12. Chapter 12
Maddie
By the time I hit the second-floor landing, I was still blushing like an idiot over a single fingertip tap to my nose.
My shoes had gone slow on the stairs without my permission, and as I rounded the banister I touched two fingers to the tip of my nose again, as if checking whether the man had actually done it or whether the whole damned foyer scene had been some ornate vampire hallucination.
He had.
That was the problem.
A prince who could skin a person alive with three well-chosen words had, in fact, booped my damn nose like I was something soft and dear and liable to smile if handled correctly.
Which, to be clear, I was not prepared to process at this hour or any other.
The memory kept replaying anyway. His thumb at the corner of my mouth.
Lemon on his skin. The quiet in his voice when he’d told me to be safe.
Then that absurd little touch that had felt somehow more intimate than if he’d kissed me full on the mouth in the middle of the foyer while his dead ancestors looked on.
The estate held night the way it held everything else—with expensive discipline.
Lamps had been lowered along the corridor so the old walls glowed honey-soft instead of bright, and the runner beneath my shoes swallowed sound until I felt like I was moving through somebody else’s dream.
Dark paneling. Framed landscapes. Gilded mirrors catching small pockets of light.
All of it elegant enough to remind a woman she was sleeping in a house built by people who thought grandeur was a birthright.
Tilden appeared from the far end of the hall, carrying a folded linen stack over one arm.
He slowed when he saw me.
I slowed because his face did something deeply suspicious.
The steward inclined his head in that precise, old-world way of his. “Miss Baucaum.”
“Tilden.”
His smile remained perfectly polite for the first second.
Then it stayed just a beat too long.
Not broad. Not rude. Just... pleased. A little too knowing around the edges. The kind of expression a man wore when he had seen enough to enjoy a private conclusion and possessed too much breeding to speak it aloud.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
He did not crack.
“If there is anything you require this evening, please let the staff know,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
The smile deepened by a hair.
I filed that away immediately, because I had survived among wolves long enough to know when a person was carrying information with unusual satisfaction.
Then he continued down the corridor, crisp and composed as ever, leaving me with the distinct sense that everybody in this house except me had already joined some committee on my emotional ruin.
I entered my bedroom.
The room greeted me with familiar quiet—lamp light on the bedside table, fresh flowers on the dresser, heavy curtains half-drawn over the dark window, the old radiator giving off a mild metallic warmth under the sill.
My suitcase sat where I’d left it. My books remained stacked on the desk in their crooked little tower. Nothing looked wrong.
Fresh flowers came every day.
Not at this hour.
I turned toward the desk.
The parcel rested against my stack of books like it had been trying very hard not to make a fuss and had failed simply by existing.
Heavy cream linen paper wrapped it with careful folds.
A pink ribbon sat tied around it in a bow that was not bad exactly, but had no business being called graceful.
One loop was slightly larger than the other.
One tail hung longer. It looked as though a man more accustomed to fastening weapons or cufflinks had attempted whimsy under duress and nearly conquered it by force.
No card.
Of course not.
I stared at it long enough to feel my pulse in my throat.
Then I crossed the room, lifted it in both hands, and carried it to the bed as carefully as if it contained something breakable. The mattress dipped when I climbed up and folded myself cross-legged in the middle of the duvet. For a moment I only held it in my lap.
It had a little weight to it.
Book weight.
My heart did one strange, painful little turn.
“Don’t be insane,” I told myself softly, which was not useful because I was already being insane.
I slid one finger beneath the ribbon and loosened it slowly.
The pink satin gave way with a whisper. I drew it free and laid it beside me, then opened the paper at each crease one by one instead of tearing through it.
It felt wrong to be rough with anything that had come from his hands, even hands capable of such crimes against symmetrical bows.
The linen fell back.
The scent met me first.
Winter pine. Citrus. The faint copper undertone that lived in my dreams, whether I wanted it to or not, braided through old paper and cloth binding and the ghost-scent of some private collector’s shelf. My fingers tightened around the edges of the wrapping.
I knew.
I knew before I saw the title clearly. Before I read the publisher line. Before my mind finished catching up to the impossible shape of it.
Still, I looked.
The book lay there in my lap in a dust jacket so clean it almost shocked me. My breath caught hard enough to hurt.
“No,” I whispered.
I opened the cover.
The copyright page stared back up at me in quiet black print.
First Edition. 1960. J.B. Lippincott Company. Philadelphia.
My hands went still.
For a second, the whole room seemed to draw away from me. The lamp. The flowers. The old radiator ticking softly. Even my own body felt far off, like I had stepped outside it and was looking down at some other woman sitting frozen in the center of a bed with treasure in her lap.
I turned to the jacket flap because my brain needed proof stacked on proof before it would dare call this real.
There it was. The price. $3.95 on the inside front flap.
My pulse thudded once against the base of my throat.
I checked the back panel. Harper Lee’s portrait stared out in soft gray scale, and in the lower right corner sat Truman Capote’s photo credit like a final little blade of certainty.
I swallowed.
The Jonathan Daniels blurb was there.
So were the reviews—Shirley Ann Grau, Phyllis McGinley—exactly where they ought to be, all the little markers any book lover with a half-obsessive streak learned to look for when the thing in her hands might be history instead of merely paper.
Every sign was present.
Every one.
It was real.
My vision blurred.
“Oh, no,” I said to nobody, because the tear escaped before I could stop it.
I yanked the book away from my face so fast it probably looked ridiculous, holding it out at arm’s length like distance alone could save it from me. One hot tear slid down my cheek and hung from my jaw. I scrubbed it away with the heel of my hand before a second one got ideas.
“I am not,” I muttered, voice wobbling once before I forced it level, “going to be the woman who ruins a priceless first edition with her feelings.”
The book remained safe.
That mattered more than my dignity.
I sat there breathing through the sting in my eyes until the blur passed and the room settled back into focus.
Then I drew the novel carefully back toward me and ran one thumb—not on the jacket, never on the jacket, but along the edge of the protective wrap beneath it—with a reverence that felt almost religious.
He had realized.
Not only that I loved the book. Not only that I had slapped his hand away from my own dog-eared copy because he had not earned the right to touch it.
He had understood the shape of the apology.
Understood that replacing my old copy would have insulted me and that giving me a clean modern edition would have missed the point entirely.
He had gone looking for the version that mattered to somebody like me.
He didn’t know I had a nicer early edition in addition to my well-loved, well-read copy.
But nothing like this. I’d never be able to afford something like this.
Nobody had ever done anything like that for me. Not ever.
Not some grand, expensive thing chosen because money could solve embarrassment. Not a practical favor. Not a gift-card kind of gesture. This was attention. This was listening hard enough to hear what a person prized and then respecting it enough to place something extraordinary in her hands.
That hit somewhere too deep to look at straight on.
I closed the cover gently and laid the linen wrapping back around it. Fold by fold, crease by crease, I dressed the book again with the same care I had used unwrapping it. Then I climbed off the bed, carried it to the desk, and set it down near my other books where it belonged for now.
My palms flattened on the wrapped parcel.
I stood there like that for a long moment, head bowed, staring at the cream linen under my hands.
Nobody had ever done anything like this for me.
Not a boyfriend. Not some guy trying to impress me. Not family. Not anybody.
And now the impossible vampire prince with the scholar’s mouth and the lethal self-control had gone and chosen violence by first edition.
I laughed once under my breath, though there wasn’t much humor in it. Only disbelief and the ache that often came with being given something your heart had not rehearsed how to receive.
“I need to say something,” I told the silent room.
The room, being unhelpful, offered nothing.
Thank you felt too small.
Anything bigger felt dangerous.
So I stayed there with both hands on the parcel and no idea at all what kind of words a woman used when a man handed her a relic and, with it, some new and tender evidence that she had been seen.
The shower helped in the blunt, unsentimental way hot water sometimes did when feelings had gotten too big for the room they were in.
Steam filled the bathroom until the mirror clouded over and my hair went damp at the roots, and I stood under the spray with both palms braced on the tile, letting the heat beat some of the rawness out of me.
It did not fix anything.
It just made everything briefly bearable.