Kazrian, lying beside her. Asleep. Peaceful in a way she had never onceseen him while awake, the careful watchfulness gone slack from his face, his breathing slow and even. And he was close, so very, very close, turned toward her in his sleep.
And the longing that had gone through her then had been so sharp it was nearly grief, because she had wanted, more than anything else, to have this.Him.Every morning. For the rest of her life.
She had lifted her hand and, ever so carefully, so carefully she scarcely breathed, brushed the dark hair back from his forehead with the tips of her fingers.
He had slept on a few minutes longer, and then he too had woken, slowly, and she had watched the exact instant he remembered where he was. The small stiffening, the eyes coming open, the flicker of recollection crossing his face.
And then all the careful distance had come rushing back at once. He had sat up. He had shifted away to reestablish the proper and respectable chasm between them. There had been stammering. There had been a truly remarkable amount of blushing, for a man of his composure, and she had spent the whole of it fighting a smile, because he was, first thing in the morning and thoroughly flustered, very nearly the most endearing thing she had ever seen.
She had been vaguely aware that she ought to be mortified about her own appearance, her disheveled hair and the creases no doubt pressed into her cheek from the cushion. But she had been unable to summon the smallest particle of concern about it.
There had also been, somewhere at the back of her mind, the distant awareness that she ought to be in a state of high panic about the mountain of work still standing between her and a launch that was now perilously close. That had felt distant too. All of it distant, held off at arm’s length, as though the spell of those first soft sleepy moments still lay over her and would not quite lift.
She had retrieved the signet ring and pocket watch from the shelf and held them out to him. He had taken the watch but declined the ring.
“Keep it,” he had said. “Only until you have your own returned to you. Today or tomorrow, if I understand correctly. I am quite certain you will not need it, because I intend to help you with every last thing that must be donetoday and tomorrow, and it will all proceed perfectly well. But I know it helps. In the moments when you need to … steady yourself.”
And then, from the door, a faintclick.
Kazrian had looked at the door. Then back at her. And he had smiled, slow and certain. “It is Thursday.”
“Oh, thank the stars!” She had scrambled up, half tripping over the blanket, and flung herself at the handle, and the door had swung open onto the ordinary passageway as though it had never had a single quarrel with anyone.
And that had been the end of it. The stolen night over. The stillness gone, the honest hours folded away. But she would keep them. In the secret spaces of her heart she would keep every moment of that night for as long as she lived.
She stood there for a long, ridiculous, radiant moment, smiling into the door like an absolute fool, and she did not care.
Then she straightened, pulled the handle, and stepped out into the back courtyard.
The evening air was cool now that the sun had all but disappeared, the flagstones dry beneath her shoes, every trace of the previous night’s storm baked away. The sky above the rooftops was soft and pale, not quite dusk, the light caught between deep amber and the first bruised indigo of evening.
And there was Henry, leaning against the wall on the other side of the gnome’s precariously towering arrangement of herb planters and flower pots, stacked three high against the courtyard wall. He stood with his arms loosely folded over his chest, one ankle crossed over the other, entirely at his ease. And he was smiling. But it was not a smile Lucie had ever seen on him before. There was something cold in it, something flat and fixed, and the look he turned on her the moment his eyes found her was so piercing that everything warm in her chest went still.
He pushed away from the wall and came toward her.
For one entirely irrational instant, she wanted to step back through the open door and shut it between them. Which was absurd. This was Henry. Amiable, attentive Henry, who complimented her toffees and asked after her family and wanted to take her to concerts. So of course she did not do it. She stayed where she was.
“Staying late again?” he said.
She managed a small laugh. “Not so very late.”
“True.” He came a step nearer. “Not so late as last night. Indeed, last night you did not leave at all, did you. And you were not alone.”
The warmth drained from her body so quickly it felt like a physical thing. Dread, cold and heavy, settled into her stomach. Her fingers went to ice. For several terrible seconds she could not find a single thought to hold on to. “What … what do you …” Then a spark of anger, of indignation, began to burn beneath it all. “Have you beenkeeping watchover me?”
“What did he do to you?”
She blinked. Shook her head. “What?”
“Did he force himself upon you? Or did you?—”
“No!” The word erupted from her, hot and angry. “He wouldnever!”
His laugh was low and quiet and entirely without warmth. “Well. I see how it went then.”
“You see nothing at all!”
“When a man arrives at a building late in the evening where a woman is alone, and does not emerge until morning, it wants no great cleverness to know what has passed between them.”
