"Your Grace," the maid squeaked, her face flushing scarlet as she attempted to curtsey even lower, which seemed physically impossible without actually prostrating herself on the floor.
Adrian acknowledged her with a single nod, his grey eyes never leaving Eveline's precarious position on the ladder. "That will be all, Mary. You may leave."
The girl scurried out with such haste that she nearly tripped over her own feet, the door closing behind her with a soft click that seemed to echo in the sudden silence. Eveline remained frozen on the ladder, acutely aware that she was now alone with him for the first time since that midnight encounter with the forbidden books; an encounter they'd both been studiously pretending hadn't happened for the past week.
"Why did you send her away?" Eveline finally managed, carefully descending the ladder while trying to maintain both her dignity and her grip on the books. "I needed her help with these volumes."
"Because I wished to be alone with you."
The words were delivered with such casual certainty that Eveline nearlymissed the last rung entirely, catching herself just before what would have been a thoroughly undignified stumble. She turned to face him, her cheeks burning with a heat that had nothing to do with exertion.
"You cannot say such things, Your Grace. Not to me."
"Can't I?" He moved further into the room with that languid grace that never failed to make her pulse quicken. "And why would that be, Miss Whitcombe? Because it's improper? I believe we've rather thoroughly established that propriety is not our strongest suit."
"Because it's... it's..." She struggled for words, flustered by his proximity and the way the afternoon light from the tall windows caught the gold flecks in his grey eyes. "Because employers don't say such things to their cataloguers."
"Perhaps not." A faint smile played at the corners of his mouth, the expression both maddening and oddly vulnerable. "But then, most cataloguers don't break into locked cabinets at midnight to read forbidden literature, do they?"
She turned back to her work with more force than necessary, opening her notebook and beginning to read aloud from the Latin text she'd been translating, her voice perhaps a touch too loud in the quiet library.
"'Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum,'" she read, deliberately emphasizing certain syllables in a way that would have made her Latin tutor weep.
Adrian winced visibly. "My goodness, what are you doing to that poor passage?"
"Translating it, as is my job."
"Trying to destroy it, more accurately. You're making Cicero sound like he suffered from a severe head cold." He moved closer, close enough that she could smell his cologne, sandalwood and something else, something uniquely him that made her stomach churn. "The emphasis should be on the second syllable of 'fallacius,' not the first."
"Perhaps I prefer it my way."
"Perhaps you're doing it deliberately to vex me."
"Perhaps I am," she admitted, glancing up at him with what she hoped was an expression of innocent inquiry. "Is it working?"
"Remarkably well." He leaned over her shoulder to point at the correct phrasing in the text, his sleeve brushing against her arm in a way that sent shivers racing along her skin. "Here—'nihil fallacius.' You're turning Cicero's eloquent condemnation of political assemblies into something that sounds like a drunkard's rambling."
"Some would argue there's little difference between politicians and drunkards," Eveline replied, though her voice came out breathier than intended due to his proximity. His chest was nearly touching her back, and she could feel the warmth radiating from his body despite the layers of clothing between them.
"A valid point, though Cicero would be appalled by the comparison." His finger traced the Latin text as he read it aloud, his pronunciation perfect, his voice dropping to that lower register that made even ancient Roman political discoursesound somehow intimate. "'Nothing is more uncertain than the masses, nothing more obscure than human intention, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.'"
"You do love to make a display of yourself," she muttered, though she was fighting a smile. "Not all of us had expensive tutors who beat proper Latin pronunciation into us with silver-headed canes."
"My tutor preferred a birch rod, actually. He said it was more traditional." He straightened but didn't move away, staying close enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him properly. "However I notice your pronunciation is usually flawless when you're not deliberately changing it to annoy me."
"You notice my pronunciation?"
"I notice everything about you, Miss Whitcombe." The admission seemed to surprise him as much as it did her, and he took a step back, running his hand through his hair. "That is, I notice when my employees are performing their duties incorrectly."
"Of course," she agreed, though they both knew that wasn't what he'd meant at all. "Well then, perhaps you'd care to demonstrate the correct pronunciation of this entire passage? For educational purposes, naturally."
"Naturally." He picked up the book, but instead of reading, he studied her for a moment with an expression she couldn't quite decipher. "You're enjoying this."
"Enjoying what?"
"Tormenting me. Making me lose my composure. Forcing me to admit things I have no business admitting."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said with exaggerated innocence. "I'm merely a simple cataloguer trying to do her job while her employer insists on correcting her perfectly adequate Latin."
