He only hoped she did not and would not regret this. He found he did not dare ask if she did. And this—the not daring, because there had never been a thing he hadn’t dared—was new, too.
“Thank you for the Italian lesson,” she whispered.
He gave a soft laugh.
Her cheeks were still flushed. Her hair was still a bit anarchic, albeit re-pinned. Her lips were rosy and a trifle swollen.
And then gently, almost tentatively, she laid her hand against his cheek. They looked into each other’s eyes, solemnly, in a sort of wary tenderness.
He turned his head to lay a hot, lingering kiss in her palm.
He closed his eyes and breathed her in.
And then he threaded his fingers through hers and stood, and pulled her to her feet, and released her hand.
He found her candle, and handed it to her.
And by tacit agreement, she slipped silently out of the door.
As she made her way through the darkened house, she balanced the candle in one hand lest a stray draft douse it. She carefully closed her other hand into a fist.
As if the kiss he’d put into her palm was another tiny flame she needed to delicately tend and keep until she reached her room.
She slept with her fist against her cheek.
Chapter Thirteen
Mariana awakened feeling as though her little room was filled with sunlight.
Given that this was London and her room was on the non-duke side of The Grand Palace on the Thames, the one without the water view, this seemed unlikely.
She realized it was just her very being.
She basked in the sensation, drowsing while the maids came in and made her fire and brought the tea, then slipped out again.
The real world and its concerns would leach through.
She lay still, and thought:
Dear Mama,
He called me extraordinary.
But I don’t think I am. How can I be? I did not resist.
I thought about it. I truly did. You raised me to be a good and cautious girl, and as the years go by, the reasons for that seem all too clear. I only know that I wanted him—him—more than I wanted to be good. What does that make me? We tend to label things, don’t we?
But what we did was extraordinary.
And it didn’t feel wrong.
“Buonasera, Miss Wylde.”
“Buonasera, Your Grace.”
She settled herself into the chair gingerly. Parts of her were still a little tender. She hadn’t slept nearly enough, but she’d had a lot of coffee this morning at breakfast, and the net result was that everything seemed both hazy and more pronounced.
She looked at him, with his smooth, clean-shaven face that had scraped her only hours earlier as she’d kissed him, and thought last night and this moment were like the difference between backstage and onstage.
