11. Chapter 11 #3
“This is for Miss Baucaum,” I said. “Please have it placed in her room after I have left for the club.”
His eyes did not flicker, but I had known him too long to miss the microscopic increase in attention. “Very good, sir.”
“No announcement. No explanation. Simply leave it where she will find it.”
“Of course.”
He paused a breath, the slightest respectful hesitation.
“Yes?” I said.
“If I may, sir—would you prefer it set on her dresser or desk?”
The question should not have mattered. It did.
“Desk,” I said after a moment. “Near her books.”
Something almost imperceptible softened near his mouth—not amusement precisely, but perhaps the private satisfaction of a steward who had served generations long enough to enjoy the sight of nobility rendered helpless by ordinary human feeling.
“As you wish.”
He withdrew, carrying the box with the solemnity due a state document.
I exhaled once, collected my coat, and went down.
The main foyer of the estate held late afternoon the way cathedrals held incense—with grandeur first, practicality second, and beauty as if it had happened by accident despite generations of deliberate expense.
High ceilings arched overhead, their plasterwork catching the descending gold from the tall western windows.
The marble floor reflected diluted light in long, pale bars.
A runner stretched toward the front doors in deep wine-red, muted under centuries of footsteps.
Old portraits watched from paneled walls in frames too elaborate for modern taste and too storied to remove.
Somewhere deeper in the house, a door closed softly.
From the kitchens drifted warmth: yeast, coffee, butter, and sugar not long out of the oven.
I was halfway across the foyer, coat on, gloves in one hand, when Maddie came dancing around the corner from the back hall and nearly collided with my chest.
I stopped so sharply my heel skidded a fraction on marble.
So did she.
For a suspended second, we stood absurdly close in the middle of all that carved old-world dignity, like the house itself had summoned us there for mockery.
She had earbuds in. That explained the movement first—the little unconscious rhythm still living in her body from whatever she had been listening to, one shoulder having just dipped, one foot half-turned as if she had come around the corner mid-step and mid-song.
Her chestnut hair had been dragged into a messy bun high on her head, soft pieces escaping around her temples and nape.
Black leggings clung to her legs. An oversized hoodie drowned her smaller frame in cream-colored softness, the front printed with an open book graphic and the outrageous declaration: Spread those pages like a good girl.
I stared at the words for half a beat too long.
Of course she owned such a garment. Of course she wore it in my father’s house while carrying pastry and a private soundtrack as if fate had not already done enough to humble me.
In one hand she held a lemon pastry from Aspen’s bakery, half-eaten and iced generously enough that the citrus-sugar scent reached me before anything else.
Then her own scent struck beneath it, warm and female and wolf, and the combination landed under my ribs like a physical blow.
Pastry, sugar, skin, Maddie. Domesticity and temptation in one impossible little collision.
She looked up fully then and froze.
So did I.
A smear of white lemon icing sat at the corner of her mouth.
My entire body made the situation worse immediately. I wanted—Goddess; I wanted—to bend and lick it off her lip like a man with no ancestry, no title, and no self-preservation.
Instead, I reached out.
The pad of my thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, catching the icing in one smooth pass. Her breath caught so softly I might not have heard it if I had been anything but what I was. My own pulse answered with one hard beat.
I brought my thumb to my mouth.
Lemon. Sugar. Butter. The faintest trace of her skin.
“Mmm,” I said, because apparently degradation still had further floors available to it. “Got a delivery from Aspen?”
Maddie swallowed.
The movement of her throat did unspeakable things to my concentration.
She nodded once, slowly, then lifted her free hand to tug one earbud out.
The other followed and came to rest around her neck, the thin wire crossing the front of that obscene hoodie.
Tinny music still whispered from them between us, too faint to identify but bright enough to sound young and alive in the graveyard dignity of the foyer.
“Yeah,” she said.
Her voice had gone a little huskier than usual.
So had mine, I suspected.
For a moment, neither of us moved. Late sunlight stood around us in golden pillars. The marble beneath our feet held the cooling day. The entire house seemed to pause and listen with vulgar interest.
I looked at her properly then.
Not at the icing. Not at the words across her chest, though those were difficult to ignore. At her face. At the wary softness there. At the possibility she had not yet armored because I had surprised her before she could.
The run.
I had come downstairs prepared to leave for Obsidian and spend the journey there composing a speech I likely would never deliver.
Some elegant thing about being careful, about not letting men like Sage mistake attention for entitlement, about wolves and distance and trust. Standing in front of her now, with lemon on my tongue and the ridiculous sweetness of her domestic little interruption still all over the air, every clever phrase died the death it deserved.
So I told the truth in the simplest form available to me.
“Be safe,” I said quietly. “And have fun at the run.”
The words seemed to alter her expression by degrees I could not fully catalogue before they were gone.
Surprise first. Then caution. Then something softer and sadder and more hopeful than I had earned.
She searched my face as if expecting the cruelty to arrive belatedly and discovering, perhaps, that it did not.
“Okay,” she said.
A pause.
“Thank you.”
There are sentences that sound small and are not. That was one.
I should have left then. Any wise man would have.
The moment had already approached dangerous levels of tenderness for a foyer where portraits of my dead ancestors could practically lean from the walls and judge.
But wisdom had not been leading my interactions with Maddie for some time, and what happened next proved that in terms I may never entirely recover from.
I lifted one finger.
And booped her on the nose.
Lightly. Once. The gentlest absurd touch to the tip of it.
Her eyes widened.
Mine nearly did as well, though I was fortunate enough to have completed the motion before my own mind caught up and demanded an explanation I could not supply.
I dropped my hand at once, turned with what I hoped resembled dignity, and walked toward the front doors before either of us could say a single word to make the thing worse.
The footman got there just in time to open them.
Cold air met me on the threshold. I descended the first stone step. Then the second.
And stopped.
My expression did not change. Centuries of breeding, court discipline, and predatory self-command held my face in perfect neutrality as the thought surfaced in me with flat, appalled clarity.
Did I just boop her fucking nose? Who have I become?
I stood there exactly two seconds, staring into the middle distance over the estate drive while the early evening light slanted across gravel and dormant hedges and did absolutely nothing to answer the question.
Then I straightened my coat.
And kept walking.