Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
The last of the light was going amber-rose high on the kitchen walls when Lucie set down her cloth and let herself do the thing she had been saving for the very end of the day: she went to the enchanted list and reviewed every item she had listed that morning and found—with a satisfaction so complete it was very nearly disbelief—that every last thing upon it had been done.
In addition to a dozen small tasks, the chocolate bees were finished, a full second batch of them, enchanted and resting obediently in their tin.
The honeycomb beehive stood assembled in all its intricate golden glory, moved to the front of the shop where nothing could knock it over—the shop was closed tomorrow, the day before the launch.
And she had even managed an additional batch of candied violet creams, because Lady Rivenna had observed that there would almost certainly not be enough on the day.
Lucie rinsed and hung the cloth, tidied the last of her tools into their drawer, and hung her apron on its hook, and to anyone watching she would have appeared entirely present, entirely composed, a young confectioner attending to the ordinary close of an ordinary day.
Her mind, however, was somewhere else entirely.
Upstairs. In the dark. On a pile of cushions, with the rain still falling.
There was never anyone else.
Her hands stilled on the edge of the worktable.
She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and let the warmth of it move through her again.
That aching, bittersweet bloom in her chest that had not faded since the words had settled into the dark between them.
All she had wanted in that moment was to fold herself into him entirely.
She had not, of course. She had only allowed herself to curl as near to him as she dared, and fallen asleep dreaming of him with the sound of rain and thunder closing over them both.
They had agreed this morning, awkwardly, both of them talking at once and then both stopping at once, in that fumbling, stumbling way they had adopted since he returned, that they need never speak of it again.
That no one else need ever know. It had been a very sensible agreement, and Lucie intended to honor every word of it.
But she had also, in the quiet and secret recesses of her mind, gone over the whole of it multiple times.
She crossed to the hearth, where Balthazar lay on his cushion beside the now lumyrite-free stones.
“Good night,” she told him, and leaned down to brush her hand gently over the fur between his ears.
He permitted it. He even, after a moment, tilted his head a fraction into her palm.
“And thank you again. For bringing Kazrian here last night to help me.” She straightened and gave him a look.
“Though I still suspect you had something to do with the storeroom door closing moments after we stepped inside.”
Balthazar blinked at her slowly, confirming nothing.
She gathered her shawl and basket and went to the back door. Her hand closed around the handle. She did not open it.
She stood there with her fingers curled around the cool metal, and then, quite without deciding to, she tilted her head forward and let her brow come to rest against the door, and a smile spread across her lips that she could not have controlled if her life had depended upon it.
Because the morning was running through her head again, from the beginning.
Waking slowly. The memories of the night surfacing before she had even opened her eyes, rising up soft and warm out of sleep. Then opening her eyes to the first light of morning, not yet golden, and seeing him.
Kazrian, lying beside her. Asleep. Peaceful in a way she had never once seen him while awake, the careful watchfulness gone slack from his face, his breathing slow and even. And he was close, so very, very close, turned toward her in his sleep.
And the longing that had gone through her then had been so sharp it was nearly grief, because she had wanted, more than anything else, to have this. Him. Every morning. For the rest of her life.
She had lifted her hand and, ever so carefully, so carefully she scarcely breathed, brushed the dark hair back from his forehead with the tips of her fingers.
He had slept on a few minutes longer, and then he too had woken, slowly, and she had watched the exact instant he remembered where he was. The small stiffening, the eyes coming open, the flicker of recollection crossing his face.
And then all the careful distance had come rushing back at once.
He had sat up. He had shifted away to reestablish the proper and respectable chasm between them.
There had been stammering. There had been a truly remarkable amount of blushing, for a man of his composure, and she had spent the whole of it fighting a smile, because he was, first thing in the morning and thoroughly flustered, very nearly the most endearing thing she had ever seen.
She had been vaguely aware that she ought to be mortified about her own appearance, her disheveled hair and the creases no doubt pressed into her cheek from the cushion. But she had been unable to summon the smallest particle of concern about it.
There had also been, somewhere at the back of her mind, the distant awareness that she ought to be in a state of high panic about the mountain of work still standing between her and a launch that was now perilously close.
That had felt distant too. All of it distant, held off at arm’s length, as though the spell of those first soft sleepy moments still lay over her and would not quite lift.
She had retrieved the signet ring and pocket watch from the shelf and held them out to him. He had taken the watch but declined the ring.
“Keep it,” he had said. “Only until you have your own returned to you. Today or tomorrow, if I understand correctly. I am quite certain you will not need it, because I intend to help you with every last thing that must be done today and tomorrow, and it will all proceed perfectly well. But I know it helps. In the moments when you need to … steady yourself.”
And then, from the door, a faint click.
Kazrian had looked at the door. Then back at her. And he had smiled, slow and certain. “It is Thursday.”
“Oh, thank the stars!” She had scrambled up, half tripping over the blanket, and flung herself at the handle, and the door had swung open onto the ordinary passageway as though it had never had a single quarrel with anyone.
And that had been the end of it. The stolen night over. The stillness gone, the honest hours folded away. But she would keep them. In the secret spaces of her heart she would keep every moment of that night for as long as she lived.
She stood there for a long, ridiculous, radiant moment, smiling into the door like an absolute fool, and she did not care.
Then she straightened, pulled the handle, and stepped out into the back courtyard.
The evening air was cool now that the sun had all but disappeared, the flagstones dry beneath her shoes, every trace of the previous night’s storm baked away. The sky above the rooftops was soft and pale, not quite dusk, the light caught between deep amber and the first bruised indigo of evening.
And there was Henry, leaning against the wall on the other side of the gnome’s precariously towering arrangement of herb planters and flower pots, stacked three high against the courtyard wall.
He stood with his arms loosely folded over his chest, one ankle crossed over the other, entirely at his ease.
And he was smiling. But it was not a smile Lucie had ever seen on him before.
There was something cold in it, something flat and fixed, and the look he turned on her the moment his eyes found her was so piercing that everything warm in her chest went still.
He pushed away from the wall and came toward her.
For one entirely irrational instant, she wanted to step back through the open door and shut it between them.
Which was absurd. This was Henry. Amiable, attentive Henry, who complimented her toffees and asked after her family and wanted to take her to concerts.
So of course she did not do it. She stayed where she was.
“Staying late again?” he said.
She managed a small laugh. “Not so very late.”
“True.” He came a step nearer. “Not so late as last night. Indeed, last night you did not leave at all, did you. And you were not alone.”
The warmth drained from her body so quickly it felt like a physical thing.
Dread, cold and heavy, settled into her stomach.
Her fingers went to ice. For several terrible seconds she could not find a single thought to hold on to.
“What … what do you …” Then a spark of anger, of indignation, began to burn beneath it all. “Have you been keeping watch over me?”
“What did he do to you?”
She blinked. Shook her head. “What?”
“Did he force himself upon you? Or did you—”
“No!” The word erupted from her, hot and angry. “He would never!”
His laugh was low and quiet and entirely without warmth. “Well. I see how it went then.”
“You see nothing at all!”
“When a man arrives at a building late in the evening where a woman is alone, and does not emerge until morning, it wants no great cleverness to know what has passed between them.”
Anger blazed fiercer now, because he was taking something tender and wholly innocent, something she had held close to her heart all day, and trying to twist it into something sordid. “Then you want a great deal of cleverness indeed,” she snapped, “because that is not at all what happened.”
He moved so quickly she had no time to brace for it. One hand came up against her collarbone and he shoved her backward, hard, into the wall beside the back door. Her shoulders struck stone. The breath jolted out of her. Beside her, the gnome’s neat rows of flower pots wobbled but held.
“Henry!” The word was a gasp torn out of her, more shock than fear, because this was—he had never—