“Good,” he said, a smile breaking out across his face as the relief hit him harder than he anticipated. He rubbed his hands together for a moment, contemplating bidding her goodnight, when he caught a small flash of emotion pass across her features.
It was the way she looked at him. She seemed uncertain, and grateful, and as though he had just granted her something far more precious than an evening’s entertainment, and it made something in his chest shift sharply.
He studied her for a long moment and knew that he could not leave this room now – not even if he wanted to, which he realized… he did not.
“How did you grow up?” he asked quietly.
Her eyes lifted in surprise. “What?”
He did not look away. “You behave as though permission is a currency.”
Her lips parted. “I do not –”
“Why,” he continued, “do you ask for leave when you have the right to act?”
She hesitated, then looked down at her hands. “I was taught –”
He stepped closer.
“Look at me,” he said gently.
She did.
James lifted his hand and brushed a loose strand of hair back over her shoulder, his knuckles grazing the sensitive skin at the base of her neck.
Eleanor gasped softly.
The sound struck him like a blow.
His vision blurred, not with dizziness, but with a sudden, unwelcome surge of awareness. He became acutely conscious of the warmth of her skin beneath his hand, the faint tremor that passed through her at the lightest contact.
He withdrew his hand slowly, deliberately, as though pulling back from something too near a flame.
“You do not need permission,” he said quietly. “Not from me.”
Her gaze remained locked on his, her breath shallow, her color still high.
James straightened, the moment tightening around them like a held breath.
He should have left.
He knew it the moment his hand withdrew from her neck. Knew it in the hollow pull behind his ribs, in the faint, dangerous lightness in his head. He had no business standing in her room while she sat before him wrapped in nothing but thin cotton and heat.
Yet he did not move.
Eleanor remained very still, her breath shallow, her gaze fixed on his as though she were waiting for something she did not yet know how to name.
He shifted his weight.
“You should rest,” he said quietly.
She did not answer.
Instead, her fingers loosened in the covers. Slowly – tentatively – her hand lifted.
She touched his chest.
The contact was light. Almost questioning. Her palm pressed against the wool of his coat as if she were testing whether he was real.
