Gabriel blinked at her. “What is what?”
“That.” She pointed over his shoulder at a framed picture of the Queen Mab that hung crookedly on the corridor wall.
Gabriel glanced back. “It’s a painting,” he said.
“I mean, what is the symbol drawn above the inn? The three spirals?”
Gabriel peered closer. “A triskelion. It’s an ancient Celtic symbol.”
Elodie raised her eyebrows. “I’m surprised you know something like that.”
“Then why did you ask me?” He straightened the painting,moving it back and forth by tiny degrees until it was exact. “As it happens, there’s one etched on the door of my parents’ house, since my father is originally from Snowdonia.”
“Really?” Elodie could not contain her amazement at this revelation. “You’re Welsh?”
“Half-Welsh.” He looked at her with mild surprise. “Surely you knew? You’ve borne the name Tarrant for a year now.”
While this wasn’t quite so exciting a statement asYou bear my name, you’re minewould have been, had he only applied a little zest to his vocabulary, it nevertheless made Elodie feel like the storm had swooped in through her body, leaving her scattered and a little damp in places. “Thank you, but I need no reminder,” she replied archly. “So…do you speak Welsh?”
He frowned. She took this to mean yes.
“In that case, shouldn’t you be the one checking on the locals instead of me?”
His frown darkened. This time, she translated it as a most definite no.
“Fine.” Her feelings bubbled over again, and she didn’t even try to contain them. How could she simultaneously adore and dislike this man so much? (Mind you, she felt the same way about blue cheese, so clearly it was possible.) “This should be a straightforward job. Today we assess the immediate situation, tomorrow we make any necessary repairs to the fey line, and the next day we go home. Then you won’t have to be bothered anymore. And I’ll sleep on the mattress on the floor, so don’t worry about that either.”
“Bothered by what?” he asked.
Pretending she hadn’t heard this question, Elodie went to leave, but Gabriel moved to block her path. Arms crossed, head tilted aslant, he regarded her in much the same way hewould a new rendition of an old map. “Bothered by what?” he repeated.
But Elodie hadn’t spent the past year ducking out and disappearing as often as possible from any potential confrontation to start now. “Shouldn’t you take those spectacles off?” she asked. “You only need them for looking at things up close.”
“My focus is exactly where I want it to be. Bothered by what, Elodie?”
“We ought to keep moving, we’re wasting daylight.”
He stared at her for a further taut moment, then shrugged and turned away. “I’m never bothered by anything,” he muttered as he went down the stairs.
Elodie almost laughed. How could such an intelligent man be so lacking in self-insight? He was a six-foot-tall, perambulating, jaw-clenching embotheration, and Elodie was not prepared to suffer any dictionary on the matter. Gabriel Tarrant’s level of tetchiness deserved a whole new word all its own.
She made a face at him (which didn’t count as undignified behavior since he had his back to her, therefore could not see it). Behind the grimace, however—er, and several inches beneath it—her heart ached like a heroine standing on a cliff’s edge, wistfully contemplating the horizon.
“If I was the sort of person who got bothered, I wouldn’t be working as an emergency geographer,” Gabriel grumbled. “And I will be the one sleeping on the floor.”
“I’m not asking you to do that,” Elodie said.
“I know you’re not. I’m saying it. I am a gentleman.”
“A gentleman wouldn’t argue with a lady.Iwill sleep on the floor.”
Reaching the lobby, he stopped, turning to her once again.For a fleeting second, she glimpsed in his eyes something that looked a lot like her own repressed misery…
BOOM!
Thunder crashed, reminding them of the disaster awaiting them beyond that of their own relationship. Elodie rubbed her forehead wearily. Gabriel frowned, of course.
“We’ll discuss this tonight,” he said. Which meant he considered the conversation permanently closed.
