“Shall I?—”
“No. Thank you.”
The woman had already crossed the room. She gave her name plainly, without embellishment: Eleanor. She looked at him with an even, professional regard and did not reach for conversation.
He followed her upstairs.
Her room was at the back of the house, second floor: a fire in the grate, a decanter on the sideboard, a lamp on the mantelpiece. She poured without being asked and set the glass beside him.
He stood there for a moment with his hands at his sides, looking at the room, which was quiet and warm and entirely ordinary, and told himself this was going to work.
She settled on the arm of the chair near the fire and watched him not drink the wine. “You’ve been here before,” she said. “Not to see me.”
“Three months ago. Perhaps four.”
“Long stretch.”
“I’ve been occupied.”
“With?” She said it without impertinence.
“Many things,” he said and picked up the glass.
“A woman?”
He drank. “An arrangement,” he said again.
She accepted this and rose from the chair’s arm, unhurried. In better light, her eyes were the color of shallow water over gravel. Her hair, loose now, was warm amber at the ends and darker near the root, nothing like dark brown, nothing like the loose loops under a gold-leafed wreath.
“The arrangement is here, or somewhere else?”
“Somewhere else,” he said. “And irrelevant.” He set the glass down. “My apologies. That was not directed at you.”
“It rarely is,” she said. She crossed toward him. “Most men who come at this hour with that face have left the relevant thing at home.” She stopped in front of him and looked up at him without performance. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“I’ve no intention of talking about it.”
“Good,” she said. “Then we won’t.” She put her hands on his chest.
Her palms settled flat against his lapels, warm and assured, the hands of someone who understood exactly what she was doing?—
And his mind went somewhere elseentirely, without his consent, without any apparent intention, and with no prospect of coming back.
Hair with an absurd wreath of gold leaves pinned in it, half undone by then, one stem bent at the wrong angle. The half inch of distance that had disappeared becauseshehad given it. Her breath warm on his jaw. The complete and involuntary way she had answered him when he had given her the choice.
She had chosen. He had not considered that enough, and he was considering it now, at the wrong time and in the wrong room entirely.
Eleanor’s hands were warm and certain and present and entirely wrong. He stood there for two or three full seconds, waiting for the room to reassert itself. It did not.
He covered her hands with his and lifted them away, gently.
“Stop,” he said.
She stepped back without alarm. She was not new to requests that changed; it was on her face plainly, the professional composure of someone who had long stopped being surprised by it. She waited.
“My apologies,” he said. He went to the sideboard, drank the wine in a single go, and set the glass down. “You’ve done nothing amiss.”
“Shall I?—”
