Page 84 of The Trick of It

“Careful,” she told him, catching his lips as they descended, “or I’ll go back to being contrary, and what will you do then?”

“Ah, Persephone. Cariad,” he replied, laughing. “That is what the ropes are for.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The week unfolded with a surprising ease, as far as Rhys was concerned. Unsettling ease, which felt more like slotting into a place that had always been meant for him rather than visiting a new venue at which to ply his craft.

It wasn’t that he had never managed to feel comfortable away from home. Certainly not. He had always been comfortable with drifting.

It was more that this grange house had started to feel familiar in a way that he had never experienced outside of Starling’s Rest. It was that the borrowed bedroom where he shared the nights with Seph Boswell had begun to truly feel like his own. Like a place that he should get to keep.

And further, the pattern of the evenings, of the easy banter over dinner and the displays of talent in the ballroom afterward, had begun to feel like the way life was supposed to be lived. It had burrowed itself so well under his skin that he wasn’t certain he remembered what things had been like before this, or how they were meant to be after.

A lot of it was Seph herself. He knew that.

Here in Lewes, they were far removed from all of the lingering ghosts that lurked around Brighton, all the reminders of how they’d gotten things wrong. This bedroom had only ever been theirs. This house was full of people who had never known them as anything other than a unit.

Perhaps it was that.

Perhaps that was all it was.

He had expected that they would do little else but explore one another in this place, day and night. If he had been asked, prior to this, how he would use such an opportunity, he absolutely would have answered in the vein of keeping Seph naked and under him as often as possible. He would have been aghast at the suggestion he’d use the opportunity for anything else.

But the work had overtaken them in many ways. The gathered performers and the warmth of Merlin for as long as they’d have him here on this plane had drawn them into their orbit. And even in the nights, though they certainly had been exploring one another and what it meant to be one thing, they often simply held one another and talked.

They talked until they slept, and they slept in peace, not simply pleasure.

He did not want this to end.

He did not want to leave this place and have to stop calling her his wife.

That second night, she had rolled atop him, bracing her hands on his chest, and he had looked up at her in wonder as she’d pulled his clothes away, as she’d touched and tested and taken, learning how to lead the dance of their union.

It had been incredible, gazing at her from flat on his back, feeling nothing but the driven choices of her own desire.

He had taunted her a few times now about how easy it would be to pick the locks on her shop, but Rhys had finally come to contend with the truth of the matter. He did not want to pick the locks.

He wanted a key.

It was perhaps the scariest desire he’d ever harbored, secretly and burning, deep in his chest.

“Palm reading,” Nini was explaining over luncheon, just past the halfway point of their tenure here, “is especially clever. You hold them at the wrist so you can feel when the pulse quickens. I never liked doing it because my fingers aren’t long and it was always awkward, but I’ve seen it mastered many times.”

“But they didn’t touch us to tell our fortunes,” Master Yuri argued, waving a bit of chicken on the end of his fork as he recalled last night’s performance; the old woman and the child, and the things they’d known. The impossible things they’d known. Or guessed. “They used … oracle items. Those cards.”

“Ah, yes, the cards were interesting,” Madame Ivanova said, leaning down on her hand. “I’ve seen Le Tarot before, but it did not look like that. There is a deck you can buy in Marseilles, for both the game and the divination.”

“It is the Visconti-Sforza deck,” Merlin interjected from his spot at the head of the table. “Very old. Incomplete. From the time of the Medicis and Borgias.”

“Italian, are they?” Yuri said with clear disapproval. “Typical.”

Rhys turned to look at the mentalist, who had, some nights ago, managed to move items without touching them, on clear glass, which precluded the use of lodestones. He had also managed to melt and twist metal and split wood, from a distance.

“At least they have the good manners to let us speculate in the aftermath, free of their company,” he said to the Russian. “They never much join us, do they?”

Everyone murmured in agreement, shaking their heads and frowning.

“Have we made them feel unwelcome, you think?” Nini asked, tapping her spoon on her plate. “I don’t think we have been rude.”