Chapter Seventeen
Seph hadn’t gotten much sleep.
At first, she had told herself it was the stress of packing again, of preparing for a longer time away.
She had tried to lose herself in digging out the old props, the trunk she’d kept buried in the very back of her storage, despite telling herself a thousand times she was going to throw it out, burn it, break it to bits.
It wasn’t even rusty. It didn’t squeak or protest at all when she opened it. And inside, none of the things from an eon past had gone dusty or ragged or moth-eaten.
She shook out the costume, the new one she had never gotten a chance to wear through a full performance, gold and deep blue, cut for easy movement in the style of a medieval damsel’s.
“Does it flatter me?”
“Couldn’t tell you one way or the other. Just don’t see you that way, is all.”
She blinked, holding the silky fabric to her chest, and let her eyes flutter shut, the sensation of his fingers trailing down the delicate bones of her throat rising like phantom touch in the room. The heat of his body against her back, the feel of his … Well.
She coughed, shaking her head and dropping the dress.
She was a grown woman, for goodness’s sake. She knew what parts men had. She knew what they did with them. And she’d spent a lifetime imagining Rhys looking at her like that. Kissing her. Wanting her.
So why hadn’t she ever really considered that he had that particular body part? That it could be so … so heavy and thick with want? That it might swell and grind against her?
She had kicked the trunk away and stood, pacing and shaking her hands out as her face heated to burning. She’d attempted to banish that thought and failed, and had climbed into bed to try to surrender to sleep instead of continuing to dwell upon it.
Sleep hadn’t come, of course.
Only a certainty that they were going to have to have a long, careful, thorough conversation before any other touching or kissing or distressing discoveries that turned her insides hot could occur.
God, but he had put his hands on her breasts. It hadn’t been incidental or accidental or any other things that rhymed. He had squeezed and stroked and fondled her nipples with those thief’s fingers of his.
She groaned, rolling onto her side and clenching her legs together.
That dress had been cut very low on her bust, she remembered. She had really started to bloom that summer and she’d wanted to show off her new assets.
Had he noticed?
Had he been avoiding looking when he’d told her he didn’t see her in that way?
And more importantly, did that dress still fit?
Yes, a long conversation. A calm, rational, serious conversation needed to happen.
They had the whole ride to Lewes. They had two weeks during which they could meet and discuss things like business-minded, fully matured individuals.
She told herself that a few times. Not too many, certainly, and then there was the sun, peeking up over the horizon like it had any business arriving so quickly.
When the rap came to her front door, she was already dressed. She was ready. She was holding steaming tea. And still, her heart had leapt all the way into her throat and threatened to escape out her mouth.
She hurried down the stairs, her bag packed by the door, trunk partially down the stairs from her own feeble early-morning efforts, and braced herself for the next phase of the trick they were performing, for the unscripted, unpracticed, utterly thrilling magic of it.
But it wasn’t Rhys at her threshold. It was Liberty Lennox.
“Morning,” said the other woman, her attention focused on the palm of her own hand. “My glove has a hole.”
“Libba?”
“Let me in,” she suggested, dropping the offending gloved hand at her side and stepping into the shop. “I suppose you ought to give me a quick training, hm? Prices and practices and hours and so on.”
“Pardon?” Seph managed, her tea clutched to her chest. “What?”
Libba sighed, rolling her eyes heavenward. “Of course he didn’t think to ask you. Or tell you, even. Rhys asked me to mind the shop while you two are off doing whatever it is there is to do in Lewes. Lewes? Really, at least go to Bristol if you two are running off together.”
Seph blinked a few times, her mind clearing a little in the midst of that ramble. “We’re not running off together,” she said primly. “We’re honoring a dying man’s final request.”
“Certainly,” Libba said, sweeping around to look at the new displays. “Of course you are. Oh, are these the birds I’m not to sell?”
“Erm, yes,” said Seph, forcing herself into motion toward the table. “The others are for sale, though, but I haven’t marked them yet. I’ll write down what I paid for them, so just try to turn a profit. And tell customers there are more coming.”
“Goodness, but they’re beautiful, aren’t they, these birds?” Libba clicked, running her fingers over the crest of feathers on the male hoopoe’s head. “Tereus did draw the best transformation, the bastard.”
Seph grimaced. “What?”
“Philomela and her sister,” Libba continued, glancing up, “got to be a swallow and a nightingale. Hardly fitting, considering he was the real villain of the story.”
“Libba,” Seph said slowly. “I do not have a classical education.”
“Oh,” Libba said, blushing a little and dropping her hand. “Right. I’m sorry. Shall I tell you the story? It’s rather horrible.”
But she didn’t have a chance.
Rhys arrived then, along with their foster brother Errol, who apparently had stepped in for his father for today’s drive to Lewes. Both young men were visibly windswept and chuckling together over some conversation that had happened on the way.
“Did you ride up top?” Libba asked Rhys with a frown of disapproval. “Your lovely curls are all frizzy.”
“Bracing!” Rhys exclaimed as answer.
“You don’t seem to care when my hair gets messed up,” Errol pointed out, running a callused hand over his sandy-blond mop. “Why’s that?”
Libba ignored him, asked for the key, and suggested they all get on their way, her eyes already starting to shine with a worrying enthusiasm as she took in the displays, one by one.
It did give Seph a bit of a curl of concern in her chest, but the men were already moving the trunk from the stairs and tossing her bags into the carriage, and it seemed to her that it might come across as lacking in gratitude if she made more of a fuss than simply letting the Starlings toss gravity around the way they always did, almost always to impressive and positive results.
Besides, Libba was right. Rhys did have mussed curls. His coat was rumpled with the cool whip of the wind. His collar had been curled open by the jostle. And it was all very distracting.
“I’ve been working at that blue box all night,” he told Seph, producing the little puzzle cube from his coat pocket to show her. “It’s harder than the tandem one. Have you played with yours?”
She blinked at him, her mouth going oddly dry. “I haven’t.”
“Shame,” he said, tilting it back and forth to make the shell hidden inside rattle. “Maybe if we’d both solved different parts, we could get it to crack open together.”
She only blinked at him, still holding her teacup, unable to form any words.
His eyes, green and bright, like he hadn’t struggled with slumber at all, passed over her dress, a creamy maple-colored underdress with a goldenrod pelisse atop it. “Good colors,” he commented, voice a touch lower, as though he did not want to be overheard. “Suits your hair.”
Her skin pricked up in gooseflesh, mercifully hidden under the fabric, which swept the full length of her arms and legs and ran like chilled silk over her torso for good measure. It both made her wonder if she had imagined last night entirely—and made her utterly certain she hadn’t.
She was forced to step to the till to jot down some simple instructions for Libba, bent over the tabletop with her quill scratching and her backside brushing the spot to which she’d been pinned last night.
When she’d finished and set the quill down, she saw the little piece of fool’s gold glinting in the sunlight next to her discarded teacup.
She snatched it up, tucking it into her pocket on instinct.
It was supposed to be protection, wasn’t it? That had been the game they were playing.
God help her.
And she looked up to see him haloed in sunlight, reclining against the door to her shop, a smile on his face that was somehow both soft and edged, his eyes locked on her from where he stood.
“Ready?” he asked, raising those dark brows.
“Of course,” she lied.
And she stepped out into the open, wondering what exactly was going to come next.