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He was taken by surprise. “Nothing. Nothing terrible, at any rate.”
“Surely they’ve warned you that I am always trying to befriend the guards, and that you should never show me a single kindness.”
“Well,” he said cautiously, “something like that.”
She didn’t reply and a long silence stretched between them. Brandon didn’t know why it made him so uncomfortable, but he was convinced she was waiting for him to speak again, and after a while he couldn’t bear the waiting.
“Is it true?” he asked.
“That you should never show me a kindness?”
“That you always befriend the guards.”
“The ones who seem willing to be befriended,” she said. “But since I have no other friends and very little other company, don’t you think my life would be woefully sad if I couldn’t have an agreeable conversation with one or two other human beings? Ever?”
Over the past three days, he had just about come to that conclusion on his own. “It would,” he said. “Very lonely, too. But—”
“But what?”
“They told me that you try to make friends so they’ll help you escape.”
Her laugh was so low it might not even be a laugh. Certainly it wasn’t mirthful. “Oh, I’ll never escape this house.”
Another long silence fell between them. He was burning to ask more questions—starting with the biggest, the most obvious one.What have you done to cause you to be locked up here for the rest of your life?Finley would tell him it didn’t matter; it was his job to carry out the assignment he had been given and not ask for the reasons behind it. The prisoner, he thought, could not be counted on to tell him the truth.
But he really wanted to know.
The chair moved more decisively across the tile, and he could see Villette’s silhouette stand up. “Well, it’s late and I’m sleepy,” she said. She bent over to blow out the candles before stepping out from under the canopy and toward the door.
But this time, unlike the other three nights, she moved at a measured pace, her head lifted, her attention fixed on Brandon where he stood near the door. He watched her slow journey from the complete darkness of the pavilion to the moon-streaked shadows of the open patio to the almost-light thrown by the interior sconces. With each step, her shape became more distinct, her features more discernible. He couldn’t help staring intently at her face, which so far he had seen only in glimpses and which even now was not wholly visible in the dimness.
The high cheekbones, the rich skin, the dark hair coiled at the nape of her neck—yes, those were exactly the way he had envisioned them after those few brief impressions. Her eyes were a velvet brown under elegantly arched brows; her mouth and nose were daintily shaped. He wouldn’t have called her beautiful, exactly, but there was something winsome about the arrangement of her features. It was hard to read her expression, yet he couldn’t shake the thought that her face was shuttered with sadness. As if no other emotion would ever be able to break through.
And then she smiled and the expression was so inviting it almost chased away the sadness. Almost. “I wonder about you,” she said softly. “Do you wonder about me?”
Without waiting for an answer, she brushed past him and went into the house.
This night he didn’t follow. He was too busy catching his breath.
Chapter Ten:
Brandon
Brandon could hardly sleep the following day for wishing the sun would race through its customary perambulations and plummet toward the hard line of the horizon. Finally, knowing he would have to be alert for all the long hours of his shift, he willed himself to doze in the early afternoon, only to wake up a few hours later. It would have to do. He rose and shaved and put on his navy uniform with extra care.
Then there was just an hour of desultory conversation with Finley to get through, and a solitary dinner to consume as slowly as possible so the activity filled the last empty hour. Finally, finally, the clocks showed five minutes to nine, and Brandon could march under the archway that led to the garden.
“I’m here,” he announced unnecessarily to Nadder. The other man nodded and left.
Brandon stood at stiff attention as he waited for the echoes of Nadder’s footfalls to fade. He was positioned so that, with one twist of his head, he could glance into the house or directly into the shadows under the pavilion. He could make out Villette’s slim seated shape, though she hadn’t bothered lighting candles this night. He thought she, too, was waiting for Nadder to be out of hearing before she resumed last night’s conversation.
But five minutes passed, and then ten, and then an hour, and Villette didn’t speak at all.
Brandon was dismayed at the strength of his disappointment—shocked, actually, to discover how much he had looked forward to hearing her voice again. His whole body had been strung with excitement when he first took up his waiting pose, but as the night wore on, he felt his hands unclench and his shoulders droop and the corners of his mouth turn down.
Stupid. What had he expected? What had hewanted,even? He couldn’t even put it into words.
He tensed up again when he caught the sound of her chair moving against the tile, but all it signaled was that she was rising to her feet. She stepped out from under the awning, but she didn’t look his way as she passed by him so closely he was for a moment enveloped in her honeysuckle perfume. Then she was gone and the scent was gone and he was left with the whole night to get through before he could seek his bed and try to forget that he was an idiot.
