Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
The ballroom of Rowanwood House glittered like a galaxy someone had coaxed indoors, and Lucie stood in the doorway and could not, for a moment, make her feet go any further.
For years, she had imagined this. The music, the masks, the enchanted glow of a hundred faelights turning everything to gold. She had imagined what the gown might feel like, the weight and the drape of something made for a world she was not part of.
And now she was here, and the whole of it shimmered and glowed and swept and turned, and it was everything. It was every last thing she had ever imagined.
She smoothed her hands down the front of her gown—carefully, because it was the finest thing she had ever worn, and some part of her half believed it might dissolve if she gripped it too hard. It was gold. A deep, warm, honeyed gold, the silk catching the light and giving it back richer.
“It was meant for Lady Fawnwood,” her mother had said, smoothing the fabric across the bed.
“She commissioned it last Season. Gold silk, with the overlaid embroidery I spent so long working on. She never collected it. Refused it, in fact, over some trifling dispute about the neckline that I suspect had rather more to do with the bills she could no longer pay than with any genuine objection to my stitching.” Her gaze had shifted to Lucie.
“It has been sitting in the back of the shop ever since. Nearly finished. Wanting only the final alterations, and an owner who deserved it.”
Go on, Lucie told herself now. Step inside.
So she did, and it swallowed her, and it was wonderful, and she drifted a few steps into the great glittering churn of it with her heart going far too fast, taking in the arched windows draped with trailing vines and pale golden flowers, the long tables where crystal glasses caught the faelight, the couples turning past her close enough to stir the air—
And then she saw him.
He was standing near the edge of the floor, not dancing, a dark and quiet still point in all that motion, and he was already looking toward the doors as though he had been looking toward them for some time.
His eyes found hers.
And everything inside her lit up like honey in the sun.
Kazrian knew her at once.
It should not have been possible. She was masked, as every guest was masked, and the ballroom was a glittering confusion of enchanted faces and borrowed forms. But Kazrian had looked across a room of hundreds of people and known beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt that the woman standing at the far edge, one gloved hand pressed to her collarbone, was Lucie Fields.
The gown first. Rich gold against the warm brown of her skin, almost glowing, as though she had been dipped in some of her own honey light. Her shoulders were bare, and the line of her neck above the gown’s edge was—
Do not lose the capacity for rational thought in the first three seconds.
And then the mask. He could see it clearly now as he moved closer. Cream and gold, with delicate filigree edging, and there, worked along one side of the upper curve in meticulous detail—
Honeybees. Small golden honeybees, catching the light as she turned her head.
It could not be anyone else. It could not possibly be anyone but her.
The crowd shifted around him as he moved. Masked figures moved and turned, caught up in their own conversations and their own enchantments, paying no attention whatsoever to the tall young lord cutting a path through the dancers as though every other person in the room had simply ceased to matter.
Because they had.
She was walking toward him too, small, careful steps, holding the skirt of her gown, lifting her chin in that particular manner that told him she was nervous and determined at the same time.
And then they were standing before one another, and the music and the voices and the glittering enormity of the ballroom receded to a distant hum, and there was only her.
Her eyes, warm hazel behind the mask. The rise and fall of her breathing. The honeybees at her temples, glinting gold.
“You came,” he said, and his voice was not entirely steady.
She smiled up at him. “You asked,” she said simply.
Something broke open in his chest. A breath he had held since writing that letter and spending every hour afterward wondering whether she would come, whether she would choose this, whether she would choose him—released all at once.
“I did.” He swallowed. “And I … you are …” He gestured, vaguely and unhelpfully, at the whole of her. “That is—you look—I am trying to tell you that you are beautiful and I appear to be making rather a mess of it.”
A breath of laughter escaped her. “You are doing better than you think.”
“I am quite certainly not.” He dragged a hand through his hair, then immediately made himself stop, because this was a formal ball, and that sort of gesture was entirely inappropriate.
“The gown is … I mean, the color, against your … and the—” He stopped.
Closed his eyes briefly. “Lucie, you are the most beautiful person in this room and I have apparently forgotten how sentences work.”
She was smiling. “Thank you,” she said, and her voice had gone soft.
Then the smile dimmed and her gaze dropped.
“I … I am so sorry, Kazrian. For hurting you all those years ago.” Her eyes found his again, wide and earnest. “You are aware now, I am certain, that I was not … truthful. About the way I felt. I wanted you to think I felt nothing for you when instead I felt everything, everything, but I was so—”
“Lucie.” He was already shaking his head. “You do not have to explain. I understand why you did what you did.”
She held his gaze, her eyes searching. “So you … accept my apology?”
“Of course.” The notion that he might possibly hold anything from their past against her was so utterly absurd.
She pressed her lips together, and something shone in her eyes as she gave him a small nod.
“And … thank you for the letter. I have read it—Well. I have read it a rather unreasonable number of times.” A pause, and then, quieter: “It has been unbearable. Being parted from you. You wrote those words and I—I feel exactly the same.”
Something in his chest turned over slowly.
“Then I shall not waste any more of the evening being parted from you,” he said. “Will you dance with me?”
“Well,” she said. “The last time you asked me that, we were in a kitchen.” The corner of her mouth curved. “And there was considerably less room.”
“There was. And no music.”
“And no one watching.”
“And you refused me four times before you said yes.”
“I believe it was only three.”
“It was four. In fact, it may have been five.”
She laughed again, the sound of it threading through him like warmth. “I promise,” she said softly, “I will not make you ask more than once this time. For I have been longing for another dance since that first one three years ago.”
He extended his hand. She took it. Her fingers settled against his palm, and his other hand settled just below her shoulder blade, and it was as right as it had been the first time. As though three years and all their careful distance had simply folded away.
They began to move.
“Ah,” she said softly, as they turned, and there was a wicked little light in her eyes. “And so at last I am permitted to place my hand upon the shoulder I have spent the entire Season admiring.”
Kazrian very nearly trod directly upon her foot.
“You—” He recovered, barely. “You have been admiring my—”
“Mm.”
“—my shoulder.”
“Shoulders,” she corrected. “Plural. I am nothing if not thorough. It seemed only fair, when you were forever standing about my kitchen being tall and broad and generally in the way of the light.”
“I do not,” said Kazrian, “have the faintest idea what a man is meant to say to that.”
“You need not say anything at all.” She was smiling up at him, entirely delighted with herself. “You have gone a most remarkable shade of red. It is very gratifying. I have been made to blush by you a hundred times over, and I think it only fair that it is now your turn.”
He considered that while trying to regain his composure. “A hundred times over,” he repeated. “Is that so?”
“Since the moment you walked straight into me and ruined the tray of caramels.”
“I really did feel so horribly guilty about those.”
She laughed. “I know you did.”
They danced. The music carried them through the turns, and the faelights drifted above, and Kazrian was aware, distantly, that there were hundreds of people around them—masked, enchanted, glittering—and he could not have described a single one.
There was only Lucie. The press of her hand on his shoulder.
The way her eyes stayed on his as though she, too, had forgotten the rest of the room existed.
The smile she could not seem to stop, and the way it made him smile in return, helplessly, ridiculously, a grin he would have been mortified by in any other circumstance and could not bring himself to care about now.
Gently, gradually, he directed their steps as they danced, a half turn here, a wider arc there, guiding them by degrees toward the far edge of the floor where the crowd thinned and the music softened and one of the tall arched doors opened onto a balcony beyond.
He was not subtle about it. He had never been especially good at subtlety, and he suspected she knew precisely what he was doing, because she followed every redirected step without comment and with the faintest, most knowing curve at the corner of her mouth.
They reached the edge of the dance floor. The balcony was just there, a few steps past the open doorway, partially screened from the ballroom by a cascade of trailing ivy. With one final graceful arc, they were outside.
Lucie looked about. There was a little round table, and the stars above, and no one at all but the two of them. “Why, Lord Rowanwood,” she said, looking up at him. “Have you spirited me off?”
“I have,” he said. “I confess it was very deliberate. I have been plotting it since the dance began.”