Page 131 of Faceless

She stopped.

The hand on his face stayed where it was, but all the rest of her altered at once — the stillness that came of expecting resistance and finding confession instead.

“You did not show it.”

“No.”

“You showed, if memory serves, something very like disapproval.”

“I was trying to.”

Her brows went up. “Trying to dislike me?”

“Trying not to show how much I liked you.”

“Why, because I was impertinent?”

“Especially then.”

“That is a very suspicious taste in a man.”

“It may be. I have had it for some time.”

“All this time,” she said, “I supposed myself to be mortifying you.”

“You were.”

“There, you see?”

“In the way one is mortified by being too pleased.”

She shook her head at him as if he were beyond remedy. “And at Rosings? When I advised you of a walking path I was fond of, so that you might be able to avoid me?”

“I thought you were flirting.”

Her eyes rounded, and her brows rose. “Flirting? Now you sound more like yourself.”

He put up a hand and caught her wrist very gently before she could withdraw it from his face. Her pulse moved under his thumb, quick and even. “I saw what I wanted to see and heard what I wanted to hear,” he said, “because I was already too far gone to hear any of it with safety.”

“I thought,” she said, “that you disapproved because you found me ill-bred.”

“I found you unlike anyone I had ever met, which was a far more dangerous circumstance.”

“So, I have been punished for my manners by being secretly admired for them.”

“You have not been punished.”

“Hid from, misled, married in darkness, observed through architectural contrivance. These things, I think, begin to amount to a system.”

“Elizabeth.”

“No, let us be accurate. Accuracy is the least you owe me after this.” She shifted closer against him under the coverlet, her hair falling forward over one shoulder. “And my insufferableness, I collect, was one of your chosen pleasures.”

“It was not one of them.”

“No?”

“It was all of them.”