Chapter Eight #3
“What did you do to him?”
“Removed him from Northglass. He won't work security here again.”
“Because he said something rude?”
“Because he ignored me.”
The answer should have simplified the gesture.
This wasn't chivalry. It wasn't Taddeo defending her honor. It was authority. Rico had violated one of Taddeo's rules, and Taddeo had corrected it the same way he corrected cameras and patrol routes.
Except the memory of the woods refused to stay separate from it.
Taddeo dismissing his men so she wouldn't have an audience.
His hand opening the instant she told him to release her.
The message to Linnea. The fact that he'd just removed one of his own men because Isolde had become the subject of a conversation he wouldn't tolerate.
“You're protecting territory,” she said.
Taddeo met her gaze. “If that's how you want to describe it.”
“How would you?”
“He doesn't get to decide what happens around you.”
“And you do.”
“For now.”
The words should have made her angry.
They did.
But for now lodged somewhere beside the anger, because it was not the same thing as always, and Isolde had begun paying far too much attention to the distinctions Taddeo made.
He left later that afternoon for Bellandi business, and Isolde spent several unsuccessful hours attempting not to reorganize every recent memory of Corwin into evidence.
By evening, she had abandoned the effort and taken a book into the eastern sitting room without reading more than three pages.
Corwin had asked about forged invoices. He had asked about harbor redevelopment records.
He had wanted to know how altered physical documents behaved when copied.
Then he'd placed an old harbor reference book directly into her hands.
Maybe Taddeo was right to write it down.
She disliked that too.
Dinner smelled like garlic and rosemary when Isolde eventually went downstairs.
Instead of the dining room, she found Taddeo seated at the kitchen island with his jacket gone and the top button of his dark shirt open, a glass of water near one hand while he read something on his phone.
Elettra stood at the stove, stirring a saucepan.
Taddeo looked up when Isolde entered.
His attention stayed on her.
At first she thought he was simply waiting for her to say something. Then his gaze moved slowly enough to become unmistakable, from her face to the open line of her sweater near her throat and back again.
Heat moved beneath her skin.
Isolde stopped just inside the kitchen.
Taddeo did not look away.
Neither did she.
The moment lasted only seconds, but there was no useful way to classify it as interrogation, irritation, or the heightened awareness created by captivity. Not anymore.
Across the kitchen, Elettra opened a cabinet. “If the two of you are going to stand there pretending you're not staring at each other, one of you could at least get the plates.”
Isolde's gaze snapped toward her.
Taddeo looked down at his phone, and for perhaps the first time since she'd met him, he appeared almost caught.
“Plates,” Elettra repeated.
“I heard you,” Taddeo muttered as he stood.
Isolde set her unread book on the counter and moved toward the cutlery drawer while Taddeo crossed toward the cabinet. They reached the narrow space beside the island at the same time.
He stepped aside.
There was enough room for her to pass.
Barely.
Her shoulder brushed his chest anyway.
It should have meant nothing. Fabric against fabric, accidental contact in a kitchen, over before either of them had reason to notice.
Neither moved.
Isolde became suddenly aware of the warmth of him, the size of his body at this distance, and his hand resting against the counter beside her instead of touching her even though it would have taken almost no effort to close the remaining space.
She looked up.
Taddeo was already watching her.
His gaze dropped to her mouth.
Only for a second.
Then he stepped back.
The attraction she'd spent days trying to explain as adrenaline, antagonism, curiosity, or some distorted response to captivity became impossible to misname.
She wanted him.
The realization arrived with humiliating clarity.
Worse, judging from the way Taddeo had just looked at her, the problem was mutual.
Isolde moved past him and opened the cutlery drawer, concentrating far too carefully on the forks while Taddeo carried plates to the island as though nothing had happened.
Across the kitchen, Elettra continued stirring dinner with the expression of a woman who had noticed everything and, mercifully, had decided she'd already said enough.
Isolde laid the silverware beside the plates and told herself the new problem could wait.
Corwin was missing. Someone had moved millions through Bellandi accounts. The Harbor Pilot might contain something her brother had hidden in plain sight, and she was still a prisoner in the house of the man responsible for taking her.
None of those facts had changed.
Unfortunately, neither had the way Taddeo looked at her.