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She sighed.
“Come.” Wes held out his hand to her.
She looked at his palm, her look flickering back up to his eyes. “What?”
“Same thing as last night. You’re not sleeping here alone. It’s not safe.”
“You don’t know that.”
Wes stifled a sigh, his fingers twitching at her. “I do know you are safer at my residence than you are here. That and you haven’t eaten all day. I sent word this morning to have my cook stop by and leave biscuits, meats and cheeses.”
He could see in her amber eyes how hungry she suddenly was.
She groaned a wicked exhale, then pierced him with her gaze, her eyebrow raised. “Same thing as last night?”
His head jerked back. “What are you implying?”
She shook her head, her eyes going to the ceiling. “Not that.”
“Then what?”
The smallest smile came to her lips. “Another truce. You stifle your anger at me for the evening.”
Wes’s look dipped to the box and then to her face. There was no way he was going to leave her alone with the Box of Draupnir.
Not that she need to know that.
He shrugged his shoulders. “A herculean feat. But I’ll somehow manage it just the same as I did last night.”
A moment of hesitation and she set her hand in his.
{ Chapter 11 }
Clutching the box to her belly, Laney walked past Wes as he held open the wrought iron metal gate that led to the gardens at the rear of his house.
The street in front of his townhouse was busy at this time of the eve, a multitude of shiny black carriages pulling along and stopping at the side. With the activity, Wes had advised discretion and sent the hack driver to the cross street so they could enter his townhouse through the mews.
Laney glanced over her shoulder. Part of the street’s liveliness was courtesy of the townhouse located directly behind the back of Wes’s home. A ball. And by the sounds drifting down across the mews to the gardens and the light spilling out onto the balcony from the ballroom, the townhouse was packed to the seams.
Wes closed the gate behind them as Laney stepped to the side by the low symmetrical hedges that held a variety of roses. The darkness of night couldn’t hide the fact that Wes’s gardener maintained a well-groomed landscape. Knee-high boxwoods lined square after square of roses, foxglove, bellflowers and violets. Curious that she didn’t see lavender anywhere. A waft caught her nose—peony. She searched to her left to find a square of crimson peonies in full bloom.
Music reached her ears and her eyes were drawn upward to the rear of the opposite townhouse. Above the mews, she caught glimpses of bright silk in a multitude of colors flashing in front of the open doors to the balcony. Dancing. Dancing with such abandon and glee she could almost taste the laughter from up above on her own lips.
“Are you coming, Laney?”
She jumped, forgetting for the shortest of moments that she was standing in the garden with Wes. Him, of all people.
Laney turned to him just as his look drifted upward from her to fix on the ballroom in the distance.
Her gaze swung to the dancers once more.
The strains of awaltz washed over them as they both stood silent, heartbeat after heartbeat, watching what once had been their lives.
Fun, friends, laughter.
Love.
A different time. Different place. Different them.
