“Hmm. May I suggest, Gwen, that when you next undertake to marry—”
“Oh, please, let’s not even speak of it.”
“—that you make a requirement,” he finished. “Consider nobody who cannot claim at least one roof without holes.”
“A good policy, I suppose.” She gave her head a little shake. “But why are we even speaking of such matters? We’re in Paris, of all places! Paris at sunrise! I’d be terribly greedy to be dreaming about the country when surrounded by this!” She swept out her hands, then did a little twirl down the pavement.
The twirl looked like manufactured good cheer—her first placating routine of the evening, in fact. Almost, he made a sarcastic remark. Paris, for all its charms, was one of the filthier cities of the world. And sunrise was no large wonder: he could testify, firsthand, that it happened every morning.
But then her face did light up, as though the act had become real, and, caught off guard as he was, he felt his damned bloody heart trip; he was grateful that her attention no longer fixed upon him, for he had no idea what she would have seen in his face, had she looked.
Instead, she gazed past him, then around them, turning a slower circle, head tipping in scrutiny. She was admiring the sleeping street, he supposed, the darkened windows in the stony faces of the Gothic and medieval facades—and the bits of trash fluttering along the embankment. Fair enough, they did tangle with some very pretty early wildflowers sprouting through the cracks in the pavement. Rogue flowers. The saffron petals formed a colorful, illicit trail up the walk as far as the eye could see, until one’s attention was hijacked by the tower of Notre Dame, demanding the eye follow it upward to the heavens. The night sky was ripening into peach on the eastern horizon, promising a day of warmth ahead. On the Seine, the glow of the rising sun spread in ripples of gold.
A lilac petal was drifting past him. On impulse, he reached out to catch it. “Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose it is beautiful.”
She turned back, mouth quirked. “Alex, you do not even have to suppose. I will vouch for it—or bribe you to believe it, if you prefer. I do not hesitate to do such things now, you know; I have grown thoroughly wicked in the night.”
He laughed. “God help us,” he said, and tossed the petal at her. “Wicked becomes you a bit too well, Miss Maudsley.”
She laughed back and batted the petal away. “And there’s the pot calling the kettle black!” she said before slapping her hand over a jaw-cracking yawn. When her hand dropped, her expression grew serious. She looked again toward the tower of Notre Dame. “It’s not really so wicked, though, is it? To want to live like this?”
“Like this?” he echoed.
“To want to live . . . freely,” she said. “Even as a woman.”
There was a vulnerable note in her voice, longing entwined with the faintest note of fear. She turned her face to him, then, and he saw the hope there, written in her eyes.
She should not trust him with such sights. It would be so easy to crush her now—to laugh at her and say, You think what you’ve done is wicked? It was child’s play, sweetheart. This is not freedom. This is simply the sort of lark available to a woman with three million pounds.
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
He would not speak the words to her. It would make him a hypocrite of the lowest order. For all the ways he could pick apart her phrasing, he did know what she meant. What she was feeling . . . it was the same yearning that had driven him away from England the very moment that university had concluded. His first sunrise over the Atlantic, the sea spray in his face, he’d leaned so far over the rail into the wind that a passing sailor had cried out in alarm.
How odd. He’d forgotten that exhilaration. How long since he’d last felt it? Its diminishment had probably been inevitable. In those early years, he’d boarded ships for sheer curiosity about the destination. Now he looked at a map and saw no names unfamiliar to him. His travels had become a matter of routine and obligation.
The sticky strands of fatigue seemed to twine together and constrict around his brain. He set his teeth against a profound tug of exhaustion. Think. Answer her.
But his sluggish mind was still stuck on the other matter. How had he come to the point where a week in Paris struck him as nothing more than an irritating delay between various and equally irritating business commitments?
He had a brief flash of a hamster on a wheel. A caged hamster. A hamster in a cage. Round and round and round it ran.
“Won’t you answer me?” she asked softly.
He took a long breath. “My apologies. I’m . . . a bit tired. Is it wicked to live like this . . .”