.innocent as lace.
She touched his wrist gently, the way she always did when she wanted attention but didn't want to bother him. "Gwendal, you got quiet. What are you doing?"
He brushed his hair back, smoothing his features from a reflexive frown of disapproval. No one was allowed to interrupt his work without damn good reason, but Greta was cute, and Gwendal had a fairly well-established weakness for cute things. "Paperwork," he said.
"I can see that." Greta turned her head to glance behind her at the piles of paper that littered the desk in stacks that had a very precise and profound order to them, an order which nobody except Gwendal could ever hope to decipher. "What specific paperwork are you doing?"
Gwendal spared a moment to scowl at the girl, who was perched atop the desk by his left hand. It was terribly cute but extremely inappropriate. No amount of lecturing about proper princessly behavior had been able to reverse the habit, and so he had learned to tolerate it instead. Besides, she never got in his way, and rarely interfered.
She was knitting.
"I'm looking over the economic sanctions held against Greater Shimaron," he said, looking down at the sheaf of papers. "We've held this embargo for a long time, as human reckoning goes. Our allies in Cavalcade have requested that--"
"We lighten some of the restrictions? Like the ones on wheat and salt, I bet," Greta mused to herself. The knitting needles in her hands twisted together with expert efficiency, never hesitating or wavering.
He was impressed in spite of himself. The Mazoku lord grunted faintly. From the sounds of it, she's been paying more attention at these conferences than her father. It wasn't that Yuuri wasn't turning out to be a decent hand at governing, but rather that he appeared to have a terrible attention span for details and needed to be reminded, in advance, of all these sorts of things.
"Yes, wheat and salt are the critical stumbling blocks," he said, tapping his pen against the desk. "Shin Makoku is one of the continent's primary exporters of salt, which is a fundamentally important resource for civilization. Besides the fact that without salt a man can die, it is used in preserving food, making paper, an ingredient in--"
Greta observed, "It looks like an awful lot of paperwork. Shouldn't you be doing more of it?"
He cut himself off mid-sentence to realize with surprise that, yes, indeed, he had stopped doing the paperwork in order to ramble at her about the necessity of salt. "I am," he said, irritably. If she really wants to know about salt, she can get Gunter to tell her about it.
But Greta seemed uninclined to move. A scarf formed steadily, coiling up into her lap. He was already re-reading the paper before him before he realized that she might have said that on purpose to shut him up, but if she had, good for her.
After a long moment she asked, "So what is it, exactly?"
This time he was prepared. "It's a petition. Our allies are listing the restrictions that they would like lifted, and in turn what they are willing to offer us." He might have to hold his bleeding-heart Maou by the throat to keep him from just abandoning the sanctions without any compensation. Or he might not -- Yuuri had been surprising him lately.
"Tell me about it." Gwendal cast her a suspicious look, but she was all innocence. "Read it out as you go! Maybe it'll help you think, and it'll help me learn, right?"
"I think you're trying to make things difficult for me," he stated.
The human girl gave him a pout. "If you like," she suggested, "I can do the paperwork and read it out loud to you, and you can knit! I bet that would make you feel better."
Gwendal made a grunting sound to indicate his skepticism.
"And," Greta said, brightening, "I can sit in the chair and you can take the desk!" She kicked her legs in delight. "You can be my eye-candy!"
The mental image alone was enough to make the Mazoku lord want to snatch the knitting from her hands. "Eye-candy?" he snapped. "Who taught you to think things like that?" He didn't need to ask; he was willing to bet it was his mother. He scowled at the petition and scribbled a particularly fierce comment on his personal notepad.
Gentle tick-ticking of knitting needles did not resume. "Gwendal," Greta said, "you just totally ignored the compliment in favor of finding something to complain about. Anissina was right, you're going to get wrinkles."
"I don't need children to flatter me," he fumed.
A slipper landed on his shoulder. Gwendal stared at it for just a moment, shocked, which was long enough for the leg attached to the slipper to shove him back in his chair. He slowly glanced up the long, long leg attached to the slipper and into the pixieish face of its owner.
"Gwendal, I'm nineteen," she pointed out.
He scowled at her. "Yes, and?"
"And I'm human. For a human, that's not considered a child anymore."
"Maybe not," he admitted, and then his attention was caught by the long, long leg attached to the slipper still resting on his shoulder. Blue eyes flew up to meet her calm brown gaze, scandalized beyond outrage. "You-- You--" Gwendal sputtered incoherently and finally settled on, "Is that a garter?"
That was definitely not his cute little Greta wearing that devil's smile. "You noticed," she said, sounding pleased.
His most compelling memories of a garter involved his mother's third wedding when one had been tossed into the air and landed on his head. He swore it had been traumatic. Gwendal felt the odd burning settle into his chest and he snapped, "That has to come off right now," and he reached for it only to have her dark hand slide over his, capturing it on her thigh. Then she didn't move.
Very slowly, Gwendal felt himself flush.
Greta said sweetly, "So, Gwendal. I think we were about to have a discussion about how I'm not a little girl anymore."
"We were absolutely not!"
"Well, we are now." Greta slid off the desk and into his lap and it became almost immediately very, very difficult to argue with her.
He hadn't really stood a chance against her. She'd been planning this for years.