Chapter Four
THERE’S ONE BED.
I want that on the record, the brochure having promised “a private stateroom appointed for two,” which I’d read on the platform purely to avoid reading Loukas’s face, and which I’d chosen, in my optimism, to interpret as a generous concept rather than a literal inventory.
But here we are. The porter’s bowed himself out with the discretion of a man paid handsomely not to have opinions, and here it is, this bed, this single regrettably beautiful bed dressed in linen so white it looks like an accusation.
And there’s exactly one of it.
“There’s one bed,” I announce accusingly, in case he’s somehow missed the central feature of the room he’s paying for.
“I can count,” Loukas says drily, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it as though the matter’s already been settled in a meeting I wasn’t invited to.
The stateroom’s paneled in a honeyed wood polished until you could lose a thought in it, with brass fittings and a window the length of the whole wall, and through it the country’s already begun to come apart into motion, San Antonio thinning into low hills and live oak and the long gold run of ranchland sliding by faster than anything that big has a right to move.
I’ve spent my whole life learning to read a piece of ground by holding still on it, by standing in one spot until the land forgets I’m there and gives up what it’s doing, where the wind sets, which fencepost the kestrel favors, how the slant of things tells the hour. None of that works at speed.
The window hands me a hundred things I know how to read and tears each one away before I can finish it, hills and a hawk and a far stock tank gone again, and it leaves me with the specific unmoored feeling of a bird that’s only ever been carried and never once flown.
I make myself look away from the glass. Watching it too long does something to my chest I haven’t got a name for and didn’t pack for.
“I’ll take the floor,” I tell him.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then you take it.”
“Neither of us takes the floor.” He says it without heat, the way he says most things, a man stating a plain fact rather than an order, which is somehow worse than an order, the trouble with a fact being that you can’t argue it.
“If a steward comes in the night with extra towels and finds my fiancée curled on the rug like a dog put out for the evening, the whole performance collapses. We share the bed. We don’t touch.
You’ll find I’ve remarkable discipline when the situation calls for it. ”
I’ve slept in worse places than a millionaire’s floor, and I open my mouth to tell him so, and then I make the mistake of picturing the bed and the not-touching and the long dark hours of both, and my mouth, which has betrayed me at every turn today, declines to say anything at all.
And then he does the one thing I’ve no defense against, so much harder to stand than the arrogance.
He crosses to the bed and turns it down himself, this man who has people to turn down beds, folds the white linen back with two slow hands, and sets the better of the two pillows on the side away from the door.
“You’ll take this side,” he says, like it’s nothing, like it isn’t the single most cared-for I’ve felt in a decade. “If anything comes through that door in the night, it comes through me first.”
He says it plainly. Not as gallantry, not performing it for an audience there’s no audience for, just a fact he’s arranging the room around, and something behind my ribs goes perfectly still, the way the birds go still when the big shadow passes over and they understand, in their small wild bodies, that for the moment they’re safe.
I’ve spent twenty years being the one who stands between the door and the soft helpless things. Nobody stands between the door and me. I do my own standing.
I don’t know what to do with a man who looks at a strange room and decides, without being asked, without being paid extra, that the danger should reach him before it reaches me.
“I can look after myself,” I tell him, and it comes out smaller than I want it to.
“I’m aware.” He straightens, and for a moment those black eyes rest on me with something that isn’t heat and isn’t mockery and is somehow more dangerous than either. “Humor me anyway.”
“Do you, though?”
The words come out with a curl I didn’t authorize, low and arch and entirely too interested, and I’d give a year of my life to call them back. They’re the same mistake I made on the platform, the mistake of letting him hear I’d noticed him at all. Don’t, Sensible Blythe says. Too late. He heard it.
“Don’t do that,” he warns me quietly.
“Do what?” I ask, all innocence.
“That.” He crosses the small room at his own pace, and I hold my ground out of pure stubbornness, the same stubbornness that lost me an argument eighteen years ago and learned nothing whatsoever in the interval.
“You bait me. You’ve done it since you were twenty-one.
You say a thing in that voice and you wait to see if it strikes home, and it does, agapi, that’s the trouble. It strikes home every time.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you—”
The wall meets my back.
I didn’t even feel us move. One second I’m being arch at him from a safe and sensible distance, and the next my shoulders are against the cool paneling and his hands have found my wrists and drawn them up above my head, unhurried, like a man who has all night and intends to use it, and my whole body jolts at the contact in a way I’d give a great deal to disown.
Do something, Sensible Blythe says. Knee him. Bite. Anything.
But I do none of it. I just stand there with my pulse going off like a struck bell and my chin tipped up at him, since tipping my chin up is the only defiance I’ve got left and I’m not about to surrender it.
“Let me make myself clear, agapi.” His voice has dropped into that low pitch I feel more than hear.
“Inside this room, you can say whatever you like. Bait me. Bristle. Tell me I’ve never been a gentleman a day in my life, which is true.
But the moment we step out that door, you’ll do the job you’ve been paid for in full.
You’ll not only act like my fiancée. You’ll act like you’re the luckiest woman alive to be wearing my ring. ”
“And if I don’t?”
His lips curve, slow and certain. “There it is. The question you were always going to ask.”
“I don’t care for being threatened.”
“It isn’t a threat, Blythe. Little boys make threats.” His fingers pass once over the racing pulse at my wrist, and he watches me feel it. “It’s a promise. And if you’d like to know exactly what I’ll do when you fail to hold up your end of our bargain—”
His gaze drops to my mouth, and no. No, no, no.
I don’t even need him to finish. I already see it, all of it, the memory of his mouth on the platform replaying itself with no regard whatsoever for my dignity and turning every inch of me feverish.
“You’ll be punished,” he murmurs. “And I think we both know that particular punishment’s been a long time coming.”
I hate that the word goes through me somewhere low and warm instead of somewhere sensible. I hate, even more, that some reckless idiot in the back of my skull is leaning forward in her seat, breathless, wanting with her whole disgraceful heart to find out exactly what he means by it.
A bell chimes through the wall, bright and merciless.
“First dinner service,” comes a steward’s voice from the corridor, muffled and cheerful and catastrophically well-timed, “in twenty minutes, Mr. Karalis.”
He steps back, and I nearly wilt against the paneling, only now noticing I’d been holding my breath the entire time, that my lungs have been off doing something other than their one job.
We come apart like two people who’ve touched a hot stove, except nothing touched, that’s the part that’ll keep me up tonight on my half of the one bed, that nothing touched and I felt the whole of it anyway.
“Twenty minutes,” he tells the glass, his voice not entirely his own. “You’ll want to change. They’ll all be watching how we’re together.”
“And how are we together?” I ask the room, the question coming out smaller than I meant it.
He looks at me then, and for a moment he doesn’t seal himself off, for a moment he just lets me see the thing that’s as inconvenient for him as it is for me.
Then he reaches for his dinner jacket, and whatever I saw is gone, sealed back up behind those black eyes.
“Engaged,” he says smoothly. “Try to remember it’s the part where you’re supposed to like me.
” He pauses at the door, and that slow certain curve comes back to his mouth.
“And agapi? You’ve got twenty minutes to decide how tonight goes.
Play my adoring fiancée out there in front of all of them, or keep baiting me the way you can’t seem to help, and find out at last what it feels like to be punished by a man who’s wanted to for eighteen years. ”