Free Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) by Dana Stabenow

curved blade he called the naginata, the weapon he only put down when he joined Dai Fang in her bed. Even now, it leaned against the wall within easy reach.
    “No,” she said. “The honorable Dai Fu would be horrified at the very thought of joining the revered house of Dai with a man not born in Everything Under the Heavens.”
    He looked down at her, his amusement showing in his face.
    “What?”
    He shook his head. Far be it from him to draw her attention to the fact that the honorable Dai Fu’s daughter shared her bed, enthusiastically and without inhibition, with a man not himself born in Everything Under the Heavens. A warrior nobleman exiled from his own country, he was still a foreigner here, forced to sell his services as a lowly bodyguard to a failed merchant, a man whom he would never even have met, let alone associated with were he still heir to those rights, privileges and duties conferred by five hundred generations of birth, influence and favor.
    But then taking a lover was of much less importance than taking a husband.
    He took a deep, steadying breath, calming yet again the shame and the fury that burned always in his breast. His father had picked the losing side in a struggle for power and their family was no more. It was futile to dwell on the past, although the day would come when…Again he forced away thoughts of vengeance and retribution. They were a waste of energy best spent elsewhere.
    And there were compensations to his present occupation, to be sure. Slowly he drew back the coverlet and let himself enjoy the sight of her smooth, unblemished skin, the small, ruby-crowned breasts, the mystery between her lissome legs concealed by a tight weave of black hair. He had trimmed that cap of hair himself, with a sharp knife and infinite care. As he watched, she stretched, opening her legs, legs that ended in tiny, folded-back feet that had been bound since birth, a grotesquerie that had charmed him at first sight.
    A delicate film of moisture made her skin glow in the moonlight. He felt his body respond, and he smiled. After all, what need had Dai Fang of sure feet? It was off them that he liked her best. And if she married judiciously…
    He looked up to meet her eyes as his hand traveled up the inside of her thigh. “Then we must select the proper husband for you.”
    She sighed, arching her back. “And you have some suggestions along those lines, I suspect.”
    He was on her and in her, ferocious, sudden, his hand clapping brutally over her mouth as she cried out in surprise. “As it happens.”
    Servicing his mistress required only the attention of his body, and left his mind free to plot the various ways he could bring Dai Fang’s attention to the newly bereaved state of that most prosperous Cambaluc merchant, the honorable Wu Li.

    In the end the choice was obvious, and Dai Fu required very little persuading to open negotiations. The honorable Wu Li was of impeccable lineage with extensive holdings who had recently lost his wife and who had no son. There was of course the matter of having looked outside his race for his first wife, but that could be excused on the grounds of his father’s misplaced loyalty to an absent associate, an honorable if foolish act. Dai Fang was a young woman of excellent family and considerable beauty. It took very little encouragement for Dai Fang to arrange a meeting between her father and the honorable Wu Li, a meeting at which she contrived to be present. He wasn’t interested until she allowed herself to display some knowledge of trade. Further questions, delicately put beneath Dai Fu’s benevolent if slightly drunken eye, revealed a shrewd mind, wrapped in a traditional and delightfully feminine package.
    In appearance she was as unlike Shu Ming as she could be, and so Wu Li overlooked her bound feet, and the calculating look in her eyes.
    The matter was arranged in a week. The sensation this caused in Wu Li’s household lasted longer than that, but by not