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In Sheep's Clothing	By : ParisWriter Category: +G through L > Harvest Moon Views: 2169 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Eight

Avery closed her eyes and slowly drew in a breath of the fresh mountain air, savoring the feeling as it filled her lungs. It wasn't like she couldn't enjoy fresh air back home, but it was the first chance she'd really gotten to slow down and relax since she and Klaus had arrived in Echo Village the previous day. Amir had shown up during her dress fitting and informed her that Klaus had decided he needed to rest, so Addie had taken that as an invitation to drag her all over town once they were finished at the tailor's shop.

Granted, the tour of the town had given her ample opportunity to meet nearly everyone who lived there, but Avery had been looking forward to spending some time alone with Klaus, as well. By the time she finally made it to the hotel in the evening, though, he'd been fast asleep. Instead of waking him, she decided it would be best if she rested up in preparation of what she was sure would end up being another busy day and she ended up ignoring the second bed in the room in order to cuddle with him in his own small bed.

Then she'd awoken in the morning to find him holding her in much the same manner a child would clutch a teddy bear during a nightmare and she started to worry. She knew it was likely nothing to get all worked up over, but a nagging voice in the back of her mind kept telling her that something didn't feel quite right. He'd also been unusually quiet during breakfast, which bothered her, but Marian had filled much of the silence with questions about how Avery was enjoying the town and their visit so far. After they'd finished eating, Klaus had asked her to take a walk with him – alone – and while Marian had given her a wink of encouragement she'd only felt her stomach sink in an odd way.

“What is it you wanted to talk to me about?” she finally asked, turning her head slightly to look at them as they continued walking side-by-side.

“I didn't say I wanted to talk about anything,” Klaus replied, shaking his head but continuing to look down at the path instead of turning his attention to her.

“You've had something on your mind all morning, I can tell,” Avery informed him, reaching out and taking his hand, then pulling on it gently to halt him in his steps. “Talk to me, Klaus. Please?”

Klaus sighed softly and finally looked at her, and Avery could see the conflicting emotions in his eyes. Instinctively, she linked her fingers through his and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze as she stepped forward and raised herself up on her toes to kiss him. He only barely returned her kiss, and when she looked up at him again she started biting her lip in worry.

“It's nothing drastic, love,” he told her, reaching up with his free hand to run his fingers through her hair. “But there is something I need to tell you and I've been struggling to figure out how to say it.”

“Why not just say it now?” she suggested with a shrug. “Get it out in the open and then you can stop worrying about it.”

Klaus let out another sigh and nodded, closing his eyes, and Avery watched him quietly as she waited for whatever it was he needed to say to come out of his mouth. A silent prayer kept running through her mind that he wasn't about to tell her he'd decided he didn't ever want to get married, after all.

“My last name isn't actually Albrecht,” he finally told her, his eyes still closed. “It's von Albrecht.”

He opened his eyes then and Avery blinked a few times in confusion as she wondered why his having subtly changed his last name at some point would be such a big deal. Then she recalled one of the first conversations she'd had with Elise after moving to Oak Tree Town, when her rival farmer had snobbishly pointed out she had forgotten the 'von' in her last name when addressing her.

“You're nobility?” she asked Klaus quietly, and he nodded in reply. “How important?”

“My family is ranked a little below Elise's, but at this point I don't even really consider myself part of the nobility at all any more. It's an old title that I simply inherited by being born to my parents, and a reminder of everything I hated about them.”

“It's just a title?” Avery prodded, suddenly remembering a remark he'd made on her birthday. “I think there's more to it than that, Klaus.”

“When they died, I inherited their entire estate,” he admitted, “which surprised me, actually. I thought for sure they would have completely disowned me after I ran away. But I suppose I should have known they wouldn't. Appearances were always so very important to them, after all.”

“So... You're nobility, and you're secretly rich. Anything else?”

“All those plots of land you and the other farmers compete over? They belonged to my family. I had them donated to the town after my parents died.”

“So I take it that means Veronica has known all along about this?” she asked him, a slight edge to her voice. “Who else knows? Marian, I assume.”

“I met Marian a year after my parents had died,” Klaus reminded her. “By then, it had already been four years since I'd dropped the title from my name. As for Veronica, I think she probably assumed when I returned to town and was simply going by Albrecht that I actually had been disowned and left it at that. Same for Raeger's mother and grandfather, while Raeger himself had only been about four years old when I originally left town so I doubt he even remembers my living there before I came back.”

“But he would have known your parents, so he probably did know about you being nobility,” Avery reasoned, clenching her jaw.

“Doubtful,” Klaus said, shaking his head. “My parents didn't associate with the 'low-borns' of the community. In fact, my mother hated Raeger's mother quite passionately. Called her a whore on more occasions than I would like to admit, and she was positively gloating behind the poor woman's back when his dad walked out on them shortly after Raeger's second birthday.”

“Well, I'm glad she's already dead or I would have had to beat her face in once we got back to town for that,” Avery said, causing Klaus to laugh a little.

“No one else in town knows anything about my lineage, as far as I know. Aside from Old Otmar, anyway, and well... You know how addled his brain is. Everyone else moved in or was born after I had left and probably just knew my parents as 'those snobby rich folks you avoid walking too near the house of.'”

Avery nodded slightly and took a step back from him, then sighed.

“I'm sorry, sweetheart, but you leave me no choice other than to do this.”

With that, she reached up and slapped him. It wasn't as hard as the slap she'd given him when she thought he'd been cheating on her with Iris, but it was still enough to cause an echo of the sound to reverberate off the trees around them. Klaus looked at her with wide eyes as he brought a hand up to his cheek, and Avery followed up her unexpected move with another one by grasping his cravat and pulling him to her for a kiss.

“Why the hell would you hide something like that from me, Klaus?” she asked him, her voice more hurt than angry. “Especially considering all the other things you've told me about so openly. I mean, maybe I'm wrong but I think you having slept with a couple hundred women is much worse than you being nobility and I still loved you even after finding out about that, didn't I?”

Klaus shook his head. “I don't expect you to understand my reasons, love.”

“Then explain them to me,” she insisted, “or at least try.”

“I suppose the biggest part is that I didn't want you judging me based on that one detail,” he told her, gently pulling her into his arms and holding her close as he spoke. “You can't stand Elise, after all, and I didn't want you lumping me in with her.”

“You're nothing like her, though,” she pointed out to him.

“My parents were,” Klaus said with a scoff. “In fact, if they were still alive today I could see them trying to push me to marry her. They certainly wouldn't have approved of me dating you, that's for sure.”

“Because I'm some low-born farm girl, right?”

“That and because of the circumstances regarding your birth,” Klaus added. “Like I said, my mother thought very little of Raeger's mother for getting pregnant out of wedlock.”

Avery stiffened a little. “Yes, well... She wouldn't be the only one to hold it against me that my mother was already pregnant when she and my father got married.”

She felt Klaus shift to look down at her, but she continued to keep her head against his chest in order to avoid looking at him and answering whatever unsaid questions he might have about that particular remark. He'd be finding out soon enough, anyway. Instead, she merely tightened her arms around him.

“You said that was only part of it, though,” she prompted him. “What's the rest?”

This time he stiffened, and Avery raised her head to look up at him and found him with his eyes closed again.

“Klaus?”

“As you might have guessed, love, I didn't exactly have the best relationship with my parents.”

“Obviously, considering you left home to get away from them,” Avery remarked, reaching up and brushing her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck.

“Take everything about your own family and turn it upside-down, and you've got what I had to go through while growing up,” he told her, opening his eyes to look down at her, and Avery felt her heart break at the pain she saw in them.

“You were an unexpected treasure to your parents,” he continued quietly. “Even though they hadn't planned on having you when they did, they loved you. On the other hand, I was planned. My parents didn't love me, though. They barely cared about me. To them, I was the fulfillment of an expectation and nothing more. I wasn't conceived out of love but for the purpose of carrying on the bloodline and the family name.”

“I'm sorry, Klaus,” Avery told him, pulling him closer and holding him.

“It kills me to think of how different things might be right now if I'd let them control me the way they wanted to when I was younger,” he whispered, pausing briefly to press a kiss to the side of her head. “I never would have even given you a second glance. You'd probably be with Fritz or Raeger now, and I'd surely be on my way to a miserable marriage of convenience with Elise.”

“Don't talk like that, okay?” Avery replied, turning her head and catching his lips in a soft kiss. “Don't think about how miserable you might have been if things were different. Actually, I'd rather believe that even if you hadn't left home when you were a teenager that maybe things might have turned out in a similar way to how they really did. We'd have seen each other, and there would have been this mutual attraction... and maybe it would have been even harder for us to come together in that situation, but I refuse to believe that love wouldn't have won out, in the end.”

Klaus suddenly kissed her then, taking Avery by surprise, and he took advantage of her gasp to sweep his tongue into her mouth. She returned the kiss just as fervently, grasping at his coat as he backed her up against the nearest tree, and whimpered softly into his mouth.

“I love you,” he muttered against her lips before renewing their kiss, but Avery pulled away again a moment later.

“I'm still kind of mad at you, you know.”

“I know,” Klaus said with a nod.

“But I love you, too, and I do understand why you didn't tell me before. You shouldn't let the bad memories from your childhood haunt you so much, though. It's the past. Let it stay there, where it belongs.”

Klaus smiled a little as he brushed her hair back from her face. “You're right. No matter how bleak my past was, I can see now how beautiful my future is.”

He leaned close to her again, their lips gently touching in a series of gentle kisses until he finally gave in and fully claimed her mouth once more. Avery's hands moved up into his hair and she leaned back fully against the trunk of the tree behind her for support while Klaus' hands encircled her waist. She knew they wouldn't be able to progress past kissing one another, given both their location and the fact that the day was set to be full of more busywork pertaining to her cousin's wedding, but she was content in sharing whatever time they could in one another's arms.

“Addie! How could you?”

The two of them quickly parted at the sound of the little girl's voice, and Klaus looked back over his shoulder as Avery leaned around him to see who had spoken. She found a little girl with blonde hair pulled up into a neat bun atop her head, wearing a pretty yellow dress that contrasted greatly with the small aviator's jacket she had on over it. Just that coat alone was enough to tell her the girl was Hina, the daughter who their pilot had been gushing about the previous day during the early part of their flight into town.

“Wait, you're not Addie,” the girl said as realization slowly dawned on her, her grey eyes widening a bit as a blush began to color her cheeks.

“No. I'm Avery, Addie's cousin,” Avery introduced herself, pulling out of Klaus' grasp and going over to the child. “This is my boyfriend, Klaus. You're Hina, right?”

Hina nodded, bowing her head in embarrassment and blushing even more.

“I'm sorry,” she apologized. “I saw your hair and thought you were Addie. Daddy says I jump to conclusions too easily.”

“It's okay,” Klaus assured her, standing at Avery's side and patting the girl on top of her head. “They do look a lot alike, don't they?”

Hina looked up at him and smiled, then blushed once more, and Avery bit her lip to keep from chuckling. Addie had mentioned the girl had a crush on Amir, and now it seemed like she was already starting to develop one on Klaus, as well.

“They're both very pretty,” Hina said, looking down at the large brown boots on her feet. “I hope someday I'll be as pretty as them.”

“I'm sure you will be,” Klaus told her, and she giggled and started swaying back and forth merrily, twirling the skirt of her dress from side to side.

“Thank you, Klaus,” she told him in response to his compliment, batting her eyelashes a bit, and Klaus chuckled as he knelt in front of her.

“I'm sorry, sweetheart, but I'm already spoken for,” he gently let her down, though she simply kept smiling at him. “Perhaps there's a little boy here in the village who's interested in you, though?”

Hina let out a tiny squeak and jumped a little, then hid her face in her hands. Avery could still see her bushing, however, as the color gradually traveled up into her ears. Apparently, Klaus had hit upon something by suggesting one of the other children might like her the way she seemed to like him. She vaguely wondered which of the two boys Addie had mentioned it might be, but quickly pushed aside the thought and instead reached out to place a hand on Klaus' shoulder.

“We should probably head back,” she told him once he had turned to look at her. “Addie has all sorts of last-minute things she wants me to help her with today.”

Klaus nodded and patted Hina on top of her head once more before standing, then he took Avery's hand in his own.

“You'll be all right on your own?” Avery asked.

“Don't worry, I come up here to take walks by myself all the time!” Hina answered the question, her voice slightly muffled by her hands, which were still covering her face. Avery smiled and then turned her attention to Klaus, who she had actually been directing the question toward.

“I'll be fine, love,” he assured her, leaning down to give her a brief kiss. “I'm sure Marian has already planned on dragging me around to show me everything this quaint little town has to offer.”

“And I assume you'll be attending Amir's party tonight?”

“Of course,” Klaus replied with a nod. “Is Addie having a shower tonight, as well?”

“Not exactly,” Avery told him, gently pulling him onto the path and heading in the direction leading back to town. “She already had her big bridal shower last week with the ladies here in town, so tonight it's just going to be the two of us. We're having a sleepover at her place, like old times.”

“That sounds like fun,” Klaus said with a smile.

“Should be, but it means you'll be sleeping alone tonight,” she informed him with a teasing little smirk.

Klaus let out a light chuckle. “I think I can manage, love.”

“I don't know if I can, though,” Avery said with an exaggerated pout, and Klaus stopped walking suddenly and pulled her into his arms.

“Then I suppose I will have to spend tomorrow night making up for the lost time, won't I?” he offered with a wink and Avery felt the breath suddenly leave her lungs and her knees go weak at the implication, even though he was just teasing her and likely meant that he would gladly hold her while she slept like he had the previous night.

A big part of her, however, hoped that he meant something else entirely.
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In Sheep's Clothing