He ran out of reasons.
Lyon sat in the opposite chair with a book he hadn’t read a word of, and watched Bonnie Oliphant sleep in his library, and told himself the feeling in his chest was nothing more than the warmth of the fire.
He didn’t believe it for a moment.
CHAPTER 6
The snow had started again sometime before dawn.
Bonnie had heard it when she woke—the hush of a world being muffled—and had felt, with a guilty pleasure she couldn’t regret, a deep and settled relief. She’d pulled Lyon’s shirt closer around her shoulders, stared at the ceiling of her guest room for a while, thinking about Lyon—specifically, his lips—then given up on sleep entirely and come to the library.
That had been two hours ago.
Now she was ensconced in what she’d privately begun to think of asherchair—the one on the left, closer to the window, where the light was better in the mornings—with her notes spread across her lap, a cup of tea going cold on the table beside her, and Lady Elspeth Mackay’s household accounts open to a particularly magnificent passage about the cost of tallow candles.
Bonnie should be writing. She was, technically, writing, in the sense that her pen was moving.
Mostly, she was thinking about the last two days.
She’d woken from that unexpected nap two days ago to find the fire still burning and Lyon in the opposite seat. And for one suspended, golden moment before either of them had acknowledged the other, she’d simply looked at him—at the firelight on his ruined cheek, at his long fingers loose around the spine of a book he hadn’t been reading—and felt something shift in her chest.
He’d noticed her wake. Of course he had; the man noticed everything. He’d looked up, looked immediately away, and said, “The cook left soup,” in his most forbidding growl, as if she’d caught him doing something embarrassing.
She’d had to press her lips together very hard to keep from smiling.
The next day had passed in the same rhythm they’d fallen into without discussion: her in the library, Lyon appearing with his sketchbooks and mechanical manuals and the occasional piece of correspondence he pretended required his urgent attention, both of them working in a silence so companionable it made her chest ache.
Keith had brought them luncheon and had lingered in the doorway afterwards with an expression of barely suppressed delight that had made Bonnie grin as well. She felt as if the two of them were unexpected partners in a scheme she still didn’t understand, but meant Lyon’s contentment. It was clear the younger man cared for his brother, so much more than a butler or even a friend.
The snow hadn’t been as steady as it had been that first day, with flurries throughout the day, and Bonnie acknowledged that she was disappointed the early December sky hadn’t dumped another two feet of snow on them.
She was aware this was not a reasonable way to feel about a blizzard.
She was also aware, with a clarity that would’ve alarmed her a week ago, that she was falling in love with Lyon Oliphant.
She’d been trying to talk herself out of it, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, on the grounds that she hadn’t known him very long and circumstances had been…well. They’d been forced into proximity by weather, which was exactly the sort of condition under which sensible women were supposed to keep their heads.
She’d told herself this firmly.
The trouble was, the more she knew of him, the firmer she needed to be.
He was a man of complete and genuine contradictions, and she found every single one of them fascinating. His mind worked like one of his mechanical sketches—precise, systematic, always looking for the design underneath the surface—and yet he could quote obscure Highland history without pausing to think, and he’d read every novel on those shelves, and when she’d asked him once, without thinking, what his favorite had been, he’d saidPersuasionin such a matter-of-fact growl that she’d had to look away before he saw her face.
He didn’t perform. That was the thing she kept coming back to.
He didn’t announce that he was kind; he lit the fire and stomped away before she could thank him. He didn’t proclaim his interest; he just put down his pen and listened. He didn’t claim he understood her—he just reached past her and handed her exactly the right book, and then went back to his chair and pretended he hadn’t done anything at all.
Bonnie had been cataloguing these moments in her mind rather than in her notes, and she had, she realized, quite a long list.
And then there was the matter of the almost-kiss, which she’d been tryingnotto catalogue and failing spectacularly.
She knew what it had been.
She wasn’t naive, and she’d read enough to understand the difference between a man who happened to be standing close and a man who had chosen not to step back.
He’dchosennot to step back. For the space of several heartbeats, he’d stood there and looked at her mouth, and she’d gone so still she’d forgotten to breathe, and then he’d stepped away and said something gruff about reading and the moment had dissolved.
She’d thought about almost nothing else since.
