“I’ve always thought so,” she said thoughtfully, “but no, Vix and Hannah and even Rosalind all seemed to really love the wedding itself. I think I would rather elope. It would be a reason, an excuse, to finally see somewhere that isn’t London, but I can’t do that. I know I can’t do that.”
“You can’t?” he said, surprised. “Whyever not?”
She pulled her lips into a flat, dimpled line, as though the unspoken were hugged with parentheses. “You know why,” she said. “Especially right now.”
“Hm,” he said, instead of telling her how absurd that was. Instead of telling her that it wasn’t her job to right all the wrongs in the world. “I’ve never left London either. Where would you wish to go?”
“Venice, maybe,” she said, looking dreamy. “Or Seville. Ooh! New York? What about you?”
He shrugged, blushing again. “I always thought Old York sounded plenty exotic, truth be told.”
She grinned. “Perhaps it is. I have never been there either.”
“You have to leave England to elope, however,” he said, giving a little grunt as he moved onto his side, propping his head on his hand so he could look down at her, dragging the tips of his fingers down the dipping curves of her side. “Scotland, I think, or elsewhere.”
“Is that true?” she said, looking up at him. “How do you know that?”
He grinned. “I know everything.”
She scoffed and rolled her eyes.
“A lot of whores dream of eloping,” he said after a moment. “A lot of men dream of eloping with them. I know all about the allures of a place up north called Gretna Green, where you can pay a blacksmith a tuppence to wed you in minutes, rather than do anything at all the respectable way.”
“A blacksmith,” she repeated, squinting at him. “Are you teasing me?”
“Only if a cow doesn’t truly have four stomachs,” he answered, leaning down to capture her lips, gently and softly.
“I’ll ask Rosalind anyhow,” she said, flopping onto her back and scooting into the shadow his body made. “We ought to light a candle, Roland. It’s getting dark.”
“It is getting dark,” he agreed, glancing up and around the room. “Whose turn is it?”
She grinned, opening her mouth with such a smug glint in her eye that he immediately kissed her again to stop her from answering.
“No, you don’t!” he said against her lips, laughing at the way her body shook with amusement. “I invented that trick. That wasn’t my question.”
“Fine,” she said with a little sigh. “Ask, for mine will be what you have to eat in this secret flat of yours.”
His heart gave a little lurch, thumping and scraping against his ribs as the words swelled in his chest and tickled at his tongue.He inhaled deeply, bracing himself, and forced himself to be a man. “My question,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Are you staying here tonight?” he asked, afraid to move, to even let his fingers twitch where they rested on her bare hip. “With me?”
She reached out and stroked his hair, miming the way he twined hers around his fingers. “Oh, Roland,” she whispered. “Of course I am.”
CHAPTER 26
Mae would have liked to stay exactly as she was for the next three or four lifetimes, swaddled in nothing but Roland’s blankets and arms.
Alas, however, the clinic awaited. And she didn’t want her grandparents to think she’d run afoul of brigands. So the only option, after a long and indulgent breakfast wearing nothing but sheets, was to return to the world at large.
“My hair,” she bemoaned, touching all the spiky and coiling strands that had escaped and been rubbed into frizzy chaos by hands and pillows in the night. “I wish I had a turban.”
“A turban is worse than that linen strip you wear,” he replied with a click of his tongue. “I will put it into order, if you don’t mind smelling of my pomade for a day.”
“Roland, I already smell of you,” she reminded him, giving a skeptical giggle as he moved about gathering combs and pots of toilette. “My hair is extremely different to yours. You won’t know how to manage it.”
“Mae,” he said flatly. “I was a child in a brothel. My first and most important function as soon as my little fingers were long enough to move with purpose was styling hair of all sorts. I could plait before I could write my name. Sit down.”
