Author's Note: Thanks for your kind reviews, I'm glad you're enjoying it! I'll be updating 3x/week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (as long as I don't get distracted and forget- this should have been out yesterday. Whoops?

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Brienne didn't emerge again until lunchtime. No questions were asked as to why she'd spent her first morning on the ranch cloistered in her room, but everyone seemed to know that Jaime was somehow responsible for it. It resulted in him being subjected to quite a few cool stares and fiery glares, courtesy of the Stark sisters, while confusion had reigned supreme from Jeyne and Pod. Aunt Genna and Tyrion looked disgusted with him, and the twins' reproachful gazes made him feel two inches tall— they hadn't understood what their father had done to drive away their new friend, but they sure knew that it was his fault she had left.

Arianne didn't seem to mind Jaime's rudeness toward Brienne one bit, if the come-hither glances he'd been fielding from her all day were any indication. She seemed awfully sure of her positive reception, and why not? She was absolutely gorgeous, a pocket goddess of petite curves and long sable hair waving to the middle of her back and dainty features and flawless, tawny skin.

So why was he so preoccupied with catching the extraordinary gaze of the irritating wench who'd almost shot him? Instead of returning Arianne's flirtatious glances with some of his own, he was spending more time staring down the long table to its opposite end, where Brienne was having an animated conversation with his brother. She was vastly more palatable when she was happy, he noted, her smile lighting up her face into something almost lovely. Definitely appealing, although Jaime admitted he might be biased, because of those eyes.

Those eyes. The previous night, when she'd rescued him from certain death by Angry Arya, and he'd been able to see her in full light, he'd just been… shocked. He didn't know what he'd been expecting— a muddy hazel, perhaps, to go with the lackluster rest of her?— but instead was confronted with the most beautiful eyes he'd ever seen in a woman's face. Dark cobalt outer rim, with a surprising gold inner rim around the pupil, and between them: a blue both deep and bright, startling in its intensity. They'd actually surprised him into silence, no mean feat, as Jaime was generally acknowledged to be a talker.

They'd nearly knocked him on his ass that morning, too, when he'd found her entertaining his children with the instinctual ease of a natural mother. The way she'd looked at Tommen and Myrcy, like she'd fallen in love with them at first sight, the way she'd smiled at them, the gentleness of her hands when she'd lifted and held them… somehow, it felt like she'd been looking and smiling and touching Jaime, too. More regret had risen in him, to join what he already had stewing inside from the night before, and he'd wanted to make amends.

But he'd never really had to rely on anything approaching verbal skill to get along with women. The first half of his adult life, he'd been with Cersei— no seduction techniques needed there— and after her death, thanks to his looks, all he'd really needed to do was smile at a woman and she was generally his for the taking.

So when the time came for him to have a conciliatory interaction with the woman, he choked and ended up flirting. Badly, it would seem, because her beautiful eyes had widened with surprise and hurt and, if he weren't mistaken, tears before she walked away. What had he done wrong? He had to figure out how to communicate with her, or the next week would be pure hell.

Jaime tried to disguise his inattention to Arianne with tending to his children, which wasn't really a pretense, as it was always a chore to get them to finish their meals.

"Briemme!" they kept shrieking, eager for her attention. She wasn't exactly helping, because she was answering them with nonsense like "Yes, my muffin?" and "What is it, little chicken?"

"I'm not a little chicken," corrected Myrcy. "I'm a lion cub." Then she roared. It was adorable, with her high-pitched voice and the way she wrinkled her nose. If the melting expression on Brienne's face was any indication, she found it just as charming as Jaime did.

"Is that right?" Brienne asked, clearly amused.

"Daddy's a lion, so we're his cubs," Tommen explained.

Brienne flicked an unimpressed glance at Jaime. Its dismissiveness irked him but he just concentrated on chewing his sandwich.

Tyrion stepped bravely into the breach. "Our family's sigil is a lion rampant, and our motto is 'hear me roar', so there's an old— and probably not very funny— inside joke about all of us being lions."

"Briemme, are you a lion, too?" Myrcy asked.

"No, I'm not anything," Brienne said, looking taken aback by the question. "My family's sigil is a sun and moon."

"Brienne is an angel in human form," Sansa announced, casting a challenging eye around the table in search of dissenters.

"Ugh," complained the angel in human form. "Not only impossible, but ridiculous."

It was ridiculous, because if the woman was anything, it was a wench: sassy, saucy, impertinent, and mouthy. And now that he'd seen what her ass looked like in tight jeans, he was starting to have inappropriate thoughts about not only that ass, but the rest of her, as well.

"Are you going to make me list all the ways it fits you?" Sansa asked Brienne with a teasing smile. Jaime got the idea that this was an 'argument' they had frequently.

"Damned well better not," grumbled the angel, more surly by the second.

"Visenya," said Arya around a mouthful of salad. "If there were ever a Targaryen warrior goddess in the flesh, it's Brienne."

That comparison seemed to please the former angel much better, though she still seemed embarrassed, if the blush creeping up her throat were any indication. Jaime found himself wondering how if the blush also spread in the other direction, and how far down it went. A prickle down his spine announced another worrying flare of sexual awareness.

Then he shook his head and forcibly directed his attention to Arianne, who'd been spending the meal eating seductively at him. She bestowed upon him a sensual smile full of promise, which he returned with interest, but he couldn't resist a look at Brienne, who had noticed his interplay with Arianne and rolled her glorious eyes before resuming discussion with Tysha.

Now his 'irked' ratcheted up to 'vexed'. He wondered if Brienne would mock him if he'd been trading lingering glances full of sensual promise with her instead of Arianne, and found his breath coming quicker in a way it hadn't with the other woman.

What the hell is that about?

Jaime gave an internal groan. Was this his natural gravitation toward a challenge rearing its unwelcome head again? It had already gotten him into plenty of trouble in his life. His existence was complicated enough as it was, raising two toddlers and refraining from killing his annoying father and wrangling all the people in his department at Lannister Financial and conquering the logistics of being an adult in general. He did not need the added issue of feeling attraction for an unsuitable, difficult, oversensitive female.

He doggedly flirted with Arianne the rest of the meal and when it was over, offered to give her a one-on-one lesson on rope tying, the subtext of which she grasped without difficulty, and when they left the table for the corrals outside, he was feeling far more himself.

The afternoon passed without incident, with Sandor training the rest of the women on tying ropes into lariats. Arianne wasn't very good at it, requiring a lot of hand-over-hand demonstration necessitating Jaime standing behind her, arms around, to show precisely what she needed to do. She was a warm, fragrant bundle in his embrace, and she kept turning her head to make eye contact, which brought their faces close together. It would be effortless to bring their mouths together, to initiate a kiss as she doubtless intended, but a decade and a half of Cersei's horror of indiscretion had drilled into him a similar aversion; the idea of being witnessed by the others made him uncomfortable in the extreme.

Well, the idea of being witnessed by Brienne, at least. He didn't think he could survive her scorn if she saw him in a clinch with Arienne. Or anyone else, for that matter. Jaime sighed and detached himself from the woman so she could try it on her own for the twenty-fourth time.

Thus went the rest of the afternoon. Even after progressing from lariat-tying to lariat-throwing, Arianne required close assistance and supervision, so he found himself tethered to her side for the duration, no matter how he tried to amble off to see how the others— mostly Brienne— were doing.

Pod and Sandor seemed to be keeping things well in hand, though, if the laughter and smiling happening on the other side of the corral were any indication. It made him feel a bit left out, because there was no laughter on his side of the corral, and the only smiles were on Arianne's part, and meant to seduce him, and thus not very fun. Jaime heard Brienne laugh again and wished he were over there with them, instead.

He was very glad when Tyrion emerged from the lodge and announced dinner in a half-hour. He hastened from Arianne's side, pleading the need to wash the twins up for the meal, and indeed it did take quite a bit of wrangling to get them upstairs, hands and faces washed and hair combed, then back downstairs into their booster seats at the table to either side of him. They were hungry that night, however, so he didn't have to resort to too much stern fathering to get them to eat and thus could pay attention to the discussion happening at the far end of the table, where Brienne was having a lively conversation with Tyrion and Sansa.

His end of the table, besides the children, featured Arianne— again eating alluringly at him— and Sandor, who tried to never speak if he could manage it. Pod, on the other side of Arianne and looking both terrified by and attracted to her in turns, wasn't talking, either. Jeyne sat to Sandor's other side and alternated bites of food with frightened glances at the huge, scarred cowboy. Tysha and Arya were both quiet sorts, seemingly happy to just watch and smile at the others talking.

Tyrion, Jaime was well aware, had a great gift of gab, and Sansa had already shown herself to be an excellent conversationalist, but Brienne was the big surprise. When she relaxed and felt at ease, she was actually very personable. Amusing and intelligent, her face was so animated that he found himself watching her and smiling just to see how brightly she lit up the room.

It was only at the end of the meal that she realized how he was observing her. Over the course of just a few minutes, her brightness dimmed, smiles fading away to nothing as she just picked at the remains of her food. Finally she stood and asked Pod if he'd help her so she could have a last horse ride before dark, and was gone in a flash, Pod trailing in her wake.

Tyrion shot a suspicious glance down the table at Jaime, who felt a flicker of outrage. He hadn't done a damned thing for at least an hour, hadn't even said a word in twenty minutes, possibly a record for him.

How was it his fault that the very sight of him sent the woman into a downward spiral?