“We do not communicate without speaking,” William said.
Cecily looked at him.
He had just proven Letitia’s point,Isadora thought with an inward smile.
“Fine,” Letitia muttered, with the dignity of someone accepting terms they intend to immediately find a workaround for. “Fine. Two minutes. Consult.”
James turned slightly toward Isadora. She turned toward him.
The two minutes had the immediate effect of making her aware that their chairs were very close, close enough that when he leaned toward her to speak quietly, his voice brushed her ear.
“What do you have?” he whispered.
“A seven… which is apparently twelve and two face cards and something Letitia is calling a shadow card, which I do not entirely understand.” She struggled to look away from his jawline.
“The shadow card doubles the value of whatever is played after it,” he said. “She introduced it in the third round while William was arguing about the seven.”
She turned her head slightly to look at him. “You have been paying attention.”
“I have been waiting for the moment it became useful.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Play the shadow card before the face card. I’ll follow with the highest value I have”
“That assumes the shadow card rule survives until our next turn.”
“It will not,” he said. “Which is exactly why we play it now.”
She looked at him.
He looked back.
“Now?” she whispered.
“Now,” he said.
“If the rule changes?—”
“Then we adapt,” he finished. “We are good at that.”
She held his gaze for one moment. Then she looked at her cards, which was the correct thing to do and which was considerably easier than looking at him at this proximity, where his voice had been perhaps two inches from her ear, and his shoulder was warm against hers, and she was extremely, inconveniently aware of both of these facts.
Practical, she reminded herself.Contained.
Her shoulder remained where it was.
“Ready,” she said to the table.
“Look at them,” Letita drawled after a while. “They’ve gone quiet. People who are actually concentrating on cards make noise—they sigh, they mutter, they accuse others of cheating. These two have gone silent, which is far more suspicious.”
“We are concentrating,” Isadora corrected.
“You are not concentrating when you keep looking at each other with answers in your eyes.”
“That is an excessive amount of meaning to assign to a glance.”
“Is it?” Letitia did not look convinced, but she was already dealing the next hand, momentarily distracted by the more pressing business of trying to win one.
The game went on. Outside, the wind had picked up, and the fire had settled into the low, steady burn of late evening.
Isadora was still aware of exactly how close James was sitting. The warmth of his shoulder against hers. The clean, faint smell of him—soap and woodsmoke and something uniquely him. The way his hand, resting near the edge of the table, was close enough to hers that the smallest shift would close the distance entirely, and the way some traitorous part of her kept calculating that distance instead of attending to her cards.
