The door opened, and she didn’t have to look up to know who it was. There was only one person in this castle whose footsteps sounded like that—deliberate, unhurried, certain in their belonging.
“Good morning,” she said, to her notes.
Lyon made a sound that was not quite an answer, which she’d learned to interpret asgood morning. She heard him cross the room, heard the familiar sound of his satchel—battered leather, stuffed with sketchbooks—being settled on the table, heard the chair opposite her exhale under his weight.
There really was no getting around it; she was going to have to look up.
As soon as you look up, he will see yearning on your face.
Yearning? Yearning? Don’t be ridiculous; Bonnie was a strong independent woman who could control her own facial expression.
Right?
Go ahead. Give it a try.
She took a deep breath and peeked up, only to slump in relief.
Lyon wasn’t looking at her; he was already opening a manual, his pen ready. As if he’d been here for hours. As if this were where he’d always worked.
She’d noticed, in the last two days, that he hadn’t returned to his study. He had work that required it, she knew—the ledgers, the correspondence—but each morning he’d appeared in the library instead, with his satchel and his manuals and his frown, and she hadn’t said anything, and he hadn’t explained.
“You have abandoned your study,” she blurted, then winced when she realized it would have been better not to draw attention to it.
He didn’t look up. “It’s cold.”
“Your study has a perfectly good fire.”
“This fire is better.”
She looked at the fire—identical in every meaningful way to the one in his study—and then looked back at him. He was making a note in the margin of something, with utter composure.
“Of course,” she said gravely. “The fire.”
The corner of his mouth did something. She counted that as a victory and returned to Lady Elspeth.
They worked in silence for a comfortable while. Outside, the snow continued its steady work. Inside, the fire crackled, Bonnie’s pen scratched, and Lyon’s occasional lowhmmof concentration punctuated the quiet.
She’d grown addicted to that sound, she realized. She’d grown addicted to quite a lot of things she was going to have to give up when the snow stopped and Lysander returned to bring her back to reality.
She was reaching across the table for her reference volume—the heavy one, on the far side—at the same moment Lyon reached across from his side to hand her something, and the result was that her fingers closed directly over his.
They both stopped.
It was so brief. His hand was warm, and large, and very still under hers, and she felt his surprise in the fractional pause before he cleared his throat and set the thing he’d been passing her—a folded letter, something from the records she’d asked about—onto the table, withdrawing his hand in the same motion. He looked back at his manual.
“Thank you,” she managed.
“Aye,” he said, to the manual.
She looked at her notes. Her heart was doing something rather foolish.
Thatwas nothing. A collision, an accident, two people reaching across a table at the same moment.
That was not the same as standing on a ladder with a man’s chest six inches from her shoulder while he looked at her mouth. These were categorically different events, and she was going to treat them accordingly.
She turned a page. He was still looking at his manual.
Was he actually reading it? Or was he as aware of her as she was of him?
