Page 126 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
I hand the leaf back to Auden. His fingertips drag over the Guest family ring circling my thumb. “Becket might not want to stay a priest either,” I point out. “If they make him move away from Devon—or even just demand his full repentance—he might decide the price is too high. He loves it here.”
Auden twirls the leaf by the stem, and his gaze is on where Becket’s head rests against Poe’s chest, where her fingers run through his golden hair. “He does.”
“And so if he’s not a priest anymore, by choice or by punishment . . . ”
“Then I don’t know,” says Auden softly. He drops the leaf back in the water. “I really don’t.”
We don’t say anything for several minutes. The garden is peaceful in the early evening—glowing with sun and redolent with life. Flowers, herbs, birds, bees, butterflies. The watery jabber of the fountain. Everything is informally jumbled and tastefully patinated—the overgrown beds and ivy-covered walls like something out of a dream.
It’s all by design, and yet it’s easy to forget that right now. It’s easy to believe that Thornchapel somehow grew itself, that it slipped into existence from elsewhere—from a book or a half-remembered movie or a dream.
“Where is Rebecca?” I ask. Digging has stalled on the final stages of maze removal until they can get bigger equipment in, but I still expected her to come stay for the week.
“She’s had a catastrophe on one of her sites. Flooding coupled with some kind of permissions conflict. She said she couldn’t get away.”
“And Delphine?”
Auden lifts his feet out of the water and props them in my lap as he leans back on his hands. Water starts soaking through my jeans and his legs are heavy enough that his heels dig into my thigh. It’s just enough discomfort to be provoking, just enough humiliation to make me breathe faster.
Auden, for his part, doesn’t seem to notice, although I know him well enough not to be fooled. He clocked the moment my pulse sped up; I’m certain he sees how hard it is for me to drag my eyes away from the sight of his bare feet in my lap.
It should be a casual touch. A fraternal liberty.
Instead, my body thuds with longing that’s anything but fraternal.
“Delphine assures me she’ll be here for Lammas tomorrow, but as I understand it, she’s spent the last week watching her parents’ dogs while they’re on holiday.”
“Without Rebecca?”
Auden presses down ever so slightly with his heels. It almost hurts, but not quite.
“Yes,” he replies.
“Do you think they’re doing okay?”
He presses down harder, and I instinctively grab at his ankles. Not to stop him, but to encourage him. To make him leave a small bruise on my thigh, one I can press on when I’m alone and remember—
No. No.
I push his feet off my lap and stand, needing away from him. Heat, sulky and lustful, flares in his face, but it’s gone just as quickly as it came. And when he speaks, it’s in his usual cool tones, as if he’s completely unmoved by what just happened. “I don’t know, actually. Delphine sounded rather anxious when I spoke to her on the phone, but she wouldn’t tell me why.”
I stretch. Poe and Becket are making for the door, Sir James at their heels, his snout bumping at Poe’s dangling hand for pets even while they walk. “I hope they’re not fighting.”
Auden finally stands too. It’s unfair that he should look so perfect when the rest of us occasionally fall victim to flushing and rumpling and dampening. Even with his hair tousled and the sun in his cheeks, he looks like a fairy-tale prince, like an archetype of polished male beauty and elegance. Like Mr. Darcy, if Mr. Darcy also had a half-brother he wanted to—
Okay, no. I have to stop thinking like this. I know it’s wrong, I know it.
I will carve this hunger out of myself.
“I also hope they’re not fighting,” Auden responds. Unhappy thoughts knot between his brows again, and I think of how good it would feel to kiss him there. How that sun-warmed skin would feel against my lips. How he would taste if I licked him.
“They’re both strong, but they’re both also stubborn,” he continues. “They’d rather suffer alone than inconvenience someone else with the reality that they have human feelings.”
“And I suppose you’re not stubborn at all,” I say. It’s a joke, I mean it as a joke, but his eyes darken as he looks back to me.
I realize that I’m tugging on my piercing with my teeth, using it to worry rhythmically at my bottom lip.
