“Yes, why?”
“You were breathing rather rapidly there for a moment.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“All right.”
His cheerful agreement was discomfiting. She was not accustomed to men agreeing with her, much less doing it with smiles on their faces.
She also wasn’t accustomed to anyone watching her closely enough to notice changes in her breathing.
It had been a long time, anyway.
Effie began poking around the room, looking out the window, letting his finger glide over the handle of the ewer on the bureau, leaning over the bed to peek at a piece of paper—a theatrical review for December—she’d left there.
“Don’t put your head on or near anything,” she said, further discomfited by the way he was so openly and unabashedly curious about her surroundings. “I don’t want powder on my things.”
He looked up from the other side of the bed. “It’s flour.”
As if that were any better. “What did you do? Ask the cook for a sack of flour?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes needs must.”
He looked so silly, so insouciant, so . . . Effie, that something swelled in her chest. It was warm, and buoyant, and she suddenly feared that it was going to lift her clear off her feet.
She didn’t know what to do, so she picked up a pillow from her side of the bed and threw it at him.
Shethrew a pillowat him!
Whathad come over her?
He sputtered, but laughter moved in to replace shock. “I thought you didn’t want my head to touch anything, and now I’ve contaminated your bedding.” He retrieved the pillow from where it had fallen on the floor and slapped it, sending a fine mist of flour into the air.
“I don’t—”
He threw the pillow back at her.
She emitted a sort of laugh-gasp hybrid. The nerve! Handily, there were two pillows on the bed. She threw the second back at him, making contact squarely with his head and sending another puff of flour into the air. She attempted to use a book from her night table as a shield, but he was too quick with his retaliation.
Soon they were engaged in an all-out pillow fight. She was gasping for air because she was laughing so hard, and Effie’s low, rumbling chuckle was doing something, too, when it came to making her breathless.
“Ow, ow!” Eventually the laughing and the breathlessness made her stomach and chest start to hurt. “If I remove this pillowslip and wave it”—the pillowslip was white, and not just because of the flour—“will you consider it a proper surrender?”
“No, no.” He dropped his pillow to the bed. “It is I who surrender.”
Something about the way he said it, all low and knowing, intensified the pressure in Julianna’s belly.It is I who surrender.It was, on the surface of things, a submissive thing to say. What was surrender but submission? But at the same time, there was an air of authority to the declaration, a decisiveness in the way he dropped both the pillow and the teasing all at once—they were like stones that had sunk in the sea.
She followed suit, with both pillow and book.
Which left them staring at each other, weaponless and shieldless. Nothing in between them. They were alone.
In some ways, they had always been alone together. In their letters, of course, but even here, in Brighton. That first moment they’d seen each other, that moment in which they’d communicated without sound and across distance. When he had taken off her gloves and examined her hands. There had been so many moments when the world around them had fallen away.
But it hadn’t actually fallen, had it? It had merely felt that way. All those times, all those touches and glances, had unfolded in public.
But now.
For the first time since they’d met in person, they were alone together without an audience. The world actuallyhadfallen away. Effie had made it so, with his ridiculous shoes and his ridiculous hair and his ridiculous scheming.
