Page 55 of A Curse of Hope and Shadows: Part I
He had to trap it under his leg whenever she touched him, lest it start trembling.
It had been a terrible idea to let her convince him to let it loose.
One morning, she came to his room curiously early, before breakfast, finding him trying to wriggle into a waistcoat with limited success.
She frowned. “You’re getting dressed?”
“Well, I’m trying to…” he said, gesturing to the buttons on his waistcoat. He’d been trying to test the dexterity in his left hand. “Buttons are hard to do one handedly.”
Adeline stepped forward to button him in. “Tell me about it.”
“You’ve done lots of buttoning one-handedly?”
“When you’ve had a baby, you’ve done everything one-handedly.”
A baby. She had a baby. Not one she’d given birth to, but a child nonetheless. He wasn’t sure he liked how much of an adult that made her, how far above him, how much it made him wonder if her affection for him wasn’t akin to maternal.
He’d been surprised when she’d told him her age, the first time. He’d thought her much older than him. Helikedthat she was closer in age, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still too far ahead. Elliott may not have been her sweetheart, but at some point, someone was bound to notice her. Want her. Tempt her away from him with the promise of an easy life.
He wasn’t sure he could bear the thought of her leaving, but then how could he ever convince her to stay?
Especially if she ever saw him on the night of the full moon.
He could not hide that from her forever.
“Are you all right?” Adeline asked, hand flattening down the folds of his waistcoat.
“A child,” he whispered.
“What?”
“You have a child. Well, not quite. But I was wondering if you ever planned to have any of your own?”
Adeline snorted. “Not any time soon, I assure you. Far too much trouble. Plus I’d probably have to give up this very comfortable job. No thanks.”
“Right,” said Dimitri, with an equal amount of relief and pain. “Comfortable.”
She smiled at him. “Why are you wearing a waistcoat today? Were you honestly just trying your hand at buttons?”
“Well, the weather is getting a bit cooler…” In truth, he’d started to feel silly not being dressed for the day in front of her, lounging around while she was wrapped up in layers.
“It is. And on that note, I wondered if I could tempt you out for a walk?”
“At this hour?”
“It’s the best time!”
He was getting increasingly bad at saying no to her. “Why not?” he answered, and then, feeling rather bold, offered her his arm. “Shall we?”
A fine, white mist had stretched in across the grounds, dusting the grass like a warm frost. Dimitri knew he should be glad of the cool and the cover, both shielding him from the sun and the eyes of anyone that might be watching, but he wasn’t sure it was prime walking weather.
“What is it?” Adeline asked, eyeing him as he pulled up the hood on his cloak.
A faint chill bit his cheeks. “Not exactly pleasant weather, is it?”
“Is it not?” Adeline grinned impishly, and without another word, bolted from his side, racing through the lawns. The morning dew spurned beneath her boots, and as she turned in the grass, for a moment Dimitri felt as if a poem was unfurling before him in the faint morning light, each second a line of words to be pressed to paper. He studied the vision before him, committing it to memory. Every strand of her hair that tugged free of her cap, copper against white, every droplet as it clung to her skin, pearls of nature. Her skirts twirled around her, and for a moment he clean forgot she was a woman of eighteen and not a girl of eight, clean forgot everything, like all of him was stripped away, until he was no more than a phantom in the fog.
Her laugh tugged him back into being, and he raced her through the grounds, following that sound, to the bitter, wilder parts of the gardens and feelings lost to childhood.
