Chapter 6
The snow had started again sometime before dawn.
Bonnie had heard it when she woke—the hush of a world being muffled—and had felt, with a guilty pleasure she couldn’t regret, a deep and settled relief.
She’d pulled Lyon’s shirt closer around her shoulders, stared at the ceiling of her guest room for a while, thinking about Lyon—specifically, his lips—then given up on sleep entirely and come to the library.
That had been two hours ago.
Now she was ensconced in what she’d privately begun to think of as her chair—the one on the left, closer to the window, where the light was better in the mornings—with her notes spread across her lap, a cup of tea going cold on the table beside her, and Lady Elspeth Mackay’s household accounts open to a particularly magnificent passage about the cost of tallow candles.
Bonnie should be writing. She was, technically, writing, in the sense that her pen was moving.
Mostly, she was thinking about the last two days.
She’d woken from that unexpected nap two days ago to find the fire still burning and Lyon in the opposite seat.
And for one suspended, golden moment before either of them had acknowledged the other, she’d simply looked at him—at the firelight on his ruined cheek, at his long fingers loose around the spine of a book he hadn’t been reading—and felt something shift in her chest.
He’d noticed her wake. Of course he had; the man noticed everything. He’d looked up, looked immediately away, and said, “The cook left soup,” in his most forbidding growl, as if she’d caught him doing something embarrassing.
She’d had to press her lips together very hard to keep from smiling.
The next day had passed in the same rhythm they’d fallen into without discussion: her in the library, Lyon appearing with his sketchbooks and mechanical manuals and the occasional piece of correspondence he pretended required his urgent attention, both of them working in a silence so companionable it made her chest ache.
Keith had brought them luncheon and had lingered in the doorway afterwards with an expression of barely suppressed delight that had made Bonnie grin as well.
She felt as if the two of them were unexpected partners in a scheme she still didn’t understand, but meant Lyon’s contentment.
It was clear the younger man cared for his brother, so much more than a butler or even a friend.
The snow hadn’t been as steady as it had been that first day, with flurries throughout the day, and Bonnie acknowledged that she was disappointed the early December sky hadn’t dumped another two feet of snow on them.
She was aware this was not a reasonable way to feel about a blizzard.
She was also aware, with a clarity that would’ve alarmed her a week ago, that she was falling in love with Lyon Oliphant.
She’d been trying to talk herself out of it, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, on the grounds that she hadn’t known him very long and circumstances had been…
well. They’d been forced into proximity by weather, which was exactly the sort of condition under which sensible women were supposed to keep their heads.
She’d told herself this firmly.
The trouble was, the more she knew of him, the firmer she needed to be.
He was a man of complete and genuine contradictions, and she found every single one of them fascinating.
His mind worked like one of his mechanical sketches—precise, systematic, always looking for the design underneath the surface—and yet he could quote obscure Highland history without pausing to think, and he’d read every novel on those shelves, and when she’d asked him once, without thinking, what his favorite had been, he’d said Persuasion in such a matter-of-fact growl that she’d had to look away before he saw her face.
He didn’t perform. That was the thing she kept coming back to.
He didn’t announce that he was kind; he lit the fire and stomped away before she could thank him.
He didn’t proclaim his interest; he just put down his pen and listened.
He didn’t claim he understood her—he just reached past her and handed her exactly the right book, and then went back to his chair and pretended he hadn’t done anything at all.
Bonnie had been cataloguing these moments in her mind rather than in her notes, and she had, she realized, quite a long list.
And then there was the matter of the almost-kiss, which she’d been trying not to catalogue and failing spectacularly.
She knew what it had been.
She wasn’t naive, and she’d read enough to understand the difference between a man who happened to be standing close and a man who had chosen not to step back.
He’d chosen not to step back. For the space of several heartbeats, he’d stood there and looked at her mouth, and she’d gone so still she’d forgotten to breathe, and then he’d stepped away and said something gruff about reading and the moment had dissolved.
She’d thought about almost nothing else since.
The door opened, and she didn’t have to look up to know who it was. There was only one person in this castle whose footsteps sounded like that—deliberate, unhurried, certain in their belonging.
“Good morning,” she said, to her notes.
Lyon made a sound that was not quite an answer, which she’d learned to interpret as good morning. She heard him cross the room, heard the familiar sound of his satchel—battered leather, stuffed with sketchbooks—being settled on the table, heard the chair opposite her exhale under his weight.
There really was no getting around it; she was going to have to look up.
As soon as you look up, he will see yearning on your face.
Yearning? Yearning? Don’t be ridiculous; Bonnie was a strong independent woman who could control her own facial expression.
Right?
Go ahead. Give it a try.
She took a deep breath and peeked up, only to slump in relief.
Lyon wasn’t looking at her; he was already opening a manual, his pen ready. As if he’d been here for hours. As if this were where he’d always worked.
She’d noticed, in the last two days, that he hadn’t returned to his study.
He had work that required it, she knew—the ledgers, the correspondence—but each morning he’d appeared in the library instead, with his satchel and his manuals and his frown, and she hadn’t said anything, and he hadn’t explained.
“You have abandoned your study,” she blurted, then winced when she realized it would have been better not to draw attention to it.
He didn’t look up. “It’s cold.”
“Your study has a perfectly good fire.”
“This fire is better.”
She looked at the fire—identical in every meaningful way to the one in his study—and then looked back at him. He was making a note in the margin of something, with utter composure.
“Of course,” she said gravely. “The fire.”
The corner of his mouth did something. She counted that as a victory and returned to Lady Elspeth.
They worked in silence for a comfortable while. Outside, the snow continued its steady work. Inside, the fire crackled, Bonnie’s pen scratched, and Lyon’s occasional low hmm of concentration punctuated the quiet.
She’d grown addicted to that sound, she realized. She’d grown addicted to quite a lot of things she was going to have to give up when the snow stopped and Lysander returned to bring her back to reality.
She was reaching across the table for her reference volume—the heavy one, on the far side—at the same moment Lyon reached across from his side to hand her something, and the result was that her fingers closed directly over his.
They both stopped.
It was so brief. His hand was warm, and large, and very still under hers, and she felt his surprise in the fractional pause before he cleared his throat and set the thing he’d been passing her—a folded letter, something from the records she’d asked about—onto the table, withdrawing his hand in the same motion. He looked back at his manual.
“Thank you,” she managed.
“Aye,” he said, to the manual.
She looked at her notes. Her heart was doing something rather foolish.
That was nothing. A collision, an accident, two people reaching across a table at the same moment.
That was not the same as standing on a ladder with a man’s chest six inches from her shoulder while he looked at her mouth. These were categorically different events, and she was going to treat them accordingly.
She turned a page. He was still looking at his manual.
Was he actually reading it? Or was he as aware of her as she was of him?
Lyon’s heart thundered in his chest after that accidental touch. It had been as bad as yesterday’s moment on the ladder, when he’d been aware of how very easy it would be to turn his head and claim her lips with his.
I want you to kiss me, Lyon.
Despite the turning of the pages of this technical manual, he’d been doing very little except thinking of that request.
When he next made the mistake of looking up from his reading, Bonnie had migrated, from her chair to the window seat, where she’d spread her notes across the cushions and was now standing over them with her hands on her hips, frowning at them the way he frowned at a schematic that wasn’t behaving.
“Lyon.”
“Hmm.”
“I have been thinking about Nessa Oliphant’s work.”
He turned a page he hadn’t read, his cock stirring at the thought of this woman considering the same wicked images he had. “Have ye?”
“Specifically the tamer pieces. The embracing couple—the actually embracing couple, not the one that turned out to be—”
“I ken which one ye mean.”
Bonnie looked up from her notes, lips twisted as if she thought it amusing he didn’t want to hear her try to define the other medieval embroideries. “Could you describe it to me? From memory? I want to know if my description in the manuscript matches what is actually there.”
He should’ve said go and look at it yourself, it’s down the corridor. That would’ve been the sensible answer.