“No, it is—you were only?—”
“I ought to—the door?—”
“Yes. The door.”
He turned and went back to it. Lucie stood where he had left her, her waist still warm where his hands had been, and pressed her palms to her cheeks, and said nothing.
He worked at the door for several more minutes. She could tell from thequality of his silence—the longer pauses, the slower movements—that there was nothing left to try.
“I believe,” he said at last, “the door has gone to sleep. It is no longer responding to anything I do.”
Lucie lowered herself to the floor once more and let her head fall back against the wall. “I should like some sleep too,” she murmured. “We had better resign ourselves to an uncomfortable night on the floor.”
Kazrian turned from the door and surveyed the room. “There is no need for that.” He was already moving toward the far corner. “There is a rather generous pile of cushions over there, and more than enough linen. I can construct something … serviceable.”
She lifted her head. “Oh.” Another pause. “All right.”
She watched him cross the room and begin pulling cushions from the pile and laying them out along the narrow strip of floor. He tucked a sheet around them, found a blanket, shook it out. Arranged the whole lot of it into something that, in the forgiving darkness, began to resemble a passable bed.
“That is … not bad,” she admitted.
And then she thought about what lying down, in this room, in his presence, would actually involve, and found herself suddenly far less tired and far more … aware.
“Will it be … large enough, do you think? For … for both of us?”
Kazrian, who had been carrying a smaller cushion back toward the makeshift bed and attempting to edge around a sack of something, caught his foot on the corner of a crate and half stumbled, catching himself against the shelving with one hand before anything could fall.
“No!” he said, rather too quickly, righting himself. “No, it is—no. It is for you. Only for you. I would never dream of—no. Absolutely not.”
She blinked at him. “But what about you?”
“I shall sit on the floor.”
“Kazrian.”
“What?”
“You cannot sit on the floor all night.”
“Of course I can.” He placed the smaller cushion where her head would rest and stepped back. “There. That should be quite comfortable. For you. The one person who will be lying on it.”
She looked at the arrangement, then looked at him, then turned hergaze to the hard wooden floor on which he apparently intended to spend the remainder of the night.
“This is ridiculous,” she said.
“It is sensible, and—more importantly—proper. Or as near to proper as we can reasonably achieve with two people locked together in a storeroom.”
“It is ridiculous, and you know it.”
She wanted to argue further, but her body had apparently decided the matter without consulting her. She gathered the pocket watch and the ring from the floor and set them on a nearby shelf where they would not be stepped on. She removed her shoes and placed them near the door. Then she lowered herself onto the makeshift bed, being careful not to disturb the arrangement too much. The cushions were, she had to concede once she was lying down, remarkably comfortable for something assembled from a storeroom’s cast-off furnishings. She pulled the blanket up over herself and stared at the darkened ceiling.
She could hear Kazrian settling himself against the wall. The small sounds of someone trying to find a tolerable position on bare wood. A quiet exhale. A shift. Another shift.
She lasted approximately two minutes.
She sat up. “I cannot possibly sleep knowing you are over there on the floor. You had better come here now, or I shall join you on the floor, and neither of us shall sleep, and we shall both be wretched and useless tomorrow. And youknowhow much there is still to be done.”
A long pause. Then Kazrian dragged a hand slowly down his face. “Lucie …”
