Her body simply flung her forward.
She ran across the grass, past the staring faces, past the shocked ladies, and she reached him and caught his arm with both hands and stepped into his path, planting herself in front of him.
“Look at me.” Her voice came out cracked and desperate, pitched for him alone. She got a hand flat against his chest, gripped his arm with the other, dragged at his attention with the whole of her will. “Look at me, please?—”
His gaze came down to her. Storm-gray and blazing, his jaw set, his breath coming hard.
“Stop. Please. Do not do it.” She held his eyes and would not let them go. “He is not worth it. He isnot worth it.The only person who will end up ruined is you.”
Kazrian went still. She felt it under her hands—the great held tension of him, quivering, and then the pause, the fractional hitch as some part of him caught at what she was saying and turned it over. His chest rose and fell hard beneath her palm.
Lucie turned and faced Henry, letting her hand fall from Kazrian’s chest, though she kept her other hand on his arm. And for a moment the three of them were frozen there, at the still center of a garden full of held breath. Henry, staring back at her, braced and hard eyed. Kazrian, rigid and furiousat her side. And Lucie between them, lips pressed together and jaw clenched.
She watched Henry’s gaze move. Away from her, hard and swift, taking in the rest of it—the fae lords and ladies in their finery, the whole glittering assembly gathered close behind Kazrian and Lucie, watching. And his expression twisted further, almost a snarl now.
“You conniving, desperate, grasping little?—”
He moved forward, and Lucie flinched. Kazrian’s arm came around her at once, gathering her against his side and turning her half away from Henry, his body a wall between them. Henry stopped, seeming to reconsider.
And then, into the silence, a voice. Cool, unhurried, and utterly composed.
“Mr Stratton.”
Lady Rivenna had arrived.
She let the name lie there in the air a moment, unadorned. Let it be looked at.
“Youdaredto lay your hands upon our sweet Miss Fields?”
Our.Even through the fear, some small, clear part of Lucie’s mind registered the word and understood exactly what it was doing. Lady Rivenna was claiming her. Claiming her for this gathering, these people—as though Lucie were a treasure belonging to them all, and Henry a trespasser who had dared to reach for what was theirs and must accordingly be driven off.
“I have watched you.” Lady Rivenna’s chin lifted a fraction, her brows drawing down, and the fury in her was a cold and towering thing. “More than once, sir, and more than twice, I have watched you make your way to the back ofmyconfectionery—where you were not invited, were not wanted, and had no earthly business to be—and press your attentions upon a young woman who had made her wishes plain. I have watched you stand too close, speak too low, and lay your hand upon her when she flinched from the touch. I saw it, Mr Stratton, with these two eyes, and I held my tongue, because I am an old woman, and I permitted myself to hope that you might yet find the sense to take yourself off before you made a public spectacle of your own smallness.”
A pause. The whole garden hung upon it.
“You have not found the sense.” Her voice dropped. “And so I shall beplain, since plainness appears to be the only tongue you comprehend. You will leave this garden. You will leave it now, upon your own two feet, while you are yet permitted the dignity of doing so. You will not return to The Honeycomb. And you will not so much aslookat our Miss Fields unless you wish to find yourself answering to every fae family whose name you have so carelessly dropped in the course of your business dealings. I suspect, Mr Stratton, that not all of them consented to the association.”
Henry did not move at first.
The fury came off him in waves. His hands had closed into fists at his sides, and his jaw was working, and Lucie could see that there was something he wanted to say, something that had been building in him for a very long while, since long before this afternoon.
She thought, in a strange dislocated rush, of all the small undermining remarks he had let fall over the months. The offhand, faintly belittling observations about Lady Rivenna. Lucie had let those comments pass over her at the time, brushed them aside, only half hearing. She saw now, all at once, how much Henry had always disliked Lady Rivenna. How the sight of a fae woman who commanded a room he could never command must have galled him past bearing.
He would hate her now more than ever.
He turned and started walking away. Stiff and deliberate, his shoulders rigid and his fists still clenched at his sides, out past the trees and into the lane beyond and gone.
For a moment the garden simply breathed.
And then the whispers began.
Not the horrified murmur of before. Something else now. Thrilled, delighted, unstoppable, rippling out from table to table and gathering speed as it went. Because whatever else had happened here this afternoon, this gathering had just been handed the story of the entire Season, laid warm and gleaming into their laps.
And Lucie, standing very still with Kazrian’s arm around her and her breath still thin and high in her chest, felt the full weight of it come down.
She had run to him. In front of all of them, without a moment’s thought, she had run to him. She had put her hands upon him. She had pressed close and whispered up into his face with the low, urgent intimacy of a woman who knew a man well, who had every right to touch him, to speak tohim so. Even if he had done nothing further, she had already told this crowd, plain as any spoken word, that there was something between the fae lord and the confectioner girl.
But he had done further. He had drawn her in. He had pulled her against his side and set himself between her and Henry, and now not one soul in this garden could hold the smallest doubt. Whatever they believed or did not believe about a storeroom and a locked door, they knew—theyknew—that something improper and undeniable existed between Kazrian Rowanwood and Lucie Fields.
