He looked at her as if she were something worth being protected. His eyes were fierce it their restraint. And suddenly, it seemed to her as if he wished to say more, as if heachedto say more, but something in him held him back.
Instead, he bent and picked up the volume she’d been reading, flipping it open with his usual precision. His gaze focused on the page.
“Geography?” he asked.
Cordelia swallowed and nodded. “I’ve read about the world before, of course, but this,” she gestured around at the piles, helpless, “this shows me how large it truly is, how lost someone can become in it. And I?—”
She hesitated.
“I know what it is to be lost,” she said finally, feeling vulnerable and exposed. “I’ve felt it. And I don’t ever want to feel that way again.”
He looked at her then, and she hated how her heart reacted, how a single glance from him could make her feel both naked and cherished.
“I understand,” he said.
He closed the book carefully, as though it were something sacred.
“You may read as much as you wish,” he said at last. “Any book in this room. And when you leave, you may borrow whichever ones you like. I’ll have them sent wherever you are.”
“So…” she asked quietly, as her hands fussed with a stack of titles on colonial agriculture that she had no actual intention of reading, “you wish to be rid of me, then?”
He stilled. The pause was not long, but it was enough.
“Not quite,” came the reply.
He must have seen something flicker across her face then, something brittle and also something she hadn’t meant to show because he looked up sharply and added in a rush. “My mother would be inconsolable.”
She blinked.
“What?”
He reached for a volume of nautical charts and gave a slight, wry smile. “You’ve become her favorite topic of conversation, I’m afraid. If I were to send you away, she’d invent a reason to see you again by the following Tuesday.”
Cordelia stared at him, uncertain whether to laugh or cry.
“So…” she said slowly, her throat tight, “you’d let me return… on account of your mother’s affections.”
He placed a book in a fresh pile and looked at her sidelong. “I would need a decent excuse to explain it.”
Cordelia pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling. A foolish part of her wanted to ask ifhewould miss her, but she was too afraid of the answer, too afraid of hearing something measured and polite and not-quite-true.
So, she merely nodded and turned back to the nearest pile. They worked in silence after that. What mattered was that hestayed.
Book by book, pile by pile… he stayed.
And when, at last, the final book from the unsorted pile was laid into its new place and the floor finally cleared, Cordelia sat back on her heels and let out a slow, aching breath. They had finished one third of the room. Two walls of shelves still loomed over them, books still stacked high and order still begging to be made.
And yet, she had done something. She had made a dent. She had created shape from chaos. She had not run from the discomfort, nor hidden behind wit or self-deprecation.
She had stayed, and so had he.
Chapter Thirteen
The decanter shattered before Mason even realized he’d thrown it.
Glass and amber liquid splashed across the hearth, a sharp burst of noise against the otherwise silent study. He stood in the center of the room, breathing hard, the veins in his forearms taut with restraint.
Control.
