Cori didn’t say anything. She had learned, over the past days, that there were moments when James Westham needed the space to finish a thought without being helped along, and this seemed like one of those times.
"She would’ve liked you," he said, and it seemed to cost him something to say it, the way certain true things did.
The draft moved through the room again and Cori shivered before she could stop herself. He noticed, then crossed to the hearth without a word and crouched to coax the banked embers back to something useful. Cori set the book on the side table and rose, not quite knowing what to do with herself while he worked, but unwilling to remain sitting while he did so.
Within a few minutes, a small fire had caught and the room was fractionally warmer and considerably less dark than it had been before he’d arrived.
James straightened and turned back to her, and she realized he was closer than she had quite appreciated, the library smaller with the two of them in it and the firelight rearranging the shadows.
"Better?" he said.
She nodded. “Thank you."
He didn’t move away. She didn’t move away either, and she was keenly aware of both of those things.
"I’ve been thinking about today," she said.
He looked at her. "Have you?"
"This morning at breakfast, you came to me and started to say something, and then everything intervened, and then this afternoon in the billiard room, you were..." She looked for the word. "Well, you did not seem yourself. And I don’t know what to make of any of it."
He said nothing.
"I kept thinking I must have done something," she said. "Without meaning to, of course. But I don’t know what it was. And I?—”
"You did nothing," he said very softly. "Nothing at all."
"Then what was it?" she asked.
He was very still.
"I care," she said simply. "Whatever it is that’s bothered you, whatever is sitting with you, I care about it."
For a long moment he said nothing. The fire shifted behind them. The draft moved through again, but this time Cori did not shiver. James had closed the short distance between them without her quite noticing, and the warmth of him was there, real and immediate, along with the faint scent of sandalwood that she had first noticed in his corridor and had not quite forgotten. She tipped her chin up to look at him and found him already looking at her with something in his grey eyes she had not seen there before.
Cori reached up and brushed her fingers against his jaw.
She felt him go very still beneath her touch. And then he kissed her.
It was not tentative. His hand came up to her hair and her breath caught, warmth rushing through her all at once. She forgot the cold entirely, forgot the day, forgot every careful thought she’d been carrying since that morning. In that moment, there was only this.
Cori kissed him back. He tasted of tea and brandy and every hope she’d been too careful not to name.
She wasn’t sure how long the kiss lasted. But long enough that she’d stopped thinking about anything else entirely. She leaned into him and sighed against his mouth when he held her close. If he would only?—
"Papa?" Hannah’s voice came from the doorway.
They broke apart.
The little girl stood in the threshold in her nightrail, her light hair loose around her shoulders and her expression one of deep, practical focus rather than any particular surprise. "I can’t find Marmalade," she said.
James looked at his daughter. Then he looked at Cori. She watched him pull his composure back around himself, almost before she had fully seen what was there.
"How did you get out of the nursery?" he asked Hannah.
"The door doesn’t latch properly," she said as though the fact was longstanding and well-documented. "I’ve told Pritchard."
"We will discuss that tomorrow." He crossed to her and crouched down to her level. "Marmalade will be wherever he has decided to be. He’ll come back when he is ready."
