Chapter 31 #2
Kazrian went still. She felt it under her hands—the great held tension of him, quivering, and then the pause, the fractional hitch as some part of him caught at what she was saying and turned it over. His chest rose and fell hard beneath her palm.
Lucie turned and faced Henry, letting her hand fall from Kazrian’s chest, though she kept her other hand on his arm.
And for a moment the three of them were frozen there, at the still center of a garden full of held breath.
Henry, staring back at her, braced and hard eyed.
Kazrian, rigid and furious at her side. And Lucie between them, lips pressed together and jaw clenched.
She watched Henry’s gaze move. Away from her, hard and swift, taking in the rest of it—the fae lords and ladies in their finery, the whole glittering assembly gathered close behind Kazrian and Lucie, watching. And his expression twisted further, almost a snarl now.
“You conniving, desperate, grasping little—”
He moved forward, and Lucie flinched. Kazrian’s arm came around her at once, gathering her against his side and turning her half away from Henry, his body a wall between them. Henry stopped, seeming to reconsider.
And then, into the silence, a voice. Cool, unhurried, and utterly composed.
“Mr Stratton.”
Lady Rivenna had arrived.
She let the name lie there in the air a moment, unadorned. Let it be looked at.
“You dared to lay your hands upon our sweet Miss Fields?”
Our. Even through the fear, some small, clear part of Lucie’s mind registered the word and understood exactly what it was doing.
Lady Rivenna was claiming her. Claiming her for this gathering, these people—as though Lucie were a treasure belonging to them all, and Henry a trespasser who had dared to reach for what was theirs and must accordingly be driven off.
“I have watched you.” Lady Rivenna’s chin lifted a fraction, her brows drawing down, and the fury in her was a cold and towering thing.
“More than once, sir, and more than twice, I have watched you make your way to the back of my confectionery—where you were not invited, were not wanted, and had no earthly business to be—and press your attentions upon a young woman who had made her wishes plain. I have watched you stand too close, speak too low, and lay your hand upon her when she flinched from the touch. I saw it, Mr Stratton, with these two eyes, and I held my tongue, because I am an old woman, and I permitted myself to hope that you might yet find the sense to take yourself off before you made a public spectacle of your own smallness.”
A pause. The whole garden hung upon it.
“You have not found the sense.” Her voice dropped.
“And so I shall be plain, since plainness appears to be the only tongue you comprehend. You will leave this garden. You will leave it now, upon your own two feet, while you are yet permitted the dignity of doing so. You will not return to The Honeycomb. And you will not so much as look at our Miss Fields unless you wish to find yourself answering to every fae family whose name you have so carelessly dropped in the course of your business dealings. I suspect, Mr Stratton, that not all of them consented to the association.”
Henry did not move at first.
The fury came off him in waves. His hands had closed into fists at his sides, and his jaw was working, and Lucie could see that there was something he wanted to say, something that had been building in him for a very long while, since long before this afternoon.
She thought, in a strange dislocated rush, of all the small undermining remarks he had let fall over the months.
The offhand, faintly belittling observations about Lady Rivenna.
Lucie had let those comments pass over her at the time, brushed them aside, only half hearing.
She saw now, all at once, how much Henry had always disliked Lady Rivenna.
How the sight of a fae woman who commanded a room he could never command must have galled him past bearing.
He would hate her now more than ever.
He turned and started walking away. Stiff and deliberate, his shoulders rigid and his fists still clenched at his sides, out past the trees and into the lane beyond and gone.
For a moment the garden simply breathed.
And then the whispers began.
Not the horrified murmur of before. Something else now.
Thrilled, delighted, unstoppable, rippling out from table to table and gathering speed as it went.
Because whatever else had happened here this afternoon, this gathering had just been handed the story of the entire Season, laid warm and gleaming into their laps.
And Lucie, standing very still with Kazrian’s arm around her and her breath still thin and high in her chest, felt the full weight of it come down.
She had run to him. In front of all of them, without a moment’s thought, she had run to him.
She had put her hands upon him. She had pressed close and whispered up into his face with the low, urgent intimacy of a woman who knew a man well, who had every right to touch him, to speak to him so.
Even if he had done nothing further, she had already told this crowd, plain as any spoken word, that there was something between the fae lord and the confectioner girl.
But he had done further. He had drawn her in.
He had pulled her against his side and set himself between her and Henry, and now not one soul in this garden could hold the smallest doubt.
Whatever they believed or did not believe about a storeroom and a locked door, they knew—they knew—that something improper and undeniable existed between Kazrian Rowanwood and Lucie Fields.
Her parents. Charlotte. Lady Rivenna. The whole of the Rowanwood family. The High Lady herself.
Everyone knew.
The high breathing was there, climbing, but some deep self-preservation instinct had hold of her now and would not let go. It told her, cold and certain: you cannot come apart here. Not in front of them. Do not let them see you break.
So she did not.
She gathered herself. She kept her gaze down and stepped out of the circle of Kazrian’s arm. His hand at her waist resisted for the space of a single heartbeat before he released her. She stepped around him. And she began to walk back toward The Honeycomb’s back kitchen door.
Do not run, she told herself. Do not look at anyone. Just walk. One foot, and then the other. Hold yourself together until you are inside.
And as she went, slow and straight-backed across the grass with all those eyes upon her, she heard Lady Rivenna behind her, not missing a beat.
“I did warn you, Nirella, about that storeroom door. Stubbornly locked the whole Season through. I confess I should dearly love to see one of us get shut inside—it would at least imply the wretched thing had consented to open in the first place.”
A hesitant laugh from somewhere. Then another, less hesitant.
“My grandson has worked tirelessly for weeks to set right all the little magical quarrels this old building keeps.”
“Yes, you did speak of it.” Lady Nirella Brightcrest’s voice, taking up her part with the ease of long friendship. “Before the Season had even begun.”
“I did. And meanwhile our Miss Fields has been at her confections from morning until night, week upon week, without a word of complaint. And some dratted, pea-brained gossip bird snatches up a fragment here and a fragment there and stitches the scraps into a tale of utter nonsense.” A delicate sigh.
“One does wonder that anyone lends the creatures a moment’s credit. ”
“One can expect nothing less of a gossip bird,” said Lady Nirella. “They are notorious for muddling the half of what they hear.”
“Just so.”
A pause.
Lucie was almost at the kitchen door.
“I must say, I am rather relieved to have seen the last of Mr Stratton. His sister departed Bloomhaven this morning, did you know? A rather swift engagement, from what I gather. How fortunate for the girl. One does hope she will be very happy indeed.”
Lucie reached the door.
She stepped through it, out of the golden light and the murmuring garden and into the cool dim of the kitchen, and the moment she was across the threshold something in her legs began to tremble.
Balthazar was there. He pressed himself hard against her leg, a warm insistent weight, but she could not stop, could not bend to him, could not do anything but keep moving. She ran for the stairs.
The tears had already begun, spilling hot down her face before she had reached the bottom step, her chest heaving now that no one was left to see it, the high breathing broken at last into ragged, gasping sobs.
Up she went, one hand dragging along the wall, past the storeroom door—the wretched, ruinous storeroom that was the cause of every last piece of this—and on to the other one, the bedroom beyond, and she pushed inside and shoved the door shut behind her and pressed her back against it and slid down until she was sitting on the floor.
And there, alone, with the whole of the life she had built lying in ruins around her, Lucie let herself fall apart.