CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE #2
Plates changed. Wine moved. Hart spoke too much.
Sabrina pretended to let him. Archie introduced one idea after another like a man scattering crumbs in a careful pattern only he could see.
Duncan kept the pace of the room from tipping too far in any direction.
Voss continued to say very little and alter everything around him anyway.
By the time dessert came, Ceci knew two things with total certainty.
First, Voss had recognized in her some quality he did not trust. Second, he was enjoying it.
Coffee was served in the drawing room. The shift was not loud, and not in the way novels usually promised.
The room merely loosened around its second course of conversation.
Hart moved toward the fireplace with his glass.
Sabrina drew him into discussion of county politics and old names.
Archie found himself claimed by a woman who wished to speak of the university.
Duncan, by some miracle of class, was cornered by a retired colonel and could not escape without visible discourtesy.
Ceci crossed toward the side table for coffee because movement felt better than stillness. She had just taken the cup when Voss appeared beside her. He entered the space as if it had always been his.
“The room suits you better than Rowe’s did,” he said. Ceci did not look at him immediately.
“That sounds less like a compliment than you may mean it to.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
Only then did she turn. Up close, he was worse.
He was handsome, though in no way she cared for.
The danger lay in his control, which was so complete it bordered on erasure.
Whatever warmth or disorder or ordinary vanity belonged to the average man had been ironed flat in him.
He looked like a person who believed selfhood was useful only insofar as it could be deployed.
“You startled at Rowe’s,” he said.
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
She held his gaze.
“I had not expected such a polished room.”
He almost smiled. “No. I suppose not.”
The line went through her like cold water. This time, she did not let herself look away first.
“Are you often in the habit of taking inventory of strange women at parties, Herr Voss?”
“Only the interesting ones.”
Any other man might have made it sound flirtatious. From Voss, it sounded like inventory.
Then his eyes dropped to her hands.
“I hope the library has been treating you better today.”
The words were mild enough to pass unnoticed by anyone else at the table.
Ceci felt them anyway.
Something in his tone caught under her skin, polished and effortless, as though he had offered her nothing more than a courteous remark while quietly testing how she would take it.
Voss lifted his cup. So composed. So easy.
She kept her face still. What exactly had he meant to place in that sentence? A courtesy. A warning. A reminder that he knew more than he should. All of it was possible.
“It has kept me occupied,” she said.
His mouth curved faintly.
“I am glad to hear it.”
That was when Duncan reached them.
“Voss,” he said, tone perfectly smooth, “you have stolen my guest.”
The line was social enough to pass. The possession in it was not. Voss looked from Duncan to Ceci and back again. The pause held just long enough to feel deliberate.
“My apologies,” he said. “Miss Bishop and I were discussing the hazards of old houses.”
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
Duncan’s expression did not change.
“I find,” he said, “that a house is safest when one knows exactly who has moved through it.”
Voss took that in.
The faintest suggestion of pleasure touched his face, not because he liked Duncan, but because he liked opposition that understood itself.
“So do I,” he said. Hart called him then from across the room, loud and self-important, drawing the moment apart by accident or grace. Voss inclined his head to Ceci.
“Until next time.”
He left her with that.
Not if.
Until.
Ceci stood perfectly still until she was sure her hand would not betray her by shaking the coffee across the saucer. Only then did she put it down. Duncan did not speak immediately.
Neither did she.
At last, he said, very low, “What did he say?”
She looked at him.
His composure was intact. She knew him well enough now to hear the pressure underneath it anyway.
“He mentioned the ladder.”
That stripped the room of all pretense. Duncan’s face altered slightly.
“Exactly.”
Ceci repeated it. Word for word. When she was finished, Duncan’s hand closed once at his side, then opened again.
“He wanted you to know.”
“Yes.”
“He wanted me to know too,” Duncan said. Archie appeared a moment later, by accident, and read enough of their faces to stop smiling before he arrived.
“What happened?”
Ceci looked at him.
“He knows about the ladder.”
Archie went still in exactly the way he had at the library table when she first said time travel aloud, not in disbelief, but in calculation under pressure.
“Did he say it plainly?”
“No,” Duncan answered. “Which is worse.”
Sabrina crossed to them then, Hart still talking behind her to the colonel, and no longer worth pretending to listen to. Her eyes moved once over all three of them and hardened.
“What?”
Ceci told her.
Sabrina did not flinch. Did not gasp. Did not perform the fear of it. She only looked across the room to where Voss now stood with Hart, one hand resting lightly against the mantel as if the whole house had already begun to belong to him.
“Well,” she said. “Now I dislike him personally.”
That startled a breathless, incredulous laugh out of Ceci before the fear could settle too deep. Archie let out the air he had been holding.
Duncan looked at her, at the sound of the laugh, and for one strange second, Ceci saw the whole impossible shape of the afternoon laid bare between them.
Voss had declared himself. Hart had served as a hinge. Sabrina had opened the room. Archie had watched. Duncan had intervened. And she had remained standing in the middle of it.
Sunday had worked.
That was the worst part. Sabrina drew herself up and smiled the sort of smile women wore when war had to be translated into manners.
“Finish your coffee,” she said. “No one is leaving this room looking rattled. If we are going to be threatened by a fascist from the future, he can at least be made to suffer through proper hospitality first.”
This time, all four of them laughed quietly, and all at once, and the sound did not lighten anything.