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“I’m not certain that’s the case,” Rowden said to her.
She peered into his face, then glanced back at Giles. He stood beside Lily but looked anxious, watching Sophronia and Rowden with a taut expression like a small child fearful his parents were having a row. The sallow tone was still there, beneath everything.
“Giles needs you,” she said under her breath, then raised her voice and forced a cheerful smile. “Holland! Rowden knew the answer. Didn’t you say it was Holland enlarging the Prince’s house, Giles?”
The boy’s face cleared. “Did I have the right of it? That’s a relief. Sometimes I don’t trust my own mind,” he told Lily.
That much was true. Rowden felt that pull again, the wire around his heart. If he left the country, who would look after Giles?
Sophronia would. She still stood beside him, her hand a steady weight on his, the scent of thyme reminding him of their long summers spent outside growing brown as raisins.
He forgot about Foster. He forgot about everything save the woman standing beside him. The shape of her filled a gap that had shadowed his life for a decade. Her presence at his side fulfilled something he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge he lacked.
He turned his hand so her fingers rested across his palm. She didn’t pull away, but her breath hitched. He saw the tiny heave of her collarbone.
“Why did you buy that print of me?”
Her voice scratched, and she cleared her throat. “Gossip about you might hinder Giles’s chances to marry well. That is why.”
He’d assumed that was her reasoning, yet her nostrils flared as she said this. When she was younger, that was her nervous tell, the signal that she was lying.
Sophronia as a girl had been terrible at lying. Sophronia as a woman might be accomplished at it, for all he knew. Likely marriage required a great deal of lying, perhaps daily.
“That print, as I understand it, has nothing to do with Giles.” His voice emerged a low growl. The dim light in the room, lit only through the skylight in the dome above their head, lent a shadowed intimacy to the space. It made one feel a part of the picture. It also made him feel there was no one else nearby, that the world comprised they two alone.
“We needn’t worry about it now.”
“Until the next engraving is made.” He lifted her hand, as if testing the weight of her. She was strong but slender. He could wrap his arms around her and himself together.
Would she embrace him back if he pulled her into his arms?
A daft notion. Worse than daft. Unutterably foolish. “What will you do then?” he asked.
Her voice drifted, a whisper. “I shan’t concern myself.”
Her eyes gazed directly into his with that stripped-down, searching look. But this time, he could see into her as well.
She was aware of him as a man. He knew how to read women. He’d had enough practice. The flutter of her breath, the dark depths of her eyes, the way her scent seemed heightened as the air warmed between them—all of it said she was attuned to him as keenly as he was attuned to her.
He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against her knuckles, a firm pressure he held much longer than was polite or appropriate. He watched with a roaring sense of satisfaction as her reaction betrayed her. Another hitch of breath that made him want to transfer his lips to her mouth. Her eyes dilated. Her hand trembled in his palm—her whole body was trembling like a reed caught in the wind.
“Rowden,” she whispered, and nothing more.
He marveled that he was able to keep his head. Some willpower was left to him.
“I am going to win our wager, Sophronia.”
That brought her out of her trance. Her brows snapped together and her eyes narrowed. “I will.”
“I am going to win,” he repeated, and then he forced himself to release her hand. Forced himself to step away. Reaching for the fading threads of self-preservation, the shield he needed to protect himself.
He had to win. He could not let her remain free to marry another.
But he could not have her himself. He wouldn’t be that foolish as to offer his heart up for shredding.
Not again. Not ever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
