“No,” he said so sharply she blinked.
He took a breath. “That is... please stay. We’ll have a lesson.”
He retrieved a sheet of foolscap for her and laid a quill next to it.
After that, neither one of them moved or said anything. She wished she had prepared something specific, something witty and urbane or acerbic, to say. Something a more sophisticated, jaded woman might say. Something like,How do you say, “Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, Your Grace,” in Italian?
He cleared his throat. “I thought of an Italian phrase you might wish to know, Miss Wylde.”
Her heart lurched.
“It’s...Non credere ai pettegolezzi. Il pettegolezzo non è vero.”
She knewvero. Truth.
He took a breath. “Don’t believe the gossip. The gossip isn’t true.”
She stared at him. She could feel her breathing deepening and quickening.
She was not going to cry. She willed herself not to do it.
She saw the increasing light in her own face reflected in his own. But there was something she needed to know. Something she needed to hear him say aloud.
“But one day it will be,” she said. Carefully. Evenly.
The silence was long.
“It... seems likely,” he said finally, just as carefully. Very gently. His voice was still hoarse.
She held herself very still, to prevent the pain, which seemed to congregate at the very center of her, from touching any other part of her.
“But if it seems to thetonthat I’ve disappeared, it’s because I find...” He paused, and turned toward the window again. He pressed his lips together, then turned back to look at her and said gingerly, as though he were picking his way through unstable, unfamiliar terrain, “...that I do not want to be anywhere other than here. I... I cannot imagine wanting to be anywhere other than here.”
She said nothing.
She just breathed.
Breathed the beautiful air in which those words had been uttered.
They were not a declaration.
She could not expect one.
But she knew, for now, they would do.
He drew what felt like his first full breath in two days when he saw the flash of her slippers at the door, which he opened immediately.
He took the candle gently from her, and closed the door behind her. He settled the candle on the table.
And then he reached for her, and she reached for him.
Arms folded around each other tightly, they merely held one another. He laid his cheek against the top of her head. He breathed in her hair.
She laid her cheek against his heart. She savored its thump against her skin.
It went on for a good long time, and seemed infinitely more dangerous and scandalous than immediate nudity.
The nudity happened soon enough.
