Page 46 of The Beautiful Ones

I smiled. A reply arrived perfectly formed in my mind, but when I attempted it, the first consonant caught.

“I—I d-don’t—”

Shame threatened to close the rest of my throat.

Adrian waited.

He did not glance toward Elin for assistance. He did not supply the word or tell me to take my time. His patience was not the bright, careful patience strangers displayed when they wished to be praised for tolerating me. He simply looked into my eyes as if the silence belonged to our conversation.

“I don’t intend to escape it,” I finished.

“No,” he said softly. “I do not believe you do.”

The answer should have unsettled me. Instead, pleasure warmed my face.

He sat at the opposite end of the bench, leaving a proper distance between us. From the upper windows, my mother could observe nothing more scandalous than an eligible gentleman discussing poetry with her daughter beneath the supervision of a companion. Adrian understood appearances as instinctively as Octavia understood envy.

“Commander Vale told me you preferred music to poetry,” he said.

At the sound of Nathaniel’s name, the garden seemed to contract around us.

“He h-heard me sing once.”

“More than once, I think.”

I looked at him sharply.

Nathaniel had listened outside the schoolroom when I believed myself alone. Once, after I finished, he had applauded from the corridor and made me laugh so hard I could not scold him. He had promised never to tell my mother that I sang without difficulty, because she would have turned the discovery into another performance I was required to perfect.

I had never spoken of that afternoon to anyone—not even Elin.

“What else did he tell you?” I asked. The sentence emerged slowly but whole.

“That you possessed a voice this house did not deserve.”

The roses stirred though no wind passed through the arcade.

I lowered my eyes to the book. “Did he tell you why he left?”

Adrian was quiet for so long that I looked up again.

“Nathaniel did not always understand the difference between leaving and being taken,” he said.

The answer made little sense, yet grief moved beneath it. I wanted to ask what he meant. I wanted to know where Nathaniel had gone, why my father paled at his name and why the Fairhavens had arrived carrying his secrets like letters addressed to the dead.

But Adrian turned his attention toward the garden, and the questions scattered.

“Would you honor me with a walk, Miss Lebon? You might show me the glasshouse before the midday heat becomes unbearable.”

Behind me, Elin drew a sharp breath.

I looked toward the overgrown structure beyond the roses. Its broken panes flashed between the trees. Even in daylight, the mist around its foundation had not entirely burned away.

“It is locked,” I said.

“Locks are often invitations disguised as refusals.”

He rose and offered me his hand.