Chapter 27 Philpot Lane #2
“Come along then, let’s find out how to contact your beau.”
A little bell rang above the door as Sybil followed Lady Guinevere inside the shop.
And there he was, standing right in the middle of it, arguing with a woman who had at least six feathers in her wide-brimmed hat and a small pot of lavender in her hands.
“No, you cannot take the lavender,” Apollo said, hands on hips, a lock of hair falling over his forehead.
“I don’t see why not!” The woman bristled.
“Because you’re dense as a brick wall. Lavender needs sunlight. The right kind of soil. Your garden is all shade. Too much clay in the soil. You’ll kill it in a fortnight. Less.” He grasped the pot with both hands and pulled.
She pulled back.
They stared at one another like bulls horn-locked in battle.
“Are we interrupting something?” Lady Guinevere called out.
Apollo looked up, swept his hands behind his back. His head tilted to the side when he recognized Lady Guinevere. Then he saw Sybil, and it felt like her heart was about to explode.
“Go ahead, then, take it,” he grumbled.
“I must pay.” The woman cradled the pot of lavender against her breasts.
“It’s a gift. Now go.”
“I’ll remember how unaccommodating you are and send my friends elsewhere.” She sniffed and made for the door.
“You’ll remember! And you’ll come back anyway! Because my plants are the best in all of London! England! Don’t kill the lavender!” he yelled as she stepped out into the street, and the door shut behind her.
And when not even the echo of his outburst filled the growing silence, he scratched his neck, looking sheepish for a moment before scowling at Lady Guinevere.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Are you selling potions?” Lady Guinevere asked.
“No. Are you?” He lifted a brow.
“Apollo,” Sybil warned. “Be nice. She’s lost everything.”
“Not everything,” Lady Guinevere insisted.
“It’s hard to be nice when I’m irritated,” Apollo said. Then, un-wrinkling his nose, he put on a placid smile and swept a gallant bow to the potion mistress. “No, my lady, I am not selling potions. As you can see, only plants.”
“Those you sent Miss Grant”—Lady Guinevere moved about the shop, inspecting flowers and vines and stems—“are of a specific sort.”
“Are they?”
“Oh yes. I did not think anyone knew the recipe. But for me.” She crossed her arms behind her back, and Sybil rather thought she might pull out a blade.
Apollo shrugged. “Easy enough stuff to figure out if you know what to look for. I do. But no one else does. Don’t worry, Lady G, I’m only in the business of plants. No potions, I swear it.”
“Then I’ll be going now, but…” She stopped right before the door. “Perhaps, when I’m up and running again you may expect an order from me. Camelias, posies, roses. Your best.”
“You won’t want to order them from anywhere else.” He swept her a grand bow.
“Are you coming, Miss Grant?” Lady Guinevere asked.
“No.” The potion mistress had one question to ask; Sybil had a hundred.
“Very well.” Then Lady Guinevere was gone.
And Sybil and Apollo were alone.
Quietly, he crossed the shop and locked the front door.
Slowly, she began a little tour of the shop. It was drenched in sunlight. Floor-to-ceiling windows for three stories. On the second and third floors, a large balcony followed the walls, and ivy swung down from the railings.
“What do you think?” he asked, his voice a whisper against the skin of her neck.
They’d left so quickly she’d not thought to don a mantle or bonnet.
Her neck, her shoulders, her chest, were open to his view, and he was pressed behind her, so very close, but not touching.
Except for the heat of his breath against her neck, her cheek.
She didn’t melt into him, though every part of her body screamed to do so. “I think it’s beautiful. You work here?”
“I own here.”
She spun around, her hands almost landing on his chest, the most natural place for them to be. Stepped backward and clasped them behind her back. “This is your shop?”
“For about a week now. Old Mr. Harley was not eager to sell out, but Diana’s loan was quite generous, and in the end, Mrs. Harley persuaded him to make an early retirement to the country.”
“Diana’s loan?”
He nodded. “I’m paying her back. Slowly. It was hard to sell the plants at first. Harley’s thumb isn’t very green, but mine”—he flashed a smile—“is golden.”
She smiled, and he ducked his head, a shy blush spreading across his cheeks. He walked deeper into the shop, tending to plants, stepping in and out of sunlight where it cast bright striations across the floor. He stopped in a pool of it, caressing a camelia.
“Business starting to increase.” He plucked a bloom and twirled it, the red flashing in the light.
“So quickly.”
“I’m viciously determined.”
“I am aware.” She approached him carefully. “The plants you’ve sent me over the last week are beautiful.”
He reached for her, and with a tentative brush of his fingertips against her temple, slipped the stem of the camelia behind her ear. “You’re beautiful.” Now his hands were clasped behind his back.
So much distance between them suddenly.
She wouldn’t abide it.
“Have you discovered much about yourself yet?”
“A tremendous amount.”
“Such as?”
“I’m a coward. But I don’t want to be.”
“A coward… is that why you’ve not visited me yet?”
He shook his head. “I’ve almost visited you a million times in the last fourteen days. But every time I found myself headed your way, I’d turn back around. I didn’t want to show up on your doorstep without something to show you, without something to make you proud.”
“That’s what this place is? Something to make me proud?”
He nodded. “And… something to make… myself.”
The sentence almost sounded incomplete. It wasn’t though. She understood.
“A fellow needs a steady income,” he said, “and I realized alchemy isn’t for me. Or I am not for alchemy. Either way, it was a bad match. And erm, when a fellow decides to go courting, he needs a plan for the future. Or he’s just wasting everyone’s time.”
“So you sent me the ingredients to love potion.” She was trying to fight a smile, but it wasn’t working.
“Since you haven’t said how you feel about me, I thought it might prove useful. It might spur you along a bit.”
She hadn’t said how she felt, had she? “Do you want me to say it? How I feel?”
He looked away from her, and the knuckles of his fists shone bone white. “You can say it when you wish.”
She stepped closer, traced the hills of his hands, urging them to soften.
He flexed his hand open, shook it, and she threaded their fingers together so she could feel the warm gold of his ring nestled between her fingers, could know that the slim coolness of her own rested between his.
Still he did not look at her, but he said, “You can say it when you want to. If you want to. Take your time. Sometimes I think I love you so deeply, I’ll fall into the feeling and drown.
And damn, Sybil… what a way to die. I love you till I’m terrified and…
and loving you makes me love the world better.
But I do want it. I want your words. I’m selfish enough to want those words now and not on your time.
I feel as if I need them. I know I’m not good enough for you, but—”
She shook her head.
“I’m trying to be.”
She went up on tiptoe and whispered in his ear, “I like you naughty, Mr. Chester. No. I love you naughty. No. That’s not quite right, either.” Her lips brushed his earlobe. Her breath warmed his skin. “I love you.”
What part of him touched her first? His hands at the back of her head? Or his lips against her lips. It didn’t matter. It happened all at once and it was like breathing for the first time after holding your breath too long. Painful and exquisitely wonderful.
He locked her in his arms, and she locked him up tight, too. They tumbled backward with uneasy steps, knocking over a plant and ending up in a window seat of some sort, sending more pots tipping over. Soil everywhere. A massacre of leaves and petals.
But he was kissing her, and she never wanted it to end.
His mouth had never tasted sweeter, and his hands had never felt so good skating down her back and nestling at her waist. Sometime after the tangle of their tongues had become a slow and sensuous foreshadowing, they broke apart, hot from the sunlight spilling through the window, hotter still from each other.
Panting, he set his forehead against hers, stroking her cheek with his thumb. “I left you alone for a fortnight when I promised to help you discover your… talent.”
“You did. And I shall punish you, but I’ve been working with Temple in his forge, and I think it good I learn the basics as his apprentice first. Before we set out to flirt with something that might be dangerous.
And…” She looked up at the soaring ceiling, the tumbling vines, the glass gleaming in sunlight.
“Oh, I think it was worth it. This is beautiful, Apollo.”
And she kissed him. Slow and steady and building up courage. When she pulled away this time, she looked him right in those blue eyes flecked with gold. No… not flecked anymore. A ring of gold circled round the blue of his irises. Glowing.
Like him, like this shop. Like gold in sunshine.
“You’ve discovered,” she said, “who Marry Sullivan is. This shop? Growing things?”
He grinned. “It is. It’s what I was never supposed to be, but… what I’ve always been at the same time. Perhaps… a little like my cousin.”
“And you do not mind a future as a shopkeeper?”
“Shopkeeper? I aim to own a whole nursery one day. After I pay back Diana’s loan. And I hope, some day, to be husband to the master alchemist.”
Her mind blanked. “Pardon? Whose husband?”
“Yours.” He kissed her. “Will you have me?”
“Is that a proposal? Because it made no sense. You cannot simply mention the master alchemist. We don’t even know who he’ll be yet, and—”
“I know who she’ll be. One day. My wife.”
“I think I’m going to marry you, but it’s despite a concerning lack of verbal clarity.”
“Think hard, princess.” He moved his lips down her jaw, her neck, placing words there with soft, hot kisses. “If a former marquess can be a shopkeep and a spinster can become a marchioness in her own right, then a very cunning lady alchemist can one day be…”
“Master alchemist,” she breathed. “Me?” The word came out as a gasp. Not because of the absurd notion he kissed along her skin, but because he’d found her bodice and freed her breast and it felt oh-so-very good.
“If you want it. But right now, I’d rather talk about me.
” His tongue on her nipple. She’d almost forgotten how good it felt.
“Becoming your husband. Mr. Sybil Grant has a ring to it. What do you say, princess?” He slipped out of their embrace and hit his knees before her.
“I’m going to worship you the rest of my life.
Let me do it from the same house”—he kissed one of her palms—“the same bedroom”—he kissed the other—“as you. Marry me, Sybil?”
She hit her knees in front of him and wrapped her arms around him, hid her face in the curve of his neck to keep him from seeing her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered there, laughing through her tears, “Yes, I’ll marry you. After you court me properly, you scoundrel.”
He rested his forehead against her with a crooked grin. “You always did like things to be done the proper way. Such a delicious little contradiction you are.” He stroked his knuckles down her cheek, and she felt the heat of his ring caress her skin, too.
“It’s funny,” she said, pulling back enough to take his hand in hers, “all alchemists who marry forge binding rings of the metal the man has carried in his pocket since youth.”
He rubbed his thumb over her ring. “I didn’t carry it that long.”
“And we forged them separately. But…”
“We forged the same thing, it seems. I could feel you through it, Sybil. So odd, but… it was the only connection I possessed to you, so I didn’t damn well care. Do you mind that we didn’t do it how it’s usually done? That I didn’t toil in a forge and present a ring to you in a pretty little box?”
“No. It’s better this way. We both needed to find the right shape. I love you, Apollo Chester, and I think I have for a long, long time.”
His grin was slow and lovely, bright as a flash of light and deep as the soil he tilled. “I adore you, Sybil Grant, and I will till the day I die. And probably after that. I’ll probably haunt you. I hope you’re prepared for that.”
She kissed him. And when she laughed, the vines curling above them seemed to giggle, the leaves shaking around them said shhh, and the light soaking through the glass retreated a bit because the heat Sybil and Apollo made together rivaled even the sun.