Be gracious. Do not make a scene.
And then—because the mind was a cruel archivist and filed these things side by side—the other touch. Kazrian’s thumb tracing the inside of her wrist and his whole attention bent on her hand as though it were the only object in the world worth understanding at that moment. The shiver that had gone through her. Not the crawling kind. The best, most delicious kind. The kind she had not felt in … well. Three years.
She opened her eyes. Slowly, she unwound one arm from around Balthazar and uncurled her fingers, holding her hand up in the thin light. There was nothing to see now because it was almost perfectly healed.
“The truth, then …” she murmured. “The truth is that I want to be near him. I have always wanted to be near him.” She shut her eyes and sighed. “Three years and a great deal of practice and I still—the moment he touched my hand I forgot everything else.”
She wrapped both arms around Balthazar and pulled him closer, and he shifted against her with a low, rumbling sound of protest against the indignity of being squeezed.
“He cooled the water for my hand,” she said, “and he kept apologizing for the burn—a thing that was my own stubborn fault—and he lowered theworktable without me saying a thing about it, and he made sure the lumyrite was removed from the side of the hearth you like to sleep on, and he makes me tea when the pixies are too busy—therighttea, Balthazar, the way only you and the pixies know how to make it—and in all the years I felt invisible working at The Charmed Leaf, he was the one who looked at me and saidI see you, and … and I love him.”
The confession dropped into the pantry and lay there.
She had never said it aloud before. Not even to herself. She had saidcared, she had saidonce, she had saida long time ago. She had built a whole wardrobe of careful past-tense words and dressed the thing up in them so it might pass for something finished and harmless. But the words were out now, present and plain andruinous, and there was no taking them back.
“I love him,” she whispered again.
Balthazar lifted his head. He looked at her for a long moment with those pale coin eyes, and then—with the air of a creature making a significant diplomatic concession—he pressed the top of his hard little skull once, briefly, against the underside of her chin. Then he withdrew and resumed his disgruntled monarch’s pose.
“Yes,” she managed. “Well. Quite.”
She took another shuddery breath and sat with the confession a while.She loved him.She had loved him as a girl across a kitchen, and as a young woman with his too-honest mouth saying things that made her blush, and she loved him now, broader in the shoulder and rougher in the hand and gentler than ever, which should not have been possible and yet was.
And it changed nothing.
That was the part the confession could not touch. She turned it over and over and it came up the same every time, the way a fact does. She was human. He was fae. And not merely fae, butRowanwoodfae, grandson of the silver-haired queen of Bloomhaven society, twin to the Crown Consort, brother to the prince’s own family.
She had seen what society did to the rare human woman who reached above her station for one of them. She had grown up in the shadow of it, in the careful quiet of a house that did not speak about what her aunt had done, whom she had dared to love. They had stepped away from it, moved beyond it, and made a comfortable life for themselves by knowing where the line was and never, ever stepping past it.
She knew exactly what it would cost Kazrian to choose her. The doors that would close. The whispers that would follow him into every room. The slow grinding diminishment of a good man’s good name.
And she knew what it would do to her own family. Her mother’s commissions drying up one by one because fae ladies would no longer wish to be dressed by a woman whose daughter had ideas above her station. Her father’s workshop growing quiet as the orders stopped coming. Charlotte and Theo losing business at the stationer’s, because scandal did not confine itself to the person who caused it. It spread outward, settling over everyone who shared your name, your street, your blood.
She would not be the reason for any of that.
She had decided it once before, in a hidden corner of The Charmed Leaf, with her heart breaking and her face arranged into something cold enough to do the job. And she found, sitting on the pantry floor with Balthazar and her ruined composure and her terrible new honesty, that she could decide it again.
“Well,” she said, her voice coming out steadier now. “He is aware now that he did not force me into anything, and that is all he needs to know. Even if he suspects the larger truth—and knowing Kazrian, he will already have fitted every piece together in that quiet, relentless mind of his and seen exactly what I did and why—it does not matter now. He does not know I love him still, and I will not let him discover it.”
Balthazar’s tail moved. A single slow flick that was not the one he reserved for Lady Rivenna, but was something close to it. Something that might, in his vast and disdainful vocabulary, have meant:You ridiculous human.
“Yes, you doubt me, and that is where I need your help. I need you to remind me.” She bent and pressed her lips, very lightly, to the top of his head, and he tolerated this outrage with his eyes shut. “It will be easier for you, since you do not like him.” She lifted her head and released a long sigh. “And then, once Kazrian is gone, everything will settle back to normal with Henry.”
Balthazar went rigid in her lap. Every muscle in his small body drew taut at once, as though the name itself were a hand reaching for him.
“Yes, I know you do not like him either, but he has done nothing wrongin all of this. In fact, it is dreadfully unfair to him that I happen to still be—” she waved her hand “—entangled. In my own head. With someone else.”
Balthazar’s ears flattened. Both of them. All the way down. The look he gave her could have wilted every flower in the courtyard.
“Truly, Balthazar. All Henry has done is care for me. There is nothing wrong with his attention. I did not step away from it before Kazrian arrived. It is only that I did not want Kazrian to see, and that is—” She faltered. “That is its own problem entirely. The problem of still being in love with someone I cannot have. A problem which will resolve itself the moment this building is finally repaired and he is gone.”
She nodded once, firmly, as though the matter were now settled. She sat a moment longer. Then she lifted Balthazar off her lap and set him down. He stalked a few paces away and waited while she got to her feet. She smoothed her apron. She pressed her palms to her cheeks—no pain on her right palm at all now—then opened the pantry door and stepped out to face the remainder of the day.
Chapter Twenty
Kazrian stopped justinside the front gate of Rowanwood House and paused. He stood with his hand resting on the iron, the moonglow essence from Mr Clave a small weight in his coat pocket, and regarded the house. The front garden was bathed in the low amber light of early evening, the kind of light that softened everything it touched, that gilded the climbing roses along the front wall. And standing there, Kazrian realized he was not yet ready to face his mother and his grandmother and whoever else might be inside. His mind was still too disordered.
He turned instead along the side of the house, where a path ran beneath the windows and led around to the gardens at the back. They were generous for a town house, though nothing compared to the great sprawling grounds of Rowanhill in the country, where a person could walk for an hour and meet no one.
