Page 147

Out the windows that looked toward the brownstone next door and out into the back, he saw only snow.

“I’m only down the hall,” she was saying, clearly unaware that he was quietly unraveling there before her. “You should sleep as much as you can, but if you need anything at all, if you feel even slightly off, come and get me. We don’t know how extensive the damage was.”

But Vesuvius, gazing at her, thought he knew exactly how extensive the damage was. He thought that really, he had crashed himself far more completely and with more devastating results two years ago. He’d broken everything, totaled himself in every way that mattered, and had never recovered.

It was one more thing he couldn’t say.

Aeryn stood there, looking like every dream he’d had about her in the intervening two years—at least one a night and ten more when he should have been focused on his work. Her eyes were dark and green. Her lips looked swollen from his kisses. Her dark hair fell in a curtain around her, looking very much like someone had been raking his fingers through it, because he had been.

She was, as she always had been, the most beautiful woman he’d ever beheld.

It wasn’t simply that she was objectively very attractive, though she was. Her mouth was wide and mobile. She had an aristocratic sort of nose and deep-set, complicated eyes. Her brows were dark and added a sense of intellect and mystery to her expression even in repose, and her high cheekbones added elegance to the roundness of her face.

All of these things would have made her beautiful. Her thick, long, dark hair only added to that, particularly when she wore it up in a variety of graceful ways. Then again when it fell, thick like silk, around her shoulders.

But there were a lot of beautiful women in the world.

There was something about her. It was the Aeryn of it all. If she had simply been another beautiful woman who’d turned up in his orbit, Vesuvius doubted he would have been so captivated. He certainly wouldn’t have jeopardized his reputation, snuck around when he should have been tending to his duties, or abdicated the throne he’d spent his life preparing to hold until his death if she had been like anyone else that he’d met.

Maybe it was as simple as the fact that when she met him the first time, she’d talked to him about art. She hadn’t flirted with him. She hadn’t even seemed particularly intimidated by him, though later, she had confessed that she had been so intimidated that she’d thought, what the hell, and had treated him like a student instead of a king.

Because she hadn’t had any idea how else to get through the interaction.

But that first afternoon—when he’d nearly not gone to the gallery at all because his schedule had been packed and he’d been in a dire sort of mood already after a typically poisonous breakfast with his ever-venomous betrothed—he had decided to make time for the gallery visit because he found everything about the art gallery soothing.

It had been his mother’s great passion, and while she’d managed to open the gallery in her lifetime, it had been left to Vesuvius to make certain that dream persisted. Part of that involved building out its collections and making the museum less of a monarchical vanity project and more a contender for international renown, because that was what his mother would have wanted.

It was the least the Queen Mother deserved, in his opinion.

His aide had filled him in on the woman he was meant to meet as they’d walked inside. An American, which tracked, as the final pieces of the Marcellus Dano collection had been donated in the last century to an art museum in Chicago. A city he had heard of, certainly, though he had never visited. It seemed faintly exotic as American cities went, since all he ever heard about were New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. And Washington, of course, but for different reasons.

The particular art historian and collections manager he’d been meant to meet that day had gotten her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Chicago. His aide had assured him that both Northwestern and the University of Chicago were considered to be highly selective and competitive institutions, deserving of admiration. Having gone to Oxford himself, and having never considered another university unless it was Cambridge or possibly ETH Zurich, Vesuvius had not been one to judge.

His aide had then proceeded to list off the woman’s qualifications, but Vesuvius had listened with only half an ear. Because the art gallery pleased him. It was light and airy, even in the darkest part of the year. There was an entire wing dedicated to his mother’s personal collection and he always took a detour through that wing first when he visited, because it made him feel…

Well. Like a human, he supposed.

Not a king. Not the head of a government, but a man who had once been a little boy whose mother had shown him all the art she’d kept in the palace galleries and told him the stories painted on every canvas.

The gallery gave him the gift of feeling like nothing more or less than a man. A human being who could look at a painting on a wall and feel his heart shift position in his chest.

He’d walked out of his mother’s wing and into the special collections wing, and had felt his heart do much the same thing at the sight of the dark-haired, bright-eyed woman directing the gallery workers in appalling French, but with a bright, apologetic smile, as if she knew exactly how tragic her French was.

He had been captivated. Struck entirely witless.

Wonderstruck, more like.

He had never felt anything like it before. And Vesuvius had always been careful, given his position—but had certainly never been a saint.

They all speak English, he had told her as he’d drawn closer. There is no need to continue assaulting them with your version of French if you would rather not.

She had turned, laughing, and that had been his first real impression of her. She did not take herself too seriously—that had been immediately clear. And her laughter was infectious. It seemed to pour over him, like something sparkling and bright.

I thought that as an American it was my duty to at least try to speak a foreign language, she had replied. Still in that French.

Is that what you are doing? he’d asked, and had found himself smiling in a way that was probably too much, given the look his aide had shot him. You’re in luck. This is not France, so it is less likely that someone might take drastic offense. How is your Italian? I am afraid to ask.

It is equally dreadful, I’m afraid, she said. In English, happily.