“Wait.”
He sounded shakier than the Pacific Rim fault line, and as Elodie turned back to him, he lowered his gaze, pushing a hand through his hair, for which there was only one possible interpretation:I’m about to ask you for a divorce.In preparation, Elodie both bit her lip and smiled, which made her appear more coyly excited than she felt. “Trepidation” would have been a better description. “Terror” would have been best.
Gabriel peered up through his lashes at her. Noting the smile, he shifted his own mouth slightly—just a little curve at one edge, the shyest ghost of emotion.
Elodie swallowed heavily. She had seen that same look on his face once before: the only time he’d smiled during the near decade she’d known him. As he’d stood at the altar, watching while she made a solo procession down the church aisle (since a girl needed at least that much on her wedding day), his expression had been entirely neutral until the moment she’d stepped into a slanting, glittering beam of sunlight.
And then he’d crooked his mouth ever so gently. Anyone who’d not spent years adoring him would have missed it. To Elodie, it blazed. And yet, it hadn’t been a smile of pleasure, or even surprised admiration. It had simply said,Of course.
As if he expected always to see her in sunlight.
Among all Elodie’s memories, that was the loveliest. At the time, she’d felt her heart swoon so completely, it had been a miracle she’d been able to take another step. Even a year later, the recollection still did things to her, delightful, tickly things that had no place in a polite paragraph.
And now here he was, smiling at her again.
“Yes?” she breathed.
He shoved back his hair a second time. (Elodie managed a moment’s envy, despite everything, to note that it resettled impeccably.) “I know we’re in the middle of a disaster,” he said, “and that the ground may explode beneath our feet at any moment, killing us and scores of other people. But I must ask…”
He paused, clearing his throat while Elodie’s nerves flailed around screaming. The smile had gone; he appeared now to be on the verge of implosion.
“Yes?” she repeated cautiously.
Gabriel shook his head. “Never mind.” Turning on a heel, he scowled around the garden. “Where the hell is some rope?”
Elodie sighed with exasperation. “Really,” she said rather stroppily, “people who kiss other people ought to just ask them questions if they want.”
“People who have questions might not know how to ask them,” Gabriel replied, his tone coolly conversational. “People might be unused to personal conversations. Why is there no bloody rope in this garden?”
“I’m going to get dressed,” Elodie grumbled, and made again for the door.
“Wait.”
She stopped. “What, Gabriel?”
He squinted at the sky. “Theoretically, do you think being married to a person precludes one from courting them?”
Elodie’s pulse did such a double take, she was momentarily too dizzy to respond. “Um,” she said eventually, which was not quite the answer she’d rehearsed for years, should such a situation arise. “No, I think it would be acceptable. Theoretically.”
“Acceptable,” he repeated gravely.
“Encouraged.”
“Hm.” He was squinting with such ferocity at a passing cloud that Elodie feared he might do himself an ocular injury. She took pity on him.
“I like flowers.”
That brought him back from the sky, although he still would not quite meet her gaze. “Yes, I read your paper on how the presence ofZantedeschia aethiopicain bog environments serves to inhibit acute thaumaturgic emissions. Most insightful.”
“Thanks. I also like coffee, and poetry, and I especially like moonlit strolls along the Thames.”
“To study the bioluminescent phenomenon of the thaumaturgic carp in the river?”
Elodie grinned. “Yes, absolutely, Gabriel. To study the fish.”
He looked at her without speaking, his expression having grown thoughtful (probably because her nightgown was becoming transparent in the strengthening daylight). “I really should get dressed,” she said. “Will you deal with the goat? That would be most chivalric of you.”
And there it was, pinching his countenance and straightening his spine even further—the tetchiness she knew so well, and that she’d even come to love, recognizing it to be not a meanness in his character but a vulnerability showing where he was rubbed sore by a world too loud, bright, and rough-edged for him. She’d teased him just a little too far.
