Page 65 of The Trick of It

“In my experience?” he said, tilting his head to the side to consider it. “Yes.”

“Perhaps I will visit someday,” she said wistfully. “And be surrounded with brash, decorum-flouting lovelies.”

“Well, you’ve already got me,” he pointed out. “I’m those things too.”

“Hm,” she said, rather than agreeing. “We have a few hours before dinner. Do you want to assemble the curtain frames? They’re just over there, by my bed.”

“Oho, your bed,” he mocked, pushing up from the ground to flip his feet back under him. “We’ll see about that. I don’t think we have room for all five, though. At least not in here.”

“No, I don’t think so, either,” she said, looking from one corner of the room to the other. “Three should do us, for an intimate performance. We won’t have an elevated stage or a large crowd like we used to, either, nor the benefit of open-air distractions.”

He nodded, frowning and craning backward to stretch out his spine before he began this simple carpentry. “Maybe there will be room for all five frames wherever these nightly performances are happening,” he reasoned. “But we can rehearse with three.”

“If we’re limited to three, we ought to reduce the number of vanishings or alter them to avoid being repetitive,” she said, reaching out to count the kerchiefs and flowers. Six of each. “I would hate to do that, though.”

Rhys had stopped over the trunk, his chin fallen so hard against his chest as he stared, wide-eyed down into its contents, that the bones of his jaw felt fused to the ones in his collar. The contents of the chest had drawn his eye. He supposed he had thought she’d emptied it of everything, the way she was surrounded by bits and bobs a few feet away.

He had been wrong.

There in the low, cradled recess of the trunk was midnight-blue fabric, glinting with gold satin down the middle and over the hips, long-belled sleeves folded over its middle demurely. It looked like a battle standard from the Crusades. It looked like the type of flag one intended to plant, whether in claim or in victory. “What?” said Seph, coming to her feet. “What’s wrong?”

“You kept the dress,” he said softly, bringing his hands up and sinking his fingers into his hair. “I did not think you would still have that dress.”

“Oh,” she said, wrinkling her brow in confusion. “Well, I don’t know if it still fits, but I’m hoping it does. It already matches the props, so it’d be one less thing to buy. We’re going to have to go into town to get the shoes, though, if we’re still doing that part.”

“We are,” Rhys said thinly, still staring down at the dress. “Aye. Indeed. Shoes.”

He cleared his throat and spun away from her to trot briskly over to the curtain assembly, lest he forget himself less than an hour into this visit. He could feel her eyes on his back, warm and curious and perhaps just a bit smug.

Gentleman, he thought.

It was such a very flexible word.

Chapter Twenty-One

By the time she and Rhys had descended into the dining room for dinner, Seph had found a soreness in her limbs and joints that she had all but forgotten, in the years since the choreography of the Changeling had been part of her life.

Perhaps naively, she had thought that once they started rehearsing the thing, they’d become distracted by one another in short order and resume their activities from the carriage.

She had underestimated what had always happened to both of them when they started their work in tandem. She had forgotten the intensity of its grip over mind and heart just as surely as she had forgotten how to use the hidden muscles under her arms and behind her legs as they moved between screens together, synchronized in every breath and heartbeat.

And it had been glorious.

She could not pretend that it had not been glorious.

And now that they could smell the scents wafting in from the kitchen, she remembered the particular pant of hunger that always followed these rehearsals too.

How much she had forgotten!

“Hot bath,” Rhys said immediately to one of the footmen by the door of the dining room, a blond gentleman who had one eye narrowed as he took in the informal assembly of diners plopping into place around his table. “After dinner? Could you see to it?”

“They are in the master suite,” Nini’s voice added as she sashayed in behind him. “Though, Mr. Caradoc, you will need another hour after dinner before you can return to your chambers, so perhaps adjust the order for then. Tonight is the first performance.”

Rhys frowned at her but did not argue, giving a loose shrug and slapping the man on the back. “You heard her,” he said, grinning into the quivering chin on the footman. “That’s a good man.”

“Rhys,” Seph tutted as he found his seat next to her. “Don’t antagonize people.”

“I can’t help it,” he returned, batting his long, black lashes at her.