CHAPTER TEN
Ceci
By the time they reached the drawing room, Ceci had the uneasy sense that she was no longer simply present in the house. She had become an arrangement inside it. Sabrina set the tone, Archie followed it, and Duncan, by saying almost nothing, controlled more of it than either of them.
A fire had been lit there too, smaller than the one in the library but brighter somehow, the flames catching in the polished wood and glass and throwing the room into a kind of conspiratorial warmth.
Lamps had been turned low. The windows had become mirrors.
Beyond them, the grounds had disappeared into black.
Sabrina crossed the room. “Now,” she said, settling into the corner of the sofa, “we may do this properly.”
Ceci glanced at Archie. “Should I be worried when she said things like that?”
“Yes,” he said at once. “But not enough to leave.”
“That is an absurd answer.”
“It is an experienced one.”
Duncan took up a position near the hearth, one arm resting lightly against the mantel as if he had not already spent half the day there.
Ceci had begun to understand that he liked edges.
Doorways, mantels, the side of a table. Places from which a man might observe without quite joining.
Sabrina noticed where she was looking and smiled in a way that made Ceci immediately regret having eyes.
“Sit down, darling,” she said. “No one can safely interrogate you while you hover.”
“That sounds very much like an incentive to remain standing.”
Archie was already moving a chair closer to the fire. “Come and be interrogated where it’s warm.”
Ceci looked at the chair, then at him. “You make that sound suspiciously attractive.”
“It’s one of my talents.”
“It can’t possibly be your only one.”
Ceci took the moment to truly look at Archie.
He looked to be just under forty, though the ease of him made him seem younger at first glance.
He was shorter than Duncan, more solidly built, strength carried openly rather than hidden in restraint.
His skin held a warm brown tone that caught the firelight beautifully, and his hair, a tumble of gold curls, seemed only loosely committed to staying in order.
Then he smiled, and the full force of him arrived at once.
Blue eyes, bright and direct, fixed on her with an interest so unguarded it felt almost intimate.
His smile changed enough to suggest he had heard more in that than she had meant to offer.
“Thank God,” Sabrina murmured.
Ceci sat.
Archie took the chair opposite hers rather than the one beside it, which should have felt like mercy and instead felt strategic.
It left a clear line between them, unobstructed and impossible not to notice.
Sabrina watched from the sofa with the contentment of a woman who had laid out cards and was waiting for people to reveal themselves without realizing they were playing. Duncan stayed where he was.
That, more than anything else, made her aware of him.
A maid came in with coffee. Another brought a tray of small glasses and a bottle of something amber that Duncan declined without looking.
Sabrina accepted hers as if it were medicine and clearly intended to enjoy being cured by it.
With Archie gone, the room lost its shield of laughter.
Archie rested one ankle over his knee and regarded her with open curiosity. “So. America.”
Ceci let out a small breath. “That is, apparently, where I’m from.”
“And you’ve found us provincial already.”
“I haven’t had enough time to be fair.”
“That is almost diplomatic.”
Sabrina curled one hand around her glass. “Do not encourage diplomacy. I asked you here to save us from it.”
Archie turned to Ceci. “She telephoned me and said Duncan had acquired a lovely new friend. I came partly from loyalty and partly because that phrase was too unnatural to ignore.”
Ceci looked toward Duncan before she could stop herself. His expression gave away nothing. Sabrina, seeing the glance, laughed softly. “You see. Even she knows it sounded unlike him.”
Ceci wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. “To be fair, it sounded unlikely from you as well.”
That won her Sabrina’s full approval.
“Oh, excellent. She’s quick when she’s tired.”
“I’m quicker when I’m rested.”
Archie leaned back a little, as if giving her more room to say whatever came next. “Then we must all hope you sleep well here.”
The line carried two meanings at once. One harmless, one less so.
Ceci felt the second of them and hated that she did. She took refuge in the cup.
The coffee was stronger than she expected and darker than anything she would have been served at an academic reception in her own life. It tasted real in a way that made her suddenly, absurdly grateful. Sabrina was still watching her. “Dax tells me your work is in archives.”
“Yes.”
“And you enjoy it.”
“I do.”
Archie tipped his head. “Why?”
Ceci smiled faintly. “I’m beginning to suspect you were both raised to ask questions as a form of courtship.”
“Only the useful ones,” Sabrina said. Ceci lowered her cup. “Because archives are where people leave the version of themselves they didn’t mean for the future to read. Letters, drafts, private notes, little traces of motive. You can learn a lot from what wasn’t polished for public use.”
Archie’s eyes brightened at that. “That sounds less like librarianship and more like forensic work.”
“It’s both.”
“And have you always preferred the private record to the official one?”
Duncan answered before she could.
“Official records are usually lies by omission.”
All three of them looked at him. He did not seem to notice what he had done. Or perhaps he noticed and did not care.
Ceci felt the line pass through her more sharply than it did through the others. He was not speaking only about archives. He was speaking to her, around the edges of the room, in a language neither Sabrina nor Archie knew they were overhearing.
“Exactly,” she said.
The word came out softer than she meant it to. Duncan met her eyes then, and for a brief second, the rest of the room receded. Everything else remained, only less urgently.
Archie broke it.
“Now that,” he said, looking between them, “felt like a conversation I arrived in the middle of.”
Sabrina smiled into her drink. “Several, I suspect.”
Ceci looked away first. She was beginning to dislike how often that happened.
She set down her cup and said, because the subject was safer than what had just passed between them, “I was meant to be working in the Gladstone collections. Personal correspondence. Social networks. How people make one another respectable.”
“At my estate? That last part is the most dangerous,” Sabrina said.
“Yes.”
“Because it’s the easiest,” Duncan added.
Archie was still watching her. She could feel it even when she wasn’t looking at him directly, a warmer attention than Duncan’s, easier in its shape but no less deliberate for that. Duncan made her feel observed. Archie made her feel chosen.
That was worse.
Or at least more fun, which was often the same thing in practice.
“Did you come to Wales for the archives alone,” Archie asked, “or were you also hoping to improve yourself by proximity to old stone?”
Ceci let herself smile. “I’m from academia. Self-improvement is mostly how we justify travel.”
“That is bleak enough to be believable.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t mean it admiringly.”
“I’ll recover.”
Archie laughed, and the room eased with it. Sabrina stretched her legs out along the sofa, shoes abandoned somewhere beneath a side table. “You should tell her about Liverpool,” she said to Archie.
“Why?”
“Because no evening improves by remaining centered entirely on us.”
“I disagree.”
“I know. It is why I had to invite another person.”
Archie gave her a long-suffering look, then turned back to Ceci. “I teach at the university.”
“In philosophy,” Duncan said, with a precision that sounded suspiciously like censure. Archie smiled without moving his gaze from Ceci. “Officially.”
“And unofficially?”
“I spend a great deal of time trying to persuade young men that having a mind is not the same thing as admiring oneself for possessing one.”
Ceci laughed outright at that, and Archie’s charm faltered into pleasure so quickly she nearly missed it, as if the sound had rewarded him more than the line itself.
Duncan saw it.
She knew he saw it because the next question out of his mouth was directed at her, not Archie.
“And your students,” he said. “What do they come to you for?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question. It was also, she thought, with a rush of heat, an intervention. She turned toward him. “Help, mostly.”
“With?”
“Finding sources. Framing arguments. Keeping them from embarrassing themselves in front of faculty.”
That won her the faintest curve at one corner of his mouth.
“And do they succeed?”
“Not always. But I do what I can.”
Sabrina, who had by now ceased even pretending she was not enjoying herself, glanced from one to the other and said, “How unexpectedly domestic.”
“Nothing about this is domestic,” Duncan said.
“No,” Archie replied. “Not yet.”
The room went very still for half a second. Archie did not appear to regret the line. Sabrina looked delighted. Ceci felt the heat rise all the way from her throat to her face and was furious with herself for letting it.
Duncan’s fathomless black eyes moved to Archie at last. There was nothing openly hostile in the look, which made it more effective.
Archie, far from retreating, lifted his sandy blonde brows, as if to say yes, I said it, and no, I won’t help you by taking it back.
Ceci reached for her cup again, though it had gone lukewarm.
“I feel,” she said, “that I should apologize for becoming the center of whatever this is.”
Sabrina laughed first.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I have been waiting ages for something worth watching.”
“Kind,” Ceci murmured.
“Very.”
Archie leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees. “She means that sincerely, you understand. Her standards are impossible. If you’ve met them by accident, I suggest you don’t apologize.”
Ceci looked at him then. It was impossible not to. He had eased out of irony for once. The warmth in his face was unguarded, the blue of his eyes catching the firelight and holding it in a way that should not have been fair to anyone.
“You’re very sure of yourself,” she said.
“I’m very sure of her,” he replied, nodding once toward Sabrina. Then, after the smallest pause, “And increasingly sure of you.”
There were, Ceci thought, at least six possible ways to answer that and every one of them disastrous. Duncan spared her from choosing.
“Archie.”
Just his name.
Nothing more.
But it carried so much contained warning that Ceci nearly smiled into her cup. Archie did smile, though not at Duncan. At her. What made it dangerous was not the flirtation itself, but the way he made it feel like a shared joke rather than a performance.
Sabrina set down her glass and rose. “I’ve changed my mind. We are not having coffee. We are having cards. I refuse to waste an evening like this on stillness.”
“No one has agreed to that,” Duncan said.
“No one is being consulted.”
She crossed to the card table by the window and began opening a lacquer box as if parliamentary procedure had never once inconvenienced her.
Archie stood at once and moved to help her, which, from the way she waved him away, only meant he had offered exactly what she wanted him to offer.
Ceci remained where she was for a moment, suddenly aware of Duncan still standing near the mantel.
Of the fact that he alone in the room knew what she had told him in the library. Of the way that knowledge altered every glance between them.
When she looked at him now, she saw no trace of the man who had laughed, briefly and unexpectedly, when she bargained for the library.
That version of him had been put away again.
In his place stood a man carrying a weight that none of the others could see and refusing, by force of will, to let it change the arrangement of his face.
The knowledge hit her unexpectedly hard.
He is alone in this, she thought. He was alone in this because he had chosen it, not because she had asked him to be. He looked at her then, as if he had felt the thought cross the room. For a second, neither of them moved.
Then Sabrina called, “Ceci, if you leave me to manage these two men by myself, I shall never forgive you.”
Ceci stood.
“That seems like an unnecessary risk.”
She crossed to the table. Archie pulled out a chair for her with a flourish so exaggerated it would have been ridiculous from anyone else.
“Your kingdom,” he said.
“This feels like entrapment.”
“Most pleasures do at the outset.”
Duncan came last, taking the remaining chair only after the rest of them had settled.
Sabrina sat opposite her, Archie at her right, Duncan at her left.
The arrangement felt too precise to be accidental.
Sabrina shuffled with the confidence of a woman who had no ethical commitments where cards were concerned.
“Now,” she said, “this is much better.”
And because Ceci was tired, because the room was warm, because the men on either side of her had become unwise in different directions, and because the life she had left behind had never once offered an evening that felt this impossible and this alive at the same time, she found herself smiling before she had meant to.
Duncan saw that too.
This time, he did not look away.