Chapter 11 #3
She noticed it before she had quite finished the stretch. The nature of it. She became conscious, in the deeply inconvenient way she had become conscious of various things in Nick’s vicinity, that his attention was on her with an undivided emphasis it had not possessed a moment ago.
Heat climbed from her collarbone to her jaw in a swift, betraying wave.
She lowered her arms. She was not going to look at him. It was a sensible decision, and she was going to honor it with the same unwavering resolve that got her through difficult days, and she was absolutely not going to—
She glanced at him.
Oh, she thought. That was not the plan.
She could not possibly be reading this correctly.
She had been telling herself this since Grimsfell, in the direct internal way she told herself warnings she intended to take seriously.
The masculine attention in his manner when he was near her was real, but that did not make it significant.
She had encountered men who saw a Yorkshire heiress and saw an opportunity.
She had been managing them with a cool distance because she had learned early that the management was necessary and could not be left to chance or to wishful thinking.
She could not fully assess his motives. She was, she knew, mostly incapable of subterfuge herself and therefore often found it difficult to identify when others were being disingenuous. Which was one of the reasons she had put Pike in charge of filtering the household’s visitors.
But Pike liked Nick. She had been watching for it since the first morning, the small signals by which Pike expressed his views on people.
The deference in Nick’s proximity. The relaxed degree to which his arms were folded.
The speed at which he moved when asked to perform a service.
Pike liked him. Pike who disliked many of her visitors.
These were not equivalent responses from a man whose advice she had been receiving for two years and found reliable.
She thought about the kisses. The one in the bedchamber at Grimsfell that had been his.
Impulsive and testing and taken with the unmistakable instinct of opportunity.
The one in Cirencester that had been hers.
Determined and brief and warm. The taste of coffee and something else.
Something faintly sharp and clean that she had not been able to name, but had thought about at intervals since with the detail of a memory that had installed itself in a place where she would keep stumbling into it.
Her eye found his mouth.
Exhaling, she commanded herself to behave and picked up the finished forgery. Set it more carefully the drying cloth and smoothed the cloth at the edge, which did not need smoothing. Her hands needed something to do.
They crossed the study to the doorway together.
Nick paused there. She was aware of him in the lamplight with a heightened alertness, having been in the same room with him for hours and reaching the point where she could have drawn the distinctive set of his jaw from memory.
Which was not a useful fact to know about herself.
He reached out and tucked a wayward curl behind her ear.
The errant curl that had been escaping its pin since approximately nine o’clock.
His fingers were warm, and the gesture was so brief that she was not certain, for a moment, whether it had happened in the way she had experienced it, or if she had added more to it that had not been there.
Her heart performed a maneuver for which she did not have a name.
Not the small lurch she had been noticing since Grimsfell.
Something different. Something more that sat in her chest and did not resolve itself tidily and was probably going to require further consideration at a later hour when she had more of her resources available.
Later, she told herself. You will think about this later.
She gazed up at him. She was aware, with the imbalance produced by being rather neatly undone, that she was going to keep finding the memory of those fingers brushing her face in the same way she kept finding the taste of coffee and the feel of firm lips.
“Goodnight, Millie,” he said quietly.
She stared up at him for a long, unguarded moment, utterly occupied by him and unable to bring herself to stop.
“Goodnight, Nick,” she said.
She turned and went down the corridor to the stairs. She heard him behind her, the limping tread and the tap of the cane. Then the quieter sounds of him returning to the study to attend to the tea tray, a thoughtful gesture because it needed doing and she had not thought to do it.
Up in her bedchamber, she stood inside her door for a moment with her hand on the frame and thought about mercenaries and Pike’s judgment and warm fingers tucking a curl behind her ear.
About the sharp lurch her heart had performed and the inconvenient accuracy with which she could recall it.
About how she was going to sort out which of these thoughts were facts and which were wishes and whether there was, at this point, any meaningful difference. She could not immediately resolve any of it.
Then she went to bed still carrying the memory of deep blue eyes framed by dark lashes, and of the brush of warm fingers over her cheek.