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Maybe that had been the trouble with them from the start. Everything had meant more than it should have. Everything had been weighed down with the futility of it all. Of them. Of what they felt when none of it could ever come to anything.

He couldn’t remember her but he’d kissed her anyway. Aeryn decided that was a blessing, the more she considered it.

Because it meant that their chemistry was as real as ever, and that the baseline connection that connected them to each other could never be lost. Time couldn’t change it. Heartbreak couldn’t touch it. Motherhood couldn’t dull it at all.

Somehow, that made everything that had happened between them make a different kind of sense. Almost as if it had never been about choices.

Neither he nor she would have chosen the path they’d taken, she was sure.

But somehow, they couldn’t resist. They had never been able to stay apart when they were in the same place. And now she had empirical evidence that the passion between them was truly irresistible.

He didn’t even have to know who she was to want her, to come and find her, to be drawn to her.

She couldn’t say for certain, but as she went and put her hand on the doorknob to the guest room, she had the distinct impression that there were things deep inside of her slowly beginning to heal.

Because all these years later, to still feel this overwhelming need had to mean that they’d never had a chance. They had never truly had the chance to stop this before it started. They could never have walked away until fate forced them to separate.

That cast everything in a different light, she thought—not that she had to act on it now, either. Surely it was enough to have kissed like that. And to know.

Aeryn told herself that she would simply check to make sure that he was sleeping peacefully, and to also check to make sure she hadn’t dreamed all of this—because she’d had a lot of dreams like this—and then go back to bed. They’d wake up in the morning and everything always looked different in the morning. Even if that morning was Christmas, and they were snowed in, and the world around them felt unreal with everyone tucked away in their homes, waiting for the storm to end.

She pushed the door open soundlessly and looked toward the bed. Her eyes had adjusted to the light, faint though it was, in the hall. Just a few little night-lights to guide her way as she moved around in the middle of the night, should Faith require it. The little girl’s room was next to Aeryn’s, but she still had to walk in the hall to get there. It was the night nurse who had suggested the night-lights and they’d ended up in every room.

There was no telling what she might trip over in the dark.

That was what she was thinking about as she processed the fact that she could see Vesuvius lying there in the bed that had once stood in her parents’ house, cozy beneath a patchwork quilt her grandmother had made with her own hands as a girl in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It was…too many parts of her life crashing together. She felt it like a kind of shock straight through her.

Vesuvius lay directly in the center of the full-size bed, which she imagined was a drastic downgrade from the royal accommodations he was used to in the palace. Not that she’d ever seen his bedroom in the palace.

Dirty little mistresses didn’t get invitations to royal palaces, as a rule. It was only the sidelines for the commoner who dared to love a king.

Aeryn had long since accepted the fact that things like that bothered her more in retrospect than she’d allowed them to bother her at the time. Because at the time, she had fully believed that being with him was worth any price she had to pay. More than that, she’d been happy to pay it.

It took her longer than it should have to realize that Vesuvius was not asleep.

On the contrary, he was wide-awake and staring straight at her.

She felt torn, then. There was part of her that wanted to demonstrate that she was, in fact, unaffected by him. That she was here to perform a task, something devoid of emotion and more suited to a nurse. Then leave, so he would think she’d really only come in here to check his health.

The other part of her, of course, burned.

It had to be the way the night-light cast its dim little sparkle, but she thought for a moment that there was some deeper sort of recognition in his gaze. That he was remembering all the same things that she did. The agony of loving him. How hard it had been to leave him, again and again.

How little she had ever wanted to be without him and the realization she’d had that it was only imagining the life her daughter would lead, caught up in the mess between them, that had gotten her to do it.

It was a shame that she thought would always run deep inside of her.

Tonight, so long after midnight, she was almost certain she could see all of that in him, and his part of it, too. The choices he’d had to make to do what he thought was right at the expense of his own joy, of his own life—and of the woman he had once told that he loved more than he loved himself.

I wish you loved me less, she had said, at the end. And yourself more. So that maybe you could find a way out for us.

Maybe she was delusional, but she thought she saw that too.

But she didn’t want to ask him what he did or didn’t recall. Maybe none of that mattered, because it was so late now that time had lost all meaning. This was turning into the longest night of her life, or possibly just the longest dream.

Yet somehow, standing here in bare feet and a bit of peach-colored silk that whispered its own set of reminders, Aeryn felt as if this was all some kind of a spell. And she couldn’t bear for it to break.

So she said nothing. She only held out her hand, beckoning to him. Pleading with him, with only her gaze, to get up and come with her.