31. Spring Beauty
Spring Beauty
Louna stood when she heard footsteps in the hall, and waited as Tennyson came into the room with a neutral expression that told her nothing of his thoughts.
The Verdier brothers were still asleep in the first room, leaving this one—a plain space with six bunk beds, a closet, and a fireplace—to her.
She’d lit the fire already, feeding it from the wood box the cabin’s staff had stocked before leaving for the season, and the room had warmed perceptibly.
Which was good, because Tennyson wore nothing but a towel.
His hair was wet, and his body showed the evidence of his fall—bruises and cuts crossing over old scars like brush strokes over a repainted canvas. He watched her, his eyes impossibly blue in the gauzy light, and she steeled herself and held a cup out to him.
“I brought that water,” she said. “And a first aid kit. What’s left of it, anyway.”
A white bandage was already wrapped around his upper arm, covering the cut he’d received in Paris. Tennyson accepted the cup from her, giving her a small smile of thanks before taking a drink.
“How did you find us?” she asked.
“Cristian was still there when I got back to the castle,” he said, his voice as mild as the firelight. “The police and fire departments had left, and the rest of Hartmann’s guards scattered when they saw me. Cristian asked if I was working with you, and I said I was. He gave me his car.”
Who would have figured that the young man would turn out to be such a valuable ally? Louna opened the first aid kit, resolving to find a way to thank Cristian before she left Romania. “Why didn’t you go back to the Nest?”
“I meant to,” Tennyson said. “But I saw two sets of tire tracks leaving the main road, and I thought maybe you’d pulled off to find a place to wait out the storm. I didn’t see the van when I came to the house, so I parked down the road and walked up to it in case someone else was inside.”
“We parked in the back,” Louna said, turning her attention back to the kit.
He put out a hand and gave her a small smile. “I’m all right. But I’m not sure you’ll be able to salvage the costume. I lost the cravat.”
His levity burned her, reigniting the emotions she’d been trying to extinguish since the fight. It was too much. The ice around her heart clung in desperation, urging her to run, to hide, to do anything but stand here and confront the injuries she’d inflicted on him.
She didn’t know how to make him understand what she didn’t understand herself.
He took in her lack of reaction and smiled again. “I just came to check on the light,” he said. “You should get some sleep.”
He turned to go, and the words she’d been holding in tore out of her.
“There are things I have to tell you.”
He stopped, but his expression never changed. He’d lost his mask sometime during the night, but this—this bland courtesy, this distance—it was a facade he’d never put between them before. He felt more like a stranger to her now than the night they’d met, and the renewed loss hit her like a bullet.
“Tomorrow,” Tennyson said gently, oblivious to her panic. “You should rest, and in the morning—”
“Hartmann took Polina,” she said in a rush. “The woman I talked to at the tea shop. He told me he had her, and he implied that he’d let her go if I went back to Harlow. So tonight, after you played your set, I called him.”
His body had gone still as she spoke, and he stood like the sculpture of a Greek hero, Michelangelesque. “You locked him in the bedroom?” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“That was dangerous.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Louna said. “I should have.”
His expression was hard and empty as marble. His gaze fell to her hand, to the cut bared against her skin. “Hartmann did that?”
“Yes,” Louna whispered.
He nodded, then looked to the ring on her finger and back to her face, a question in his eyes.
“It’s the reason Harlow let us go,” she said. “I recognized a picture of it in his studio, and I knew it belonged to Ilya’s family. It’s a key to something, I don’t know what. That’s why I was talking to Polina.”
“I can figure that out,” Tennyson said.
Her heart gave an anguished wrench. “You?”f
He turned, breaking the illusion of immobility as he strode for the door. “Yes. In the morning, I’ll see what I can find of Polina’s trail, and I’ll try to—”
“Don’t,” she said, a horrible, breathless desperation rising in her voice.
She tried to force it down, but she was trembling now, her body cold in the stifling heat of the room.
He turned back to her, his mouth opening to tell her that she would be safer without him, that she should go back to Paris, that he needed to do this on his own, and her composure shattered.
She was on the side of the castle again, unable to reach him, watching him disappear forever.
“Don’t tell me to go again,” she breathed. “Not now, not after—not after—”
Her hands were in his. She looked up—when had she fallen?
—and found him supporting her, his expression finally, finally him again.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said, his arm wrapped around her back, holding her to him.
“I don’t want you to go. I just didn’t want to assume that you would come with me. ”
She buried her face in his shoulder, swallowing hard to keep from embarrassing herself with tears.
“I don’t want you to go,” he said again. “I should. I should do whatever it takes to make you leave, but I can’t.”
“Don’t,” she said.
Tennyson leaned back, but didn’t release her. He looked at her like her face was a painting, like he was studying the composition and the lighting and the perspective, drawing meaning from the color in her cheeks and the shadows under her eyes.
“I scared you,” he whispered.
“You scare me,” she said.
The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “You scare me too.”
His confession was barely audible, but it settled over her like the weight of his arms, warm and solid and steady. She didn’t know how to exist like this. Feeling worried instead of exhilarated, wondering if the next time she saw him would be the last.
But the alternative—being without him—was worse.
Maybe it would be better to melt after all.
“I don’t know how to trust,” she said, her forehead against his chest, over his heart.
He lifted her chin, stopping just before her lips touched his. “We could learn together.”
She leaned into him. “I won’t be good at it.”
“I know you,” Tennyson said, his voice low. His lips brushed hers as he spoke, barely, never close enough to be a kiss. “I know what you’re capable of.”
“And you?” she asked.
“For you,” he breathed. “Anything.”
She pressed forward, touching her lips to his, and for one heartbeat they stayed there, a moment captured before the impending motion.
Then he sighed, leaning into the kiss as he pulled her tighter, one hand coming up to tangle in her hair as she splayed her hands over his skin.
She’d never been much of a sculptor, but she felt like one now—running her hands over his back, feeling the shapes of his muscles bunching under her touch, revealing the hurts beneath each scar.
This, finally, was the real Tennyson, laid bare of pretense. Exposed. Vulnerable.
The angel freed from the marble.
Her heart freed from the ice.
It would be that way, she realized. They could be a composition together, a blend of contrasting colors, a chord of two notes. A work of art worth stealing over and over again.
Her fingers brushed a section of torn skin on Tennyson’s shoulder blade, and his breath hitched against hers. She drew back, smiling when he tried to close the distance between them again.
“Turn around,” she said. “Let me clean it.”
“It can wait,” he whispered, pressing a kiss beneath her jaw.
“You fell off a cliff,” she said.
He huffed a laugh against her neck. “Why do people keep bringing that up?”
“You don’t seem to have realized it.” She pushed gently on the soft skin just above his hips, and he turned with a long-suffering sigh.
The flashlight he’d been carrying was on the bed, though she didn’t hear him drop it there, and she picked it up and folded his fingers over it.
“Hold this here,” she said, lifting his arm and angling the light over his shoulder.
“Yes, ma’am,” he muttered.
She touched the red skin around the deep scrapes on his shoulder blade, and he hissed. “Be good,” she said. “Or I’ll send you back to Lindsey for treatment.”
He grunted something inaudible, and she let him distract himself with his affected irritation while she reached for an alcohol wipe.
Scrape was too light a word for the angry tears in the skin, but at least they weren’t bleeding.
She cleaned the area around the cuts first, feeling Tennyson’s muscles tense again as he held himself still. “This will hurt,” she warned.
“It already hurts,” he grumbled.
Louna leaned in and kissed the bruised skin above the scrape. “Don’t be such a baby.”
“As you all keep reminding me,” he said in a strained voice. “I fell off a cliff.”
She studied his back, the evidence of new and old hurts carved into his skin, and kissed him again.
“Relax,” she said. “I’m almost done.”
She wasn’t, but he accepted the lie anyway.
Tennyson talked in his sleep.
Not much, and not clearly, but enough to make Louna lie awake even though her body ached for sleep.
When she’d finished alleviating his various hurts, he had banked the fire and pushed the two bunks closest to the fireplace together to make a larger bed.
They were simple wooden frames with thin mats, made for use with sleeping bags rather than as actual beds, but they were better than nothing.
Louna piled all the sheets she found in the closet on top of them, and then half directed, half coaxed him into bed.
She’d turned away to close the door, and he caught her hand.
“Stay,” he said, his eyes heavy.
She touched his scruffy cheek. “I will. Go to sleep.”
By the time she’d returned from cleaning up the medical supplies and shutting the door to keep the heat in, he was asleep.
He’d taken the side closest to the door, protecting her even now, and she crawled beneath the sheets and burrowed into the warmth of his body.
When he felt her weight beside him, he rolled to put his arm over her shoulder, holding her to his chest as he exhaled into her hair.
He murmured his first words against her temple, and she’d snuggled deeper into his embrace and tilted her face to hear better.
“What did you say?” she whispered.
He didn’t stir. For several minutes, he was quiet, and she started to drift to sleep. Then, softly—
“Cynthia.”
She froze, but he went on in a barely audible voice. “Ten-times bright and fair, from thy blue throne, now filling all the air, glance but one little beam of temper’d light…”
Louna smiled as she worked to place the lines, melting into him once more.
Keats. Endymion, if she remembered correctly—the shepherd who fell in love with the moon goddess.
She listened as he recited the second book of the poem, his voice fading in and out, sometimes steady and rhythmic, sometimes skipping whole stanzas.
By the time he quieted, the fire had burned to embers, and Louna could hear the stirrings of movement in the next room. She closed her eyes, trailing her fingers over a scarless patch of skin on Tennyson’s side, and drifted to sleep with the feeling of his heartbeat against hers.