“You only do it when you are watching me,” she said with a little sigh, shaking her curls. “I thought for certain you were attempting to impart a lesson.”
“Well, now hold on,” he said, raising his brows. “If I only do it when I’m watching you, then it likely is some form of communication, even if unintentional. Do you want to show me again?”
She considered it, her eyes glinting in the low light as she studied his face. “No,” she decided. “I am embarrassed.”
This time, he could not suppress the twisting beginnings of a smile, charmed despite himself though still doing his level best not to laugh and send her off into a snit again. “What were you going to tell me the other day?” he asked. “About tribes in Siberia? I cut you off and I shouldn’t have.”
She wrinkled her brow, as though she did not quite remember.
He did chuckle at that, but only in reaction to his own peevishness. “I was being a beast, if you recall, about the will,” he reminded her, holding up the flat of his hand and brushing it against the tip of her nose just the way he had in his room that first day, when he’d wanted her to stop talking. “You wanted to come to some sort of accord about the marriage and you said something about Siberian tribes.”
She blinked, giving a little shiver as he pulled his hand away, her eyes drifting down to look at her empty port glass. “Oh,” she said, half-whispering. “That. It is nothing, really. Only that there is a tribe that often matches children they consider the most opposite when arranging marriages, because they think that opposing elements of temperament produce the strongest households and the most resilient children. I thought perhaps Willa was thinking along similar lines, with her decree.”
“You think us complete opposites?” he pressed, raising his brows. “I also do not like failing to be good at things right away, you know.”
“You don’t?” she asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
He shook his head, letting another ripple of laughter escape him. “So how do you think it felt,” he pressed, “sitting beside you in Latin lessons? Or beside Malcolm in arithmetic?”
“Well,” she said, frowning. “I also had to sit next to Malcolm in arithmetic.”
He paused, a little flash of surprise passing through him. “Oh,” he said. “I suppose that is true. Did you hate it as much as I did?”
She grimaced, her teeth reflecting the low light. “Of course I did. Especially when it was algebra or logic problems. And he’d take such glee in answering very fast, before I could even wrap my head around the question.”
“He would!” Elias exclaimed, eyes widening. “What a little peacock he was.”
“Was,” said Hattie with a shrug. “Is?”
And they both laughed this time, for a stolen, quiet moment.
“Ah,” she said, shaking her head. “I suppose I did the same thing in language lessons, didn’t I? And the more of us Willa took in, the more unbearable lessons must have been for you, one by one.”
He gave her a wan smile and a shrug. “Must have been,” he echoed. “Who can remember now?”
“But now you are the instructor,” she reminded him, “and I the struggling pupil. You have the answers and I do not. Perhaps you may motivate yourself in teaching me as some sort of revenge, hm? Do I not deserve it?”
He narrowed his eyes. “You do, actually.”
She smiled, lowering her lashes. “So what were you thinking? Watching me at dinner, holding your crystal wineglass?”
He straightened, breathing with intent, and angled himself toward her, their knees brushing on the edge of the mattress. It immediately distracted him, his eyes falling to the collision of his velvet robe and her tiger-striped silken one. “I can scarcely recall,” he confessed, though, just now, he had an inkling.
“Oh,” she whispered, raising her eyes back up to meet his, her tongue darting out to moisten her lips. “That is a shame.”
“Forget the wineglass,” he said, a bit throatier than he would have liked, nudging closer to her on the mattress. “What do you think my body is conveying? Right now?”
She was silent for a moment, though Elias was of the mind that she eventhoughta bit more loudly than was polite.
He dragged his eyes up to meet hers, trailing over all the details of the damned robe in the process, until there was nothing left in his view but the dark shadows and dancing lights around her irises, the color of amber stones in the dark.
She swallowed, her narrow throat flexing, and ran those eyes of hers over his face. “Perhaps I am too close,” she said in barely a whisper, her little, pink tongue darting out to moisten her lips.
“You are not close enough,” he returned without thinking, his hands itching to remove that robe now and be done with it forever.
“Elias,” she said, her tongue rolling over the syllables in that serpentine shape she loved so well, her eyes fixed on his mouth. “If I were any closer, we would be touching.”
“Indeed?” he said. “And is that not part of the silent language as well? Touch?”
