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The silence stretched on and on. I wanted to say something to help, but all I came up with was, “Fresh air sounds nice.”

Adrien set down the pestle. When he turned around, there were angry tears in his eyes. Tears that pulled at my heartstrings. “I hate being on the water! You know that.”

“Adrien…” his father tried.

“The boat rocks too much. And there’s nothing to do. It’s boring. And I don’t want to go!”

“Your cousins will be there,” Yves said, trying to placate him. “And we’ll be fishing. We can make a game of it. How does that sound?”

“We can’t even eat the fish, so what’s the point?” Adrien pushed past his father and stormed out of the stillroom. Della glanced nervously at me, and I waved her after him. Once the two of them were gone, it was just us. Yves and I. Alone.

I held my own breath, knowing by the look on Yves’s face that this hadn’t gone as he’d hoped.

He gripped the bridge of his nose. “I apologize.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” I reassured him.

“You probably think me a terrible father for not teaching him proper manners. The way he storms out. I swear, I have tried to teach him. I’ve tried. He just…”

His sentence broke off, but I could still hear the hurt and the frustration. It drew me closer to him.

“Sometimes, we get along very well,” he said. “When we’re stargazing or doing something he likes. But the moment I ask him to do anything else, it’s this.” He ran a hand through his perfectly styled hair, tousling it and sending that one wave into his eyes. Those piercing green eyes of his. “He’s my heir, Cora. My only son.”

Tears burned in the back of my throat. Had Mama felt the same way about me? Yes, sometimes, we’d get along. But most of the time, I was drowning under the weight of her suffocating expectations. Unlike Adrien, I often complied because the consequences of not complying were terrible.

I swallowed down the discomfort and found I couldn’t stand the hurt in his eyes. He’d hired me to give him advice, and even though this wasn’t about The Devouring, I gave it to him anyway. Forcing a smile through the sadness, I said, “He wants to know you like him the way he is. Quirks and all.”

Yves canted his head to the side. “Did he tell you that?”

“No. I just know.”

Silence filled the stillroom. I closed my eyes, willing back tears, and when I opened my eyes, Yves was standing closer than he had been. Close enough that I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes.

“He has to know I love him.”

“Of course he knows you love him,” I said. “He needs to know you like him. There’s a difference.”

More silence. A dangerous silence. A silence that slipped between my rib bones and wormed its way into my heart. I’d told myself many times that I didn’t want to get closer to this man, and yet here I was, sharing inconvenient truths with him, and he was looking at me like he would kiss me if I asked him to. Or like he might ask me to stay here with him forever. Like one of the stone angels in his garden. And I was looking at him like he was more than a safe shore to land on.

“You are by far,” he said slowly, “the best advisor I have.”

I waited for him to chuckle or couch the compliment in my gender or my position in his employment, but he did neither.

By the way he was looking at me, I swore his eyes said, ‘I wanted you to stay. Why didn’t you stay?’

I couldn’t do that with him. I had to break the tenderness with humor. “Don’t let your nephew hear you say that.”

He didn’t respond to my bid for laughter. He just continued staring at me in that way that made my skin prickle with heat. Then his eyes slid down to the book still clutched in my hand. “Where did you find that?”

The prickle of heat immediately doubled. “In the library. The cover says it is about corsairs.”

“Captain Cortez and his band of miscreants.”

“You’ve read it?”

He held out a hand, and I reluctantly gave it to him. Yves ran his finger along the cover, over the author’s name printed in gold leaf, and a small smile rounded his lips. “This book is from my private collection.”

“You should be more careful with your private books, because this one was in the poetry section.”