“A coward… is that why you’ve not visited me yet?”
He shook his head.“I’ve almost visited you a million times in the last fourteen days.But every time I found myself headed your way, I’d turn back around.I didn’t want to show up on your doorstep without something to show you, without something to make you proud.”
“That’s what this place is?Something to make me proud?”
He nodded.“And… something to make… myself.”
The sentence almost sounded incomplete.It wasn’t though.She understood.
“A fellow needs a steady income,” he said, “and I realized alchemy isn’t for me.Or I am not for alchemy.Either way, it was a bad match.And erm, when a fellow decides to go courting, he needs a plan for the future.Or he’s just wasting everyone’s time.”
“So you sent me the ingredients to love potion.”She was trying to fight a smile, but it wasn’t working.
“Since you haven’t said how you feel about me, I thought it might prove useful.It might spur you along a bit.”
She hadn’t said how she felt, had she?“Do you want me to say it?How I feel?”
He looked away from her, and the knuckles of his fists shone bone white.“You can say it when you wish.”
She stepped closer, traced the hills of his hands, urging them to soften.
He flexed his hand open, shook it, and she threaded their fingers together so she could feel the warm gold of his ring nestled between her fingers, could know that the slim coolness of her own rested between his.
Still he did not look at her, but he said, “You can say it when you want to.If you want to.Take your time.Sometimes I think I love you so deeply, I’ll fall into the feeling and drown.And damn, Sybil… what a way to die.I love you till I’m terrified and… and loving you makes me love the world better.But I do want it.I want your words.I’m selfish enough to want those words now and not on your time.I feel as if Ineedthem.I know I’m not good enough for you, but?—”
She shook her head.
“I’m trying to be.”
She went up on tiptoe and whispered in his ear, “I like you naughty, Mr.Chester.No.I love you naughty.No.That’s not quite right, either.”Her lips brushed his earlobe.Her breath warmed his skin.“I love you.”
What part of him touched her first?His hands at the back of her head?Or his lips against her lips.It didn’t matter.It happened all at once and it was like breathing for the first time after holding your breath too long.Painful and exquisitely wonderful.
He locked her in his arms, and she locked him up tight, too.They tumbled backward with uneasy steps, knocking over a plant and ending up in a window seat of some sort, sending more pots tipping over.Soil everywhere.A massacre of leaves and petals.
But he was kissing her, and she never wanted it to end.
His mouth had never tasted sweeter, and his hands had never felt so good skating down her back and nestling at her waist.Sometime after the tangle of their tongues had become a slow and sensuous foreshadowing, they broke apart, hot from the sunlight spilling through the window, hotter still from each other.
Panting, he set his forehead against hers, stroking her cheek with his thumb.“I left you alone for a fortnight when I promised to help you discover your… talent.”
“You did.And I shall punish you, but I’ve been working with Temple in his forge, and I think it good I learn the basics as his apprentice first.Before we set out to flirt with something that might be dangerous.And…” She looked up at the soaring ceiling, the tumbling vines, the glass gleaming in sunlight.“Oh, I think it was worth it.This is beautiful, Apollo.”
And she kissed him.Slow and steady and building up courage.When she pulled away this time, she looked him right in those blue eyes flecked with gold.No… not flecked anymore.A ring of gold circled round the blue of his irises.Glowing.
Like him, like this shop.Like gold in sunshine.
“You’ve discovered,” she said, “who Marry Sullivan is.This shop?Growing things?”
He grinned.“It is.It’s what I was never supposed to be, but… what I’ve always been at the same time.Perhaps… a little like my cousin.”
“And you do not mind a future as a shopkeeper?”
“Shopkeeper?I aim to own a whole nursery one day.After I pay back Diana’s loan.And I hope, some day, to be husband to the master alchemist.”
Her mind blanked.“Pardon?Whose husband?”
“Yours.”He kissed her.“Will you have me?”
