The steaming copper tub was almost the only thing in the room, and the scent of rosemary oil wafted up from the steaming water.
Maria opened up a bath sheet wide, and turned away to give me some privacy. I stepped into the warm water, and inhaled with surprise at its heat. When it hit my most private of parts, the throbbing still there from touching myself, I felt a jolt run through me and the flash of Maksim’s face had me biting my lip holding back the shameful sensations only exasperated by the hot water.
“You’re so quiet,” Maria said, still looking away, but now smiling. “Don’t tell me you’re swooning over that hulking brute that calls himself your brother.”
“Stepbrother,” I corrected as I slid down into the hot water, “as he’s always quick to tell me.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Maria said, smiling so hard now that her dimples showed. Once I was submerged up to my shoulders in the water, she gathered up the sheet and opened her eyes, raising an eyebrow at me.
Annoying as it was to apparently be so readable, Maria had been aware of my less-than-sisterly feelings towards my step-brother for as long as I’d been having them. She was canny, as the scullery maids would say, and very little slipped past her. A little glance here, a blush there, and Maria had known exactly what was going on in my head. And she never let me forget that she knew.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, letting my back rest against the warm copper back of the tub, and wiggling my toes in the water, milky with oat milk to moisturize my skin. “That would be disgusting. And anyway, he’s nothing but a bully,” I added, desperately trying to believe what I was saying. I tried to summon up the sting of his words, his threat against Maria, but what came instead was pure desire and need. I could still smell his scent somehow, as if I still had my face buried in his shirt. “He’s always so nasty to me and I’ve had enough of it. Nobody treats me like that, nobody. I’m done trying to figure him out.”
Maria clearly wasn’t buying it. Not at all. She shook her head slowly, flaring her nostrils.
“You can’t fool me.” She took a glass bottle of verbena oil from the shelf, and dropped a few droplets into the water above me. I watched the oil disperse the surface of the water, shimmering in a tiny rainbow in the colorful light from the small blue glass window that illuminated the bath chamber.
“Come on. Why would I…what was the word you said? Swoon over a man who barely has the time or interest to even look at me?”
“I’ve got a theory about all this,” Maria said, taking a seat on the stool beside the tub, with a brush in her hand. She smoothed my hair over the back of the tub and then gathered it up in one fist, to begin working on the tangles near the ends. “I think he’s the one leaving all these gifts for you.”
I turned to look at her, making the water splash side to side in the tub. “Oh please.” She tugged at a few tangles. I felt the pinch on my scalp and winced. But she was always gentle about it, and patiently worked out the knots with a boar-bristle brush…. Which, come to think of it, had also been a secret gift. It had arrived with a bouquet of deep red roses, which were my very favorite of all the flowers.
“I’m serious,” she said, untangling the length of my hair slowly. “Who else could it be?”
I blew out a breath and turned away, doing my best to sound exasperated. Not once had such a ridiculous idea crossed my mind. But now that Maria had mentioned it, I found it wildly erotic. All those gifts left by my bedside, by him?
“Gifts are left for us all the time. I don’t even like the gifts.”
“Oh shut up, you,” Maria said, laughing. “You can fool other people, but you can’t fool me. The crossbow? The blue dress?” Maria dropped my hair and stood up. Then grabbed a glass bottle from the shelf nearby, and gave it a shake. “This?” She said, unscrewing it and drizzling the viscous liquid down into the water.
The room was filled with the most wonderful scent of lavender, and as I wiggled my legs, it foamed up marvelously, into heaps of bubbles, so that in an instant, it was as if I was sitting inside a cloud.
Maria stood in front of me, hand on her hip.
I didn’t know what to say, but I knew for sure I was blushing. And so I sucked in a big breath and submerged myself beneath the waterline.
The sound of Maria’s wonderful giggle was muted through the water, and I found myself giggling too, in a stream of soapy bubbles. Being underwater gave me just a little privacy and some room to think.