A long silence settled over the room, warm and slightly absurd.
“The ghost,” Cressida said. “Agnes. You told me there was a ghost named Agnes who disapproves of changes to the household routine.”
He looked at the ceiling. “I did say that.”
“And your housekeeper’s name is also Agnes.”
Another pause.
“There is,” he said with immense control, “a perfectly rational explanation for all of this that I intend to pursue in the morning.”
“Of course,” she murmured.
“I will be speaking to every servant individually.”
“Naturally.”
“And then I will be revising the terms of every contract of employ?—”
“Theodore.” She put her hand flat on his chest, and he stopped as if pulled by a string. She gave him her very best grave look, held it as long as she could, and then found she could not maintain it after all.
The laugh escaped before she could prevent it, her face pressing into his shoulder, and she felt the sound move through him, a low exhale that shook his chest briefly against her cheek.
“They were rooting for us,” she said, when she had recovered some composure.
“They wereconspiring,” he countered, but there was nothing in his voice that could honestly be called outrage.
His arm tightened slightly around her.
“Sleep,” he said, and she settled against him, not an argument to be heard.
She knew she would wake in his arms tomorrow morning.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You are staring,” Cressida said, without opening her eyes.
There was a brief pause, then: “I was not aware that was prohibited.”
She opened her eyes.
The morning light lay across the coverlet in long, flat bands. Theodore was propped on one elbow beside her, dark-eyed, dark-haired, simply watching her with an openness she had not previously seen from him in daylight.
His hair was disheveled from sleep, a dark fall of it down his shoulders that he had not bothered to push back. His jaw was unshaven. There were marks on his throat, faint and half-concealed by the open collar of his shirt, and he was looking at her with an expression that belonged to low firelight and drawncurtains. He had permitted it regardless in full morning light, without arrangement.
She registered this without comment, having learned over the previous months that drawing attention to his unguarded moments was the surest way to end them.
“It is not prohibited,” she said, pushing herself upright against the pillows. Her hair was an absolute catastrophe. “It is merely noted.”
His gaze moved briefly to her hair and then away, and the line of his mouth held something she was almost certain was amusement.
“You may say whatever is amusing you,” she offered.
“I am not amused,” he said, then thought better of it. “I am,” he admitted, after a dignified pause, “exercising considerable restraint.”
She laughed, and his expression shifted in response.
There it was, the thing she had spent the better part of a season coaxing out of him by degrees.
