Page 33 of The Beloved Escapade

And here was the truly disgraceful thing, the thing he would confess to Sebastian someday and to no one sooner … the arrangement pleased him.

Strange as it was, backward, headlong, sealed in a library against a hidden door by a woman he had known mere hours, it pleased him entirely.

She sat beside him, bright as newly applied gilding, already planning the letter that would detonate in her mother’s morning room. And when he had kissed her, when she had made him kiss her, in effect, having made him do everything else, the memory of it rose warm through him now, unbidden and thoroughly enjoyed.

Her mouth had been soft and sure under his, answering without hesitation. He had felt the seam of her lips part for him, the slow, deliberate stroke of his tongue against hers, the faint taste of honey and tea still lingering from the pot they had shared.

She had fitted against him in a manner that had left heat low in his body ever since, her form soft and decidedly, distractingly womanly for so small and martial a person.

The press of her breasts against his chest, the way her fingers had curled into his coat, the helpless sound she had made against his mouth, all of it returned to him in the sway of the carriage and made his blood thicken with private, unrepentant pleasure. There was a month of Sundays between now and the chancel steps, and Lorenzo suspected the month would improve his praying considerably.

The carriage turned up the lane. Behind them, the village boiled joyfully. Ahead, above its trees, the chimneys of Grey House stood against the sky, keeping what they kept.

Lucy followed his gaze to them.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said, answering the question he had been too proud to ask since the library. “At first light, if you like. We open the room, and everything in it, and we read every page together.” Her hand settled on his sleeve, light and sure and entirely without permission, exactly as she did all things. The warmth of her fingers soaked through the cloth into his skin. “You have waited three hundred years, signore. You will certainly survive until breakfast.”

Lorenzo sighed in relief.

CHAPTER 7

The figures must live. The hand must show the tendon, the face the grief

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

Lucy had lasted one hour and forty minutes.

She wished the fact recorded. She recorded it herself, privately, with some ceremony: she had genuinely intended to wait until tomorrow. She had said tomorrow in the carriage in her firmest voice, the voice with Papa in it, and she had meant it. There were letters to write. There was a household hanging half-assembled about her ears. There was dinner to invent out of a kitchen that had woken from seven years’ sleep that very week, and a betrothal hours old, and every reason under heaven to keep the door in the library shut until morning like a rational woman.

She had opened it at half past four.

The trouble had been the wall itself. She had gone into the library to write to Papa at the long table. Neutral ground, she had reasoned. Good light. And the carved vines had sat there at the edge of her vision the entire time, keeping their three hundred years directly over her shoulder.

Her letter had gotten as far as, My dear Papa, I hope this finds you, and stopped, because how did one continue that sentence, and also because the wall was humming. Not truly. She knew it was not truly. But a shut door with a secret behind it gave off something, some pressure on the skin, and Lucy Carroway had spent her whole life on the wrong side of shut doors, and she was one-and-twenty, and it was her own house, and Uncle Henry would have been ashamed of her.

So she had sent for lamps, and for Signor di Bianchi at The Rusty Anchor, and surrendered with, she felt, considerable dignity.

That had been two hours ago. She had seen him arrive. She had watched him come up the drive at a pace suggesting the horse had been consulted and had agreed the matter was urgent. She had opened the room, watched him remove his hat, and been called away almost at once by Mr. Tredwell on the matter of dinner, and then by one of the new maids on the matter of a bat in the blue bedroom, and then by dinner again, dinner being apparently a negotiation conducted in installments. The bat had taken twenty minutes and won.

Now she came back along the gallery in the early evening light with a second lamp in her hand, through the library where the case stood swung wide on its hinges, and stopped in the opening of the hidden room, and forgot entirely what she had come to say.

He had taken off his coat.

It hung over the back of the visitor’s chair, discarded with careless abandon, as if he had forgotten he owned it. He stood at the shelves in his shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned back to the elbow, a lamp raised in one hand, and he was talking. Not to her. He had not heard her. Not to anyone. A low, continuous river of Italian, half under his breath, rising and falling as his eyes moved along the spines. Cataloging, she realized. Thinking aloud to an audience centuries old.

Lucy stood in the doorway and found herself facing a difficulty.

The difficulty was his forearms. She was not aware forearms could constitute a difficulty. Nothing in her education had covered it. But the turned-back cuffs revealed lean brown arms corded with use, the lamplight sliding along them as he reached and turned and reached again, and the sight did something absolutely disgraceful to the rhythm of her heart.

It was not as though she had never seen a man’s arms. Farm laborers. The blacksmith at home. But she had never stood like this, close and quiet in a little lamplit room, with a man so informally dressed. A man who was going to be her husband. With his collar loosened and his sleeves rolled and his tanned throat moving as he murmured to his shelves.

The whole of it was suddenly, overwhelmingly domestic, and that domestic atmosphere, was far more dangerous than the romantic. The romantic she had defenses against. Nobody had warned her about shirtsleeves.

Heat bloomed low in her belly. Her pulse stumbled. She took a breath and put her defenses back up where they belonged.

Passage, she reminded herself. Not love. You have bargained a berth on a ship, Lucy Carroway, not a heart.