She turned to him, searching his face.
“What is it?”
She seemed to be struggling for words. “I find...” She shoved her hair self-consciously away from her face, as though she, too, were dropping a veil. She cleared her throat. “I find that something in me feels lighter if I can see across a vista. I feel more like myself if I can see far as the eye can see.”
Almost nothing else she’d said could have surprised him more in the moment. He had the sense that she had never admitted that to anyone before.
She was watching him cautiously. Afraid, perhaps, of being mocked. “That makes sense,” he assured her.
She was visibly relieved. “I can ride like the wind. I’m a competent climber. I’m afraid of very little, actually. After a fashion nearly everything I do is reasoned, Mr. Cassidy. Even now.”
But what weight did the daughter of an earl carry about? Or was it just that she craved the exhilaration that arises from realizing one is smaller than everything and that the world is vaster than can be imagined?
Or was there a wildness in her that simply had no place to go within the confines of her life?
He didn’t ask. But he thought he knew. The bands of muscle across his stomach tensed, as if the restraints she lived under were suddenly binding him, too.
“Has this... predilection for views come upon you recently?”
“Ah,” she said shortly, a little bitterly. “You’ve been talking to my father. You probably laughed when he told you about the church tower.”
“No,” he said. “Nothing about you, or this moment, is a joke.”
She studied him as if to ascertain the truth of this, then turned away, for one last look at the view. “If I may presume... but I should like to say that I’m very sorry for your losses, Mr. Cassidy.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t know how I would do without my family. Even St. John.”
He’d thought he’d dreaded those spaces unfilled with work or activity because memories inevitably crowded, and loneliness would corner him. And blunt words usually quite effectively forestalledthe need for soul baring. They had indeed been a sort of blind he could take refuge in while his soul stopped ringing from the losses.
It was easier for him, somehow, to talk about it in the dark. He wanted to give her an answer, because it was clear she was thinking about loss. And he didn’t want her to spend a moment suffering over his own suffering.
“For what it’s worth... I don’t think anyone you love is ever truly gone. I do very much feel their absence... but I also feel their presence all the time, in a new way. In some ways they’re with me now more than ever. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“It does,” she said shortly.
That was enough unexpected soul mining for the night.
“All right,” he said briskly. “Now that you’ve seen the view, I’d be grateful if you’d allow me to see to it that you come safely down off the roof now.”
She didn’t reply to this. But she did knot her shawl snugly about her in preparation for descent, and he plucked up the lamp.
Then she turned to him again. And because he wasn’t about to deny himself the pleasure of it, he drank her in by lamplight and moonlight one last time, the way she’d drunk in that view. He was still amazed that this magical combination of features, animated by this particular maddening person, could cause him to lose his breath.
She knew precisely what he was thinking.
“I’mnotnaive, Mr. Cassidy,” she said. Deadly earnest. Her voice was barely above a whisper.“Not completely,” she added. It was very nearly a plea.
Oh God. It was like a kick in the solar plexus.
It sounded less like a dare than an invitation.
But it was definitely both.
He imagined how he would begin. How her face would feel cradled in his hand. Her delicate, clean-lined jaw, her skin like a petal. The path his lips would follow.
One kiss. What harm could there be?
