Page 31 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

He stepped away, putting space between them. Nore shifted her weight. “I guess I did,” she admitted.

They were behind the stage, in one of the dark alcoves of knotted ropes and old set pieces.

“I have to go back to rehearsal,” he said, nodding his head toward the blaze of light off to the left, where she knew the stage was. “If you want to wait here for a spell until it’s clear, you’re welcome to. And if you want to wait longer, I have forty minutes left, and then I can deliver you where you need to go.”

“I don’t need that,” Nore said quickly—but.

But she was oddly shaken. Perhaps because she had never considered that she was ever in danger—in Arlowe, she never had been. And here in Nettlepool, even when she was running errands for Celestine, she was usually doing it in populated areas, and not in the dark of night.

He smiled, and there was kindness to it. His hands were moving quickly, gathering his shoulder-length black curls into a knot on top of his head, tying it back. He had strong eyebrows and a straight nose and eyes dark and gleaming as her favorite jasper pendant, a present from her mother for her last birthday. She looked away from his gaze, swallowing hard, focusing on his hands. He had beautiful hands, long fingered and graceful; golden-brown skin smoothed over the muscles of his forearms below his rolled-up sleeves.

“Forty minutes,” he promised, and then he was gone.

Nore barely had time to catch her breath. She looked around, her eyes adjusting to the shadows of the back of the theater—she hadn’t even learned his name.

It only took her ten minutes to find her way downstairs, down the hall, and to the dressing room where she had been instructed to leave the bag. Afterward, she went back upstairs to that dark backstage corner. Now, with rehearsal going in earnest, she heard the beating pulse of the orchestra as they practiced, the thud of the dancers as they moved across the floor.

She laid her hand on the door to go—but how she loved the theater. Every time she accompanied Edith, she watched the beauty of it with her heart in her throat.

Nore turned. Crept across the dark expanse of ropes and black-painted floorboards. She hid in the shadows at the edge of the stage and watched the dancers as they wove their way across the stage, like magic.

It was not hard to find the boy who had pulled her from the alley. He’d removed his shirt—in practice, all the young men danced bare chested—and she found the play of light against his skin to be oddly hypnotic. He moved with sinuous grace under the blaze of the lights, stirring to the music of the orchestra. Nore was certain the other dancers were good, too, but she could not take her eyes away from the boy, to be sure of it.

She didn’t realize she was still watching, her heart beating too fast, as the practice came to an end. The boy turned to say something to one of his friends—but his gaze caught Nore there, in the shadows, and it was like she was pinned in place. Other dancers walked out, down to the dressing rooms, and out into the alley, but Nore couldn’t move.

He pulled the shirt over his head. Hesitated. “Just let me grab my things,” he said, “and I’ll walk you?”

“That would be nice,” Nore agreed.

He disappeared, and she tried to get a grip on herself. Nore leaned against the sweating brick wall backstage and closed her eyes.

She’d had crushes before, in Arlowe. The apple seller, and a boy she’d kissed behind the village hall, and one disastrous flirtation that ended with groping over clothes at a harvest festival. Crushes and kisses—but she’d only been a girl before she came here, and Edith’s rules were like a vise on any other judgment she would make.

He was back soon, his hair wet and dripping over his shoulders, wearing different clothes, with a bag slung over his shoulder. “Where to?” he asked as he held the door open for her.

She felt a bit foolish. “I’m okay. I don’t need assistance to get around.”

“If that’s what you wish,” he said. “But I work evening shifts at a pub on the harbor. If that’s closer to where you’re going, you can come with me, and then you can get a carriage from there?”

Nore glanced at him sidelong, guessing his game. “I can fend for myself, you know.”

“I have no doubt of that,” he said.

It was cooler now, the sign of some storm rolling in from the sea. Outside, walking next to him, Nore felt oddly shy. She wondered if it had anything to do with the way she’d just ogled him for the better part of an hour.

“Is it a habit of yours, to lurk backstage?” he asked as they turned onto the wide avenue that ran down from the arts district, through the garment district, toward the harbor.

Nore snorted. “No,” she said. “I was on an errand. I thought the alley was a shortcut.” It was a good enough lie that it didn’t even twist on her tongue.

“Ah,” he said. “Not always great sorts around those parts at night,” he said.

Nore nodded. “You’re a dancer?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I play the horn.”

It took her a second—and she had to look at him to confirm that he was smiling. “That’s not fair,” she said, her tone sliding into whining. “I’m just trying to make polite conversation.”

“Polite conversation does not require stating the obvious.”