Page 103

What have you done, Adelaide?

The thunder rolled on, and for once, it felt like a beginning.

* * *

Julian had not slept since the night he brought Adelaide back through the storm. Not real sleep. Each time he drifted under, he snapped awake, lungs burning, the phantom taste of her still on his tongue and the old, churning ache in his chest refusing to abate.

He ate nothing. Mr. Danvers brought trays, then retrieved them hours later, the contents untouched. The cook sent up tea and biscuits, and he left them on the side table to dry and crumble in the air. His study grew musty, thick with the stagnant scent of rain-soaked wool and old paper.

He tried to write, but the letters he formed trembled and bled. Twice he spilled ink across the page, once upending the entire well. The stains spread outward, soaking through the good linen paper and onto the desk. He stared at them, hands shaking, remembering the way Adelaide's fingers had closed over his in the dark, guiding him back from the precipice.

This is not what you planned, Hawthorne. You said you would court her, secure an heir, keep the rest at arm's length. You said you could manage it.

He laughed, hollow and desperate.

He could not even manage to stand in the same room with her. Every time he heard her step in the hallway, every time she brushed past his study door, his pulse hammered, his breath locked, and all words fled his mind.

Helena had made herself invisible, perhaps sensing his mood. Or perhaps she was simply more considerate than he deserved. He had not spoken to her since the day Adelaide had gone into the storm, nor had he sought her out.

He would have given anything to be someone else, anywhere else, anything but this.

A knock at the door: "Your Grace, a letter from the museum trustees. I left it on the tray."

Julian waited, counting the seconds until he was sure the servant had gone. Then he crossed to the door, snatched the letter, and shut himself in again. The ink on the page blurred before his eyes.

It was a request for an update on the Xanthos expedition, the final arrangements, and the date of departure. He tried to respond, but the words would not come. The letter in his hand trembled so violently he feared he would tear it in two.

He stared at the wall. Across the room, Thomas's portrait hung between the window and the bookshelves. The artist had captured him as he never was in life: still, silent, grave. The sight of it was like a knife.

Julian tried to remember what it was to be rational, methodical, immune to the currents of feeling. He could not. All he could recall was the taste of her, the sound she made when he kissed her, and the way she looked at him in the rain, as if he was both her salvation and her ruin.

After an hour of pacing, he gave up all pretense of work. He needed the volume on Anatolian antiquities in the main library, and it was the one place he had avoided since the night of the storm. He braced himself, rolled his shoulders, and stepped out.

The house was silent. Even the servants seemed to have vanished, retreating from the pressure that filled every hallway.

He opened the library door and stopped dead.

Adelaide sat at the long table near the windows, a folio open before her, head bowed over a sheaf of notes. Light from the clouded sky caught her hair in wild, damp curls, and she was biting her lip, just as she had at the threshold two nights before.

He nearly turned and fled.

Instead, she looked up. Their eyes met, and he froze, pinned like a specimen.

She shut the folio with a snap. "Julian."

He nodded, every muscle in his body rigid. "Adelaide."

She stood, moving with slow, deliberate purpose, and crossed to the fireplace where he stood as if rooted. Her gaze ran up and down him, assessing, accusing, alive with an anger he had not seen since the day she first challenged him in the Kent library.

"You have been avoiding me," she said.

He managed a small, brittle smile. "I have been busy."

"Nonsense," she said. "You have been hiding. From me, from Helena, from yourself."

His chest tightened.

She took another step, standing so close he could see the tiny scratch on her cheek from the woods, the bruise on her wrist.