the doorway, unnoticed until he spoke, Cassian’s low laugh rippled through the hall. “One vase, and quite possibly several more before you’re through, I suspect.” He crossed to inspect the damage with an ease that suggested he found the whole scene more charming than troubling. “No harm done. Odera will have it set right within the hour.”

Bryn beamed at him, victorious, and Maren shook her head, torn somewhere between exasperation and gratitude—gratitude that this man, at least, seemed endlessly patient with her sister’s chaos, endlessly generous with the both of them.

She did not notice, in that moment, how closely he watched not the broken vase, nor Bryn’s careless delight—but her. Maren. The soft curve of her smile as she watched her sister, unguarded and easy, in a way she rarely allowed herself to be.

He watched the way a man studies something he intends to keep.