The pale yellow light did nothing to warm the icy tower. Instead, they cast spidery shadows across the gray stone walls, the dark patterns scurrying and leaping in syncopation with each foot fall on the stairs.
Benjamin had always hated the counting house. Too distant, too dark. Too cold. The claustrophobic stairwell and the cramped little rooms made tales of princesses locked in towers seem more like Gothic horror than fairy stories. He could not wait to leave it all behind.
When he reached the top, he shoved open the slender oak door.
His pulse skipped. He was not alone. The queen was in the counting house counting all its money.
Or plotting how to rid the castle of an unwanted duke.
Noelle glanced up from whatever correspondence she’d been writing and froze, plume in hand. “What areyoudoing here?”
“What areyoudoing here?” he countered brilliantly. She had always managed to wipe all intelligent words from his mind.
At first, he did not notice her lack of response because he was too busy drinking in every aspect of her person.
The gold-rimmed spectacles were perched on the tip of her pert nose. Her coif, a loose twist. Half a dozen soft tendrils fell against her slender neck or kissed the side of her cheeks. Even scowling at him, she was a vision. His heart thumped.
How he wanted to brush those soft tendrils from her face with the pad of his thumb and lower his mouth to—
“I work here,” she said, her voice remarkably even for a woman who likely wished to stab him with the quill in her hand.
He had never apologized for leaving. To do so, he would have to explain emotions he preferred to bury. Like why he could not bear another attachment… and another loss. The fissures she created in the shields around his heart were a liability.
He had not wished to hurt her by leaving. But it had been kinder to leave when all they’d shared was a single kiss. Prolonging the inevitable would have been much crueler. For both of them.
This time, Benjamin would keep his distance.
“If you worked for my grandfather, why are you still here?” He glanced about the otherwise empty room. Being one of Grandfather’s secretaries sounded like torture.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” She glanced up from her correspondence. “Mr. Marlowe didn’t sack me. He died.”
“Shouldn’t whoever is in charge of the counting house be going through the journals and finalizing documents?”
He realized his mistake as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
“You work here,” he said before she could beat him to it. “You took Fuzzy Wig’s place.”
“That’s right.” She bit her lip. “He helped me during the transition. His mind is sharper than his hearing.”
Benjamin nodded. “I don’t doubt it.”
A new silence fell, different than before. Worse, he realized. Noelle was no longer expecting him to apologize for the past. She assumed he wasn’t going to.
He wished he could. That there was anything at all that could excuse his absence. From the first, he had enjoyed her company far more than he should.
By the time he’d learned she was an orphan far below his class, it no longer mattered. They were already inseparable.Tooinseparable. Their friendship would have challenged Society more than enough. Their single stolen kiss had been so dramatically outside his control that it had sent him reeling. Retreat was the only safe path for them both.
Gingerly, he stepped into the counting house and seated himself behind the great mahogany desk that had once belonged to his grandfather.
The only items in the room were his large desk, her small desk, a bookshelf, and a pitiful fire spitting orange behind the grate. They were alone.
Very, very alone.
He cleared his throat. “Should you summon a maid?”
She raised her brows. “To watch over me sitting in my chair at my desk as I perform the duties of my post, as I’ve done alone every day for the past four years?”
Fair enough. Yet they could not continue like this.
