After several hot, motionless seconds, Elodie ventured cautiously, “Can you reach the quilt to pull it up?”
“Not without moving my…telescope,” Gabriel said.
“That’s fine,” Elodie answered at once. “I don’t need the quilt. I feel quite warm enough.”
“Hm,” Gabriel replied, the meaning of which was anyone’s guess at this point.
The silence returned with a vengeance. The night beyond, however, was a cacophony of sound. Wind howled, sending tree branches and slate tiles clattering around the village. Rain bombarded the inn. It seemed like an oasis compared to the environment in the bedroom.
Elodie closed her eyes. Unable to stop herself, she sank into a dream that Gabriel held her from a sincere wish to be close with her, not just for the scientific pursuit of relief. As the storm rioted outside, she imagined them making a sanctuary for each other, Gabriel’s strength encompassing her with certainty while her soft warmth eased his aches from the day’s travails. She cuddled closer without consciously realizing, and his arms tightened around her.
I really do love you, dreadful man,she thought.
But even as the impossibly beautiful dream melted a smile into her heart, it was succeeded by a pang of shame. Gabrieldisliked her, despite what his physiological response to their contact might suggest, so her own pleasure in his touch felt somehow unethical.
“Sorry,” she said, pulling away.
But she’d forgotten just how narrow the bed was, and she would have tumbled right off had Gabriel not caught her. He pulled her close against him once more, their bodies connecting like a hard, fierce kiss. A hundred nerves endings flashed with memory, sending thrills through them like alchemy, shaking their breath to pieces. Instantly, they scrambled to turn their backs, Gabriel cramming himself against the wall, Elodie clutching the edge of the mattress lest she fall again.
“Good night,” Gabriel said brusquely.
“Happy dreams,” Elodie replied.
And wind rattled against the house like laughter, mocking them.
Chapter Nine
Just because you can read a map
doesn’t mean you know where you’re going.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
Elodie woke tomagic. It pressed warm against her body, softening her pulse with its starlit dreams, and she smiled, cuddling closer to it despite the inherent danger of doing so, in the same way she threw herself out of hot air balloons and ran straight toward thaumaturgic bombs, wild-hearted woman that she was.
Unfortunately, despite also being a well-educated woman, her brain took a while to catch up.
And then, abruptly, it did. Making a rapid assessment of the situation, it noted the scent of quality soap and the feel of a strong arm curved over her body, and it flung her eyes open even before she could fully process its report. She thus had half a second to realize she was snuggling with Gabriel before his eyes also flung open. The expression in them suggested he’d just received an equally alarming report from his own brain.
They stared at each other across a distance that Elodie professionally estimated to bereally bloody close. And for the first time since she’d known him, she saw fear in Gabriel’s eyes.
Or perhaps it was her own fear, reflected in that heavy darkness.
“Sorry,” she said, pulling herself up out of his embrace.
“Sorry,” he said in the same moment, also sitting up.
Crack. Her forehead met his chin.
“Damn it,” they swore in unison.
“I’ll just…” Elodie said, and practically threw herself off the bed. Bright, rosy light filled the room, indicating that they had outslept their intention to rise with dawn. Fairly certain that her face shone with the same hue, Elodie fled to the bathroom.
“You are your own personal disaster zone,” she whispered furiously to her reflection in the old, mottled mirror. Shadow-rimmed eyes looked back at her with weary agreement.
Completing the usual ablutions, she bundled as much of her long, tameless hair as she could manage into a knot at the back of her head, secured with Gabriel’s elastic band, which was by now entwined with snarls. At once, the coiffure, such as it was, drooped lopsidedly. Elodie tried without success to convince herself this was charming, then decided that the heroines of mythology never fretted about their hair, and that she too was a heroine, professionally speaking, and had better things to do with her day.
Thus consoled, and daydreaming about Atalanta, and about the princess Ariadne being met by Bacchus “in his chariot, wreathed with vines,” she returned to the bedroom to find Gabriel having just arrived back from visiting the downstairs bathroom. His own hair was faultless of course, his jaw shaven, a cool, fresh scent surrounding him. Elodie promptly discarded the vision of wild Bacchus in favor of this man in all his Apollonian precision.
