Chapter 23 #3
Kazrian turned from the door and surveyed the room. “There is no need for that.” He was already moving toward the far corner. “There is a rather generous pile of cushions over there, and more than enough linen. I can construct something … serviceable.”
She lifted her head. “Oh.” Another pause. “All right.”
She watched him cross the room and begin pulling cushions from the pile and laying them out along the narrow strip of floor. He tucked a sheet around them, found a blanket, shook it out. Arranged the whole lot of it into something that, in the forgiving darkness, began to resemble a passable bed.
“That is … not bad,” she admitted.
And then she thought about what lying down, in this room, in his presence, would actually involve, and found herself suddenly far less tired and far more … aware.
“Will it be … large enough, do you think? For … for both of us?”
Kazrian, who had been carrying a smaller cushion back toward the makeshift bed and attempting to edge around a sack of something, caught his foot on the corner of a crate and half stumbled, catching himself against the shelving with one hand before anything could fall.
“No!” he said, rather too quickly, righting himself. “No, it is—no. It is for you. Only for you. I would never dream of—no. Absolutely not.”
She blinked at him. “But what about you?”
“I shall sit on the floor.”
“Kazrian.”
“What?”
“You cannot sit on the floor all night.”
“Of course I can.” He placed the smaller cushion where her head would rest and stepped back. “There. That should be quite comfortable. For you. The one person who will be lying on it.”
She looked at the arrangement, then looked at him, then turned her gaze to the hard wooden floor on which he apparently intended to spend the remainder of the night.
“This is ridiculous,” she said.
“It is sensible, and—more importantly—proper. Or as near to proper as we can reasonably achieve with two people locked together in a storeroom.”
“It is ridiculous, and you know it.”
She wanted to argue further, but her body had apparently decided the matter without consulting her.
She gathered the pocket watch and the ring from the floor and set them on a nearby shelf where they would not be stepped on.
She removed her shoes and placed them near the door.
Then she lowered herself onto the makeshift bed, being careful not to disturb the arrangement too much.
The cushions were, she had to concede once she was lying down, remarkably comfortable for something assembled from a storeroom’s cast-off furnishings.
She pulled the blanket up over herself and stared at the darkened ceiling.
She could hear Kazrian settling himself against the wall. The small sounds of someone trying to find a tolerable position on bare wood. A quiet exhale. A shift. Another shift.
She lasted approximately two minutes.
She sat up. “I cannot possibly sleep knowing you are over there on the floor. You had better come here now, or I shall join you on the floor, and neither of us shall sleep, and we shall both be wretched and useless tomorrow. And you know how much there is still to be done.”
A long pause. Then Kazrian dragged a hand slowly down his face. “Lucie …”
“I know perfectly well that you are a gentleman. You will leave an absolute chasm of space between us. You always do.”
Oh. She likely should not have said that aloud either. The fact that she was fully aware of just how much distance he always kept between them.
“I am not—” He made a vague, helpless gesture at the makeshift bed. “I am not a small person. I would take up the entire bed.”
“You are exaggerating.”
“I am not.”
“Kazrian.”
Another silence in which he did not respond. The rain continued to drum against the window. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled.
“Please?”
She heard him exhale a long, low grumble. He sat forward and began to remove his shoes, and the action, which signaled that he had given in, that he would be lying beside her within moments, sent something hot and dizzying spiraling through her chest and all the way to her fingertips.
Stop it, she instructed herself. This is nothing. It is a pile of cushions and two people who need to lie down for the night. THAT IS ALL.
He set his shoes beside hers near the door, moved to the makeshift bed, and waited at the foot of it, as though the cushions might offer him some alternative arrangement if he stared at them long enough.
“Oh, for—” A laugh escaped her, high and nervous and not entirely under her control. “Would you just lie down?”
He did not move immediately. She had the sense that he was watching her, could feel the weight of his gaze, but she could make out little more than the outline of him in the dark. She was glad of it. She was not entirely sure what her own face was doing.
“Very well,” he said eventually. “But I want it noted that I objected.”
“Noted,” Lucie said.
She lay back down and closed her eyes, her traitorous heart leaping wildly in her chest. And as she felt the cushions shift beneath his weight, she decided that this storeroom, this night, this man lying down beside her in the dark, was going to be the absolute undoing of everything she had ever told herself she did not feel.