Chapter 42
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Forty-Two
Constance chased Neil through the palace.
The man’s legs were too bloody long. In his few seconds’ lead on her, he had managed to disappear, turning around a corner that led off in three different directions.
Thankfully, Constance wasn’t averse to a good sprint.
She made two false starts before determining on the third way, which led her down a set of stairs that spilled out into one of the palace’s many secluded courtyards.
The pale marble square was lined with white pillars that shimmered in the moonlight.
The lights and noise of the party rose softly from beyond a darkened wing of the palace.
Neil was still walking. He had nearly reached the far end of the marble paving stones.
“Where are you going?” Constance called after him.
He paused but didn’t look back. “Does it matter?”
Fury replaced the colder fear that had driven her after him. She set her hands on her hips. “Yes, it bloody well does!”
Neil finally turned. He took in her pose and laughed. The sound was dark and helpless. “You looked at me like that thirteen years ago when you were defending using my fountain pen ink to paint the Bayeux Tapestry on one of the bedsheets.”
Constance waved dismissively. “You had plenty of ink.”
“You took all of it,” Neil countered.
“It was an expansive mural.” Constance crossed her arms defensively over her chest.
The tired flash of humor fell away, and Neil dropped to one of the benches that lined the softly moonlit space. He put his head in his hands.
He looked… broken.
Constance had seen Neil frustrated, horrified, or furious. She had deliberately provoked those reactions from him throughout most of their childhood.
She had only seen him like this once before, back in Egypt when he had thought his terrible choices might have cost Adam and Ellie their lives. What could be happening right now that was anywhere near as awful as that?
Constance sat beside him. “Neil… can you tell me what’s wrong?”
He kept his palms pressed to his eyes under his spectacles. His voice was raw in his throat. “I don’t think that I can, Connie.”
Fear tangled inside of her again. “Why not?”
“Because it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Fair to whom?”
Neil’s face was drawn in the moonlight as he finally raised his head. “To you.”
Constance stood and faced him, planting her hands back on her hips. “I don’t care if it’s unfair, then. I want you to say it.”
Neil’s spectacles glinted with silver light as he stared up at her.
“No,” he said.
He stood, moving past her to walk away.
Constance grabbed him by his untucked shirt and anchored him in place with sheer stubborn strength. She hauled him closer.
“I will tie your socks into knots. I will cut open the pockets of every single one of your waistcoats. I will hound you through every nook and corner of this palace, night and day and back around again, until you tell me what is wrong,” she vowed, her voice seething with threat.
Neil’s eyes flickered with a sad shadow of amusement. “You would, too. Wouldn’t you?”
His expression shifted, the poetic lines of his face drawn with dismay. “I’m in love with you, Connie.”
The pillars that framed the courtyard tilted as Constance’s mind blanked with shock. “You’re… what? But why?”
Neil ran a hand through his soft brown hair and laughed helplessly. “Why? Why do you bloody think?! Because you walk into danger like it’s a birthday party. You’ve threatened me with knives. Put a live trout under my pillow. Saved my life. Kissed me like I was…”
He trailed off, the words catching in his throat. A tear slipped past the line of his spectacles to run down his cheek.
“That’s why, Connie,” he finished, his voice rough. “That and a thousand other reasons.”
Constance felt as though she had just stepped outside to find that the world had turned upside down.
It would never have occurred to her that Neil could feel this way—Neil, who had hidden in his room every time she came over. Who’d groaned with exasperation at her deliberate acts of mischief.
But he had been a boy then.
He wasn’t a boy any longer.
Neil’s green-touched eyes had always been transparent, glittering with excitement when he was rattling on about Ancient Greek grammar or shadowing with guilt when he knew he had made a mistake.
They could hollow with vulnerability—or burn with desire.
Or they might look as they did just then, aching with sadness as Neil waited for Constance to gently tell him why he couldn’t possibly be the man she was looking for.
But that wasn’t what she wanted to say. Something else rose to her lips instead—a startlingly unexpected notion born of the silent world of moonlight and marble that surrounded her.
“What if we didn’t end it?”
Neil looked confused. “End what?”
Constance swallowed. Her mouth was oddly dry.
“Our engagement.”
Neil held himself still as he responded. “Why wouldn’t we end it, Connie?”
Fear darted through her. “Isn’t that what you want?”
Neil’s shirt hung loose over the waist of his trousers. The courtyard painted him in tones of subtle blue and silver, giving him the look of a ragged knight stepped out of a fairy tale.
“I need to know what you want,” he demanded.
The words rumbled from deep in his chest. Constance fought the surprising impulse to press her hand over his heart and see if she could feel the subtle thrum of them.
What did she want?
There were so many ways she might answer, visions she had dreamed up for what her life might look like. Galloping across the desert with a tribe of Bedouin marauders. Sailing away on a pirate ship. Discovering a lost civilization on the banks of the Congo.
An affair with a passionate Austrian violinist. Masquerading as a mysterious French art collector. Climbing the Matterhorn.
Those images all scattered from her mind like fallen leaves. Instead, she thought of a man who had thrown her off a boat into the Nile. Of enthusiastic lectures on Demotic and groans of dismay over scorched notepapers.
Remembered scholarly hands tracing over her body and Neil’s taste on her tongue—leather and tea and spice.
Words spilled out of her as though they had been waiting at the edge of her lips.
“You have never once asked me to be somebody other than who I am.”
Neil’s brow furrowed. The familiar expression warmed Constance like a softly crackling fire.
“Not even when I was tormenting you,” she continued. “You might easily have done it then. ‘Constance, why can’t you be just a little less…’”
Her voice trailed off with a pang of remembered hurt. “Other people have. They wished that I were quieter. Less opinionated. More well-behaved. Not quite so Indian.”
“I might have occasionally wished you were a little less quick to charge into danger,” he admitted. “But then, your complete lack of any sense of self-preservation has worked to my benefit more than once since we became reacquainted—though I won’t pretend it doesn’t terrify me.”
“And then you turned up on me in Egypt,” Constance continued. “Or I turned up on you, rather—and you’re all… this.”
She waved a hand over the lean, strong lines of his body. Neil looked down at himself as though unsure what she meant.
Constance gave a huff of frustration. “A scholarly wizard with a flaming sword.”
Neil stared at her as though he was having trouble absorbing her words. “That is… not exactly how I would have put it.”
“Well, of course not,” Constance retorted. “You never could see your own appeal, outside of being handy with a library card catalog.”
Neil stiffened defensively. “I’m very good at libraries.”
“You’re exceptionally good at kissing as well, though I doubt you noticed that either,” Constance retorted crossly.
Neil’s stillness took on a different edge—one that felt just a little dangerous. “Am I?”
“Yes,” Constance assured him emphatically.
She raised her hands to the dupatta that hung around his neck and glided them down the saffron silk as she moved closer.
“We’ve managed two stolen moments of perhaps three minutes apiece, and I can tell you with full and absolute confidence that I am nowhere near satisfied with the use I’d like to make of you. ”
Neil’s breath hitched. His head dropped to graze against her unbound hair. “Blast it, Connie…”
Constance tightened her grip on his scarf as though some part of her was afraid that if she let go, he would disappear.
“You will undoubtedly try to remind me that you are an unemployed academic from a family of no account in the world, and I will answer that I do not care. I have known piles of men with sterling credentials, and not one of them would ever have admitted when he was wrong, or faced a truth that utterly upended his world when he could just as easily pretend it didn’t exist. You haven’t the foggiest notion how rare that is.
You haven’t the foggiest notion how rare you are. ”
The look he gave her was raw with feeling. “You really mean that.”
Constance tucked an unruly lock of hair back from his forehead. “Of course I do.” Her throat tightened as she continued, her heart thudding wildly in her chest. “If we never broke off our pretend engagement, then we would end up getting married. Is that what you want?”
Neil swallowed thickly. Constance followed the enticing movement of his throat. She wasn’t sure why the pulse of his Adam’s apple had such an effect on her—but by God, did it ever.
“I don’t think I have allowed myself to consider that question,” he admitted carefully.
“You must be considering it now,” Constance countered impatiently.
“Yes,” he answered helplessly.
The word shivered through her body like a caress.
Constance brushed her thumb along the sharp line of his cheekbone, and Neil’s eyes fell closed.
“It never occurred to me that something like this was possible,” Constance admitted, her fingers tracing the graceful angle of his jaw. “But now that you’ve put the idea in my head, I will admit that I find it desperately appealing.”