She couldn’t help but smile back. “Not everyone wants their world to be as strictly organized as you.”
He straightened up to his impressive height. “That is true. I do like my world to be orderly. I like to know precisely where things are, how they fit together.” He reached a hand to her cheek. His touch was feather-light along her cheekbone. “You drive me mad, you know.”
“Oh?”
“When Lee told me you were missing, it hit me very hard. I’d been through a war, I’d been threatened with a pistol and forced to drink poison—but that was a distant, numb sort of fear that could be put aside in order to survive.” His hand cupped her cheek, his fingers threading through her hair. “But when you were taken, it was different. It was immediate. Hot. I felt like I would tear apart the city.” He exhaled, a rueful smile on his lips. “I hated it.”
Saffron held still, worried that if she moved or interrupted him, he would stop speaking. She didn’t necessarily enjoy his words, but she was desperate to understand what he was saying.
“The meditation I do helped me ease the fear and anxiety I felt—feel, still. It helped me let go of my feelings. I stopped dropping dishes,smashing beakers, losing myself when a loud sound jolted me.” He swallowed. “I have sat, cross-legged and barefoot on the floor, for hours since I met you. No amount of meditation helps. You are too bright, too captivating for my mind to let go of.”
Saffron had no words to match his quietly spoken confession. She kissed him.
He returned her kiss but only for a moment. “The window,” he murmured.
With her office illuminated, anyone below in the Quad would see a pair of shadows doing things better left in privacy. She dragged him from the window and toward the couch.
She started their kiss anew, fierce with a determination that stemmed from his words and her own need to stave off the despair at the sights of death and pain she’d seen that day. This was warmth and life and something somehow better than logic and evidence and method, a rightness that did not need words to define.
That feeling of rightness was peerless in her experience. Perhaps that egged her on, encouraged her hands to tangle deeper into his hair, her body to press closer against his. Saffron believed in reason and answers to the questions of why and how, and she wanted to know why Alexander cared for her if she drove him mad, and why she wanted to understand him when he was so insufferably inscrutable, and how they could make things work between them.
Things were working very well, in her lust-hazed opinion. She’d managed to situate herself very nearly in Alexander’s lap, and she could see his face perfectly. The way his brows furrowed as if in concentration as he returned her kiss, the hints of wrinkles across his forehead that would grow deeper with time, the three gray hairs hiding in the black at his right temple.
Likely sensing her distraction, his lips slowed, then stopped. He gazed up at her. His eyes, which were so often as impenetrable as his mind, were deepest brown. She could see the striations like layers in the soil. She could count each thick eyelash.
He leaned so his lips touched her throat. She shivered. His lips inched upward.
“I want you to do something for me,” he murmured, breath tickling her ear.
She sighed with pleasure. “Yes?”
“Please leave off this business with Nick.”
It was like she’d been drenched in cold water.
“Oh, no,” she said, scooting off him, batting his hands away. “I will not put up with that again, Alexander.” She got to her feet. “You were the one to ask me to investigate on Adrian’s behalf!”
“This is different.”
She glared at him. “I’m helping solve what might be a murder. And helping your brother in the process! I am not doing this with you again!”
“Nick is dangerous.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. She could no longer dismiss the idea of Nick being more than what he seemed. He’d shown her he was. He had permission to examine a body before the police had even visited the scene, and he knew about measurements of a dead body’s decay. Alexander had known him while on a diplomatic mission during the war, during which Nick had no doubt killed men from the other side. More than anything else, however, Saffron had seen how Nick had changed his entire personality like he was switching hats. She’d seen his intensity, his coolness in the face of death. She could believe Nick was dangerous.
Deflated, she said, “There will always be danger of some kind. I might be hit by a bus on the street or catch ’flu. I work with poisonous plants for a living! Why is working with Nick any different?”
Alexander ran a hand through his hair, mussing the curls she’d already disordered. “I just want you to know that he isn’t as he appears.”
“One doesn’t watch a man go from making quips about cows to examining a dead body with the clinical air of a professional without something being not quite right,” she said flatly.
Alexander shot her a look of consternation. “Yet you agreed to help him.”
“In part to help Adrian.”
“And in part because …? Did you find it hard to say no to Nick?”
The tone of his question rankled her. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I found it hard to say no to a member of the government asking for my help in solving mysterious deaths because figuring out if it was accidental or intentional is important to the security of the laboratory.”
