Her father stared at him. Then he let out a breath and shook his head, and said, “Well, I certainly would not say no to that, my lord.”
Kazrian smiled and Lucie looked down at her stew and thought,Stop. Please stop being you. Just for one evening, be someone I could bear to lose.
Beneath the table, Charlotte’s knee bumped Lucie’s. Lucie bumped back, harder, which she hoped communicated,I will deal with you later. Charlotte’s responding bump communicated absolutely nothing except delight.
Lucie risked a glance at her mother. Mrs Fields was eating with impeccable composure, her gaze moving between her bowl and the table and, every few seconds, across to Kazrian. There was a quality to her attention that Lucie recognized—the same sharp, quiet watchfulness her mother brought to a fitting, where she could assess the way a fabric sat across awoman’s shoulders without appearing to look at all. She was studying Kazrian. Drawing conclusions.
And then her gaze shifted to Lucie, and their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and Lucie knew with sinking certainty that her mother had missed nothing. Not the way Lucie looked at Kazrian. Not the way Kazrian’s voice changed when he spoke to her. Not the warmth passing silently across the table between them.
Lucie looked away first.
The evening should have stayed excruciating. That was the strange thing. It should have remained a taut and mortifying ordeal from start to finish. Instead, somewhere in the middle of it, the evening simply … eased.
Perhaps it was when Kazrian noticed the embroidery on the table runner—her mother’s own work—and paused mid-sentence to look more closely at the border. “Is that a briarknot stitch?” he asked. “My mother uses it for her finer pieces. She swears it is the most unforgiving stitch there is.” He glanced up at Mrs Fields. “Do you use the enchanted thread? The one that assists?”
“No,” her mother said, and there was a note in her voice, not quite pride, not quite correction, but something carefully between the two. “I learned as a girl, with ordinary thread. It is rather complicated, I grant you, but I have had a great many years of practice.”
Kazrian nodded, and there was something in the nod, an unhurried, genuine respect, the recognition of someone who understood what it meant to work in fine, precise detail, that made her mother’s posture ease by the smallest degree.
Perhaps it was when Theo and Kazrian discovered a shared and passionate devotion to a particular card game that no one else at the table had the faintest interest in, and spent several minutes debating the merits of a specific opening strategy with the fervor of men who had at last found a fellow enthusiast in the wilderness.
Perhaps it was when Belle threw a piece of bread at Robbie and Robbie threw it back and it sailed wide of its target, struck Mrs Fields squarely on the side of her perfectly composed face, and bounced into her lap. There was one breathless, horrified instant of silence—and then Kazrian made a sound, a strangled, desperate attempt to swallow a laugh that did not quite succeed, and Theo’s composure broke, and then Charlotte’s and Lucie’s,and even Lucie’s father, who ought to have known better, pressed his napkin to his mouth with suspicious haste, and Mrs Fields sat there trying to maintain her dignity with a crumb on her cheek and said, in a voice of magnificent calm, “Robert. Turner,” and that finished everyone off entirely.
The evening wound down the way evenings do when the food is finished and the children are growing heavy-eyed and the adults are lingering over the last of the conversation because no one quite wants to be the first to stand. Robbie fell asleep against Theo’s shoulder. Belle ended up lying half across her chair and half in Charlotte’s lap, her thumb in her mouth.
When at last Kazrian rose to go, he thanked Mrs Fields with such quiet, unhurried sincerity—for the meal, for the welcome, for her generosity in opening her home to an uninvited guest—that something in her expression shifted, just barely, from endurance to something warmer, before she caught it and smoothed it away. He shook Lucie’s father’s hand and promised the silver wood again.
Then he turned toward Charlotte and Theo, both of whom were pinned beneath their respective sleeping children. He held up a hand before either could so much as shift. “Please, do not disturb them on my account.” He leaned across and clasped Theo’s free hand, then inclined his head toward Charlotte with a warm, quiet smile. “Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Turner. I am very glad you thought of the lathe.”
And then he turned to Lucie.
“Miss Fields,” he said. Formal. Correct. For the room.
But his eyes, when they met hers, were not formal at all.
“Lord Kazrian,” she managed.
“Until tomorrow.” A pause, and then, lower, meant for her: “You are going to be magnificent. You already are.”
Lucie did not trust herself to answer. She nodded, and hoped it read as composure, and walked with him the short distance to the front door because someone had to, so it might as well be her.
She opened the door. The cool night air of Elmrow Lane came in.
“Good night, Lucie,” he said quietly, as he stepped out and looked back at her.
“Good night,” she whispered.
And then he was gone, down the path and into the dark of the lane, andshe stood a moment longer than she needed to with her hand on the cold edge of the door, watching him go.
Then she closed it.
She turned around.
Her mother and Charlotte stood in the middle of the parlor, waiting for her, Charlotte clearly having maneuvered herself out from beneath Belle’s sleeping form.
The two of them together made a tableau so perfectly opposed that Lucie nearly laughed despite everything. Charlotte was beaming—wide-eyed, incandescent, both hands pressed to her own cheeks, looking like one who has done a Terrible Thing and could not be more thrilled about it. Their mother stood beside her with her arms folded and an expression that suggested Charlotte’s continued survival was, at this precise moment, an open question.
Mrs Fields looked from one daughter to the other.
