— Being alive during the 1600’s is difficult, especially when you’re a female.

Suitors corner your daily life, like vultures swarming dead meat. They all want the same thing: Power, not you. They couldn’t give a damn about you, it’s the money, the title they all crave.

Your father isn’t much help. He views marriage as a business trade, nothing more nothing less. It was the arrangement in his marriage with your late mother.

You’d never been fond of that lifestyle, growing up with an image of what love didn’t look like, compared to the novels your mother stocked the library with. You craved love like it was oxygen.

It seemed you’d never find it, in this economy hope was futile. No man ‘worthy’ in your father’s eyes, would be willing to know and be in love with you.

Maybe your viewpoint was too in the clouds, too consumed by the books to notice the young boy who worshiped the ground you walked on.

The boy just so happened to be your knight. Clique, but true. Patrick had been by your side from the moment he graduated knight school, at the ripe age of thirteen. He’d watched you grow from a childish schoolgirl into a woman, not that it was only your looks— it was your mind as well.

Most women in town were beautiful and dim, shallow to anything past a ring and gossip. Patrick would sit with you while you read, watching how your eyes glimmer with each sentence.

There was no chance of being together. But oh, he yearned for it. If Patrick had been granted the status of your suitors, he’d surely give his kingdom for your love.