Page 78 of A Fragile Enchantment

“You may be the only good thing I’ve ever wanted.”

Her breath whooshed out of her. She couldn’t process it. She couldn’t accept it. She couldn’t allow herself to hope again. It would hurt too much.You’re going to get your heart broken.“We should go before someone finds us here.”

Without waiting for his reply, she turned on her heel to flee.

“Wait.” He caught her by the wrist. His fingers were hot against her skin, his grip firm but reverent.Stay, please.Her pulse beat wildly as she turned around to face him. “Just… Wait a minute. You’re always moving.”

They stood in the middle of the room, but his presence enveloped her entirely. The warm intensity of his gaze pinned her in place. As long as she’d been old enough to understand the cards she’d been dealt, she had worked her life away: always preparing for the inevitable, searching for the next thing to do, another tear to mend, another hurt to soothe. She had always believed life was what slipped through her fingers while she was idle. That life was something she wasted, not something she had. But now, she understood how wrong she’d been. Her heart beat. Her lungs swelled with air. Life was here, right in front of her.

She would not move for anything.

His eyes on hers were molten, as golden and bright as sunlightitself. They were poised on the knife’s edge of hunger and frustration. It sent a jolt through her, pooling low within her.

“There,” he murmured. “Is that so terrible?”

“No,” she breathed.

She didn’t know how it happened, or who moved first, but she was suddenly weightless. She rose onto her toes, and the plane of his stomach was solid and warm against her palms. His hand slid to the small of her back, pulling her flush against him. When he kissed her, it was entirely unlike him, nothing at all like it had been before: sweet and tentative and searching. Niamh grinned against his mouth.

There were so few times when she did not resent her body, traitorous as it was. But gods, he felt so good against her. Tears gathered behind her eyes at how tenderly he held her. Happiness fizzed within her like magic. She felt practically luminous with it, her every heartbeat singing with the sound of his name. Everything was falling to pieces around them, but here, with him, she stood within the eye of a hurricane.

“Kit!”

At the sound of Jack’s voice, they both froze.

“Hide,” Kit said.

22

Hide.It was a cold reentry into the world.

Nothing felt real at all, when her head was still swimming from his kiss. He lowered her back onto her feet, her skirts suddenly heavy and snaring around her.

Hide?There was notimeto hide. Jack’s footsteps echoed in the antechamber, growing louder and louder. Her eyes roved wildly about the room. Unless she wanted to climb out the window—which, knowing herself, would almost certainly result in some kind of injury—there was nowhere to go, either.

Nowhere but the desk.

Niamh scrambled underneath it, just as the door flew open.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Niamh’s blood ran cold at the sound of Jack’s voice. Growing up in a household still reeling from so much loss, she’d alwaysbeen attuned to anger, all the ways to make herself small to avoid it, to weave between its volleys. But Kit faced Jack down with the stoicism of a soldier.

“Taking a look around,” Kit replied flatly.

She tried to adjust herself more comfortably, but she’d drawn her knees to her chest and cranked her neck at an odd angle to even fit under here. If she pressed her cheek flat to the floor, she could make out a thin sliver of the room. Just the floorboards, slick with moonlight and strewn with all of Jack’s documents, and the shine of their black shoes.

The silence stretched out between them. Jack must’ve noticed the empty decanter on the shelf because he said, “You’re drunk.”

Jack’s voice wavered in a way Niamh had not thought him capable of. In truth, she hadn’t thoughtanyonecould inject so much feeling into two words. It crossed every shade of grief, from anger to despair and back again.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Kit snapped, but there was something raw in his voice: guilt, born from a pure and awful self-loathing. “I poured it out.”

“I don’t believe you.” Jack spoke steadily now, pulling on all his armor piece by piece. But the damage had been done. Too many cracks had spread across it, where the helplessness, the heartbreak, seeped through. Niamh’s throat tightened, to hear a man like the prince regent so undone by love. “How can you possibly expect me to believe you?”

“Believe me or don’t. I don’t care.” But Niamh could tell that he cared very much. She could picture them now, standing on opposite sides of the room as though it was a ravine they couldn’t cross. “I can already see the gears turning in your mind. But I’m not a problem you have to solve. I’m not some mess you have to sweep up. Don’t you get it? You couldn’t have fixed me. I still resent you for it, but now I see sending me away was the right decision because you would have killed yourself trying.”

“Kit—”