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“Yes.”
“Needy.”
“Desperately,” I retort.
“Insufferable.”
“Famously.”
His expression softens. “I’m hopelessly in love with you.”
There are many dramatic things I could say. I have built entire reputations on saying dramatic things at emotionally inappropriate moments, but Alcott is looking at me as if the wrong answer may teach him never to be brave again.
So I choose carefully, “I love you too.”
His breath catches. That small tremor in the perfectly composed man. My utmost undoing.
I lean in, slowly. He meets me halfway. The kiss is not like Darkness. Darkness kisses like a blade dragged smiling across skin. Alcott kisses like a man translating a language he has studied for years and only now dares to speak aloud. Careful at first.
His hand slides to the back of my neck. Mine settles at his waist. The fire warms one side of us while the room cools the other. He tastes of brandy and restraint, and I decide at once that restraint is overrated.
When I draw back, his eyes are darker.
“Do not look pleased with yourself,” he says.
“I am extremely pleased with myself.”
“I may rescind the confession.”
“You cannot. I have collected it.”
“Of course you have.”
“I keep precious things.” My words quiet him.
His fingers brush the front of my shirt. “Am I one?”
“One what?”
His gaze lifts. “A precious thing.”
There are moments in life when one sees the fragile machinery beneath another person’s ribs. This is one of them. Alcott tried to ask the question lightly. He failed. I heard the wound beneath it. The boy sold. The brother saved and not saved. The mind split to survive what a child should never have endured. The man who learned to be useful, brilliant, dangerous, entertaining, anything but precious. I take his face in both hands.
“Yes,” I say. No flourish, no poetry, only truth. “You are precious to me.”
His eyes shine, then he kisses me again. This time, it is not careful. The room narrows to firelight, breath, hands, the soft scrape of his nails at my collar, the small sound he makes when I press him back against the mantel and immediately remember to move him away because hot stone is romantic only in theory. He laughs against my mouth. I laugh too. The sound turns into another kiss.
Then another. By the time we reach the sofa, I have lost one cufflink, my sense of dignity, and a considerable portion of my self-control. Alcott sits astride my lap, hair loosened from its tie, looking thoroughly debauched and deeply offended by how much he enjoys it.
“This is your fault,” he says.
“Entirely,” I confess.
“You seduced me.”
“I stood beside a fireplace and told you I loved you.”
“With intent.”
