If any other children of the late '80s are reading, see if you can spot the blatant Square One TV reference!
It had been almost a month since Flora left St. Mystere to live with Professor Layton, and she still wasn't entirely sure what to make of him. He was clever, and charming, and made her smile so often that the long-hidden golden apple hardly ever faded from the skin above her collarbone anymore, but she was left wondering how a man who was so brilliant in so many ways could be so obtuse in just one. The one which was most important to her.
It was far from the most difficult puzzle that had been placed before him. She had been a child when orphaned, but under her father's orders the gates of St. Mystere had remained closed to visitors and its secret had been closely guarded until enough years had passed for her to leave childhood behind. It wasn't at all a difficult deduction to make to realize that the puzzles hadn't be set to find a guardian for her. But Layton never seemed to make it.
She wasn't too young to marry, but perhaps she was too young for him, young enough that he couldn't even see her as a romantic prospect. Perhaps in a year or two, when she had passed through the gap between not being a child and fully being an adult, when it would be entirely clear that she'd come into his life far too late for them to ever see one and other as father and daughter, that would change.
She surprised herself by wanting that change. She'd been so frightened when she'd been told that her father's plan had been put into action at last, so terrified at the thought of a strange man carrying her off just because he'd won her in a game of puzzles, but that had changed almost as soon as she'd started sneaking out of her tower to watch him. The very first time she'd seen his eyes light up when he was presented with a puzzle she'd realized that if she'd been asked to choose a type of man for herself it could only have been one who found so much pleasure in the riddles and brain-teasers which had made up her entire world for almost as long as she could remember. As she followed him from place to place in her disguise it had only become easier to imagine taking a place by his side, and the entirely dashing manner in which he'd rescued her from the tower had made her want that place.
She still followed him from time to time, hidden and shawled. She knew that he'd take her with him anywhere she asked, but she wanted to see how he acted within his own city when he didn't know she was there. It was no surprise that he was as much of a gentleman when he was alone with Luke or other men as he was at all other times, and so it also should have come as no surprise that she soon saw that she wasn't the only woman with her eye on him. He wasn't the most handsome man in the world--his eyes were too small, and set too high in his face; his face too wide; his nose too long and narrow for that width--but he was so kind and so intelligent that it would be surprising if he didn't have his admirers.
Although she didn't like to watch them watching him, it did make her happy to see that he never treated them with anything more than gentlemanly distance, not the warmth that he showed to her.
ADOFU QDO FDIV BV? I=V, V=E she wrote once on a piece of paper, because this was important and important things must always be shrouded in puzzles, but it was too obvious and too blunt and too much like a little girl tossing notes asking if people liked her, Y/N, and the last thing she wanted was to make him see her as more of a child than she worried he already did. Eight-percent of my heart is reserved for my future husband. This may not seem like much, but the rest has already been doled out; ten-percent to my parents, three to Luke, five to Lady Dahlia, and the remaining seventy-four-percent has been spread out into even portions of two-point-four-six-seven-percent to every resident of St. Mystere including the cat. Where, then, does the portion of my heart devoted to Hershel Layton lie? But numbers and math were too cold of a language to speak confessions of love in, so that too got set aside.
So rather than focus on puzzles for him, she focused instead on the ones she wanted to know the answer to. First among them exactly what she could do to win his heart, of course, but there were others. There was the mystery of his body; what it would be like to touch him freely, how her fingers against his skin might bring him pleasure, how he might do the same for her. One of the small inconveniences of being raised by a village full of robots was that she had very little idea of what to expect, with him or any other man, but information was easier to come by in London although she was too shy of people aside from Layton and Luke to do more than huddle in libraries and bookstores, flipping quickly through human anatomy books and scurrying away whenever she heard someone coming. The sexuality books she couldn't even look at without her cheeks burning, even though she knew that better, less clinical, information would be found within them.
There was his hat; what it might take to get him to remove it for her, to see his eyes unshaded by its brim or what his hair looked like beyond just the back of his head. There were the thousand little mysteries of his personality; finding out what he liked besides puzzles, what he disliked beside insane men in destructive flying machines and her attempts at cooking. Finding out more and more about which interests they had in common, which were different, and which she could learn to enjoy as well as he taught her about them in the new expanded world he'd brought her into. Anything at all he could teach her, she wanted to learn.
She wanted to take her spot by his side, the spot which he had won the right to hold her in through the strength of his mind and the strength of his heart. She wanted it more with each conversation that they had, with each little kindness that he offered her without even needing to think about it.
But she supposed that she could be patient enough to grow up for him a little more before letting him know how firmly he held her heart. There were still aspects of his personality she hadn't yet puzzled out, after all, and St. Mystere had raised her to be content with waiting however long she needed to as long as there were riddles available to solve.