“That’s why, Connie,” he finished, his voice rough.“That and a thousand other reasons.”
Constance felt as though she had just stepped outside to find that the world had turned upside down.
It wouldneverhave occurred to her that Neil could feel this way—Neil, who had hidden in his room every time she came over.Who’d groaned with exasperation at her deliberate acts of mischief.
But he had been a boy then.
He wasn’t a boy any longer.
Neil’s green-touched eyes had always been transparent, glittering with excitement when he was rattling on about Ancient Greek grammar or shadowing with guilt when he knew he had made a mistake.
They could hollow with vulnerability—or burn with desire.
Or they might look as they did just then, aching with sadness as Neil waited for Constance to gently tell him why he couldn’t possibly be the man she was looking for.
But that wasn’t what she wanted to say.Something else rose to her lips instead—a startlingly unexpected notion born of the silent world of moonlight and marble that surrounded her.
“What if we didn’t end it?”
Neil looked confused.“End what?”
Constance swallowed.Her mouth was oddly dry.
“Our engagement.”
Neil held himself still as he responded.“Why wouldn’t we end it, Connie?”
Fear darted through her.“Isn’t that what you want?”
Neil’s shirt hung loose over the waist of his trousers.The courtyard painted him in tones of subtle blue and silver, giving him the look of a ragged knight stepped out of a fairy tale.
“I need to know whatyouwant,” he demanded.
The words rumbled from deep in his chest.Constance fought the surprising impulse to press her hand over his heart and see if she could feel the subtle thrum of them.
Whatdidshe want?
There were so many ways she might answer, visions she had dreamed up for what her life might look like.Galloping across the desert with a tribe of Bedouin marauders.Sailing away on a pirate ship.Discovering a lost civilization on the banks of the Congo.
An affair with a passionate Austrian violinist.Masquerading as a mysterious French art collector.Climbing the Matterhorn.
Those images all scattered from her mind like fallen leaves.Instead, she thought of a man who had thrown her off a boat into the Nile.Of enthusiastic lectures on Demotic and groans of dismay over scorched notepapers.
Remembered scholarly hands tracing over her body and Neil’s taste on her tongue—leather and tea and spice.
Words spilled out of her as though they had been waiting at the edge of her lips.
“You have never once asked me to be somebody other than who I am.”
Neil’s brow furrowed.The familiar expression warmed Constance like a softly crackling fire.
“Not even when I was tormenting you,” she continued.“You might easily have done it then.‘Constance, why can’t you be just a little less…’”
Her voice trailed off with a pang of remembered hurt.“Other people have.They wished that I were quieter.Less opinionated.More well-behaved.Not quite so Indian.”
“I might have occasionally wished you were a little less quick to charge into danger,” he admitted.“But then, your complete lack of any sense of self-preservation has worked to my benefit more than once since we became reacquainted—though I won’t pretend it doesn’t terrify me.”
“And then you turned up on me in Egypt,” Constance continued.“Or I turned up on you, rather—and you’re all… this.”
