A Lily Among Thorns(24)

“Does he use French holes?”

She stared at him. She hated to admit that Solomon knew of a perversion of which she had never heard, but there was nothing for it. “French holes?”

“On his corset,” Solomon said impatiently. “You know—most use ordinary buttonholes, but some use a sort of eyelet made of ivory or bone. You can lace them tighter that way.”

She blinked. Then she bit the back of her hand, shaking with silent, helpless laughter. “I never noticed,” she admitted, when she could speak again.

He sniffed scornfully, but his eyes were warm.

She realized she was still holding her spoon, full of almond-pear filling. She put it in her mouth, and her eyes widened. “Oh.”

He smiled at her. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he said in a low, warm voice, and she immediately pictured him saying the same thing in quite another context.

She eyed him suspiciously. Had he meant that to sound indecent? He blinked innocently at her, and she decided that he had. “It’ll do,” she said. “Did you know that Sir Percy Blakeney is angling to be sent to France as a spy?”

“No!” Solomon’s whole face lit up with glee.

The prince’s eyes popped. “I say, Dewington, these are your Mrs. Jones’s pear-almond tartlets! I’ve been trying to buy the recipe from her for decades! What did you pay, Lady Serena?”

The look of dawning horror on Dewington’s face as he realized exactly how that recipe had made its way into Serena’s kitchen would be forever precious to her. “Not a farthing, Your Highness,” she said.

“Then how—no one knows the recipe but Dewington’s cook!”

Serena met Dewington’s eyes. The man was fidgeting in his seat and twitching slightly. She smiled slowly. “I think Mrs. Jones must have confided the recipe to Lord Dewington’s sister.” All eyes turned to Dewington, who gritted his teeth manfully. His wife looked ready to sink into the floor.

“Good Lord!” Sir Percy exclaimed. “Your nevvy’s working in the kitchens!”

Lord Petersham shook his head. “There but for the grace of God go I. Will Hathaway was my Latin tutor too, and my sister would have run off with him in a trice if he’d asked her. Handsome devil. Heard the boy looks just like him.”

“He has my sister’s eyes,” Dewington said. No one seemed to quite know what to say to that.

Ordinarily, Serena would have entered the day’s earnings and expenses in the books before bed, but she was exhausted. Ordinarily, she would have taken the back stairs to the first floor to avoid running into guests in the hallway, but—“she was exhausted” wouldn’t wash as a reason for that, would it?

She would have done the books before bed, and she would have taken the back stairs, only Solomon was heading for the public rooms and the main staircase right now (it didn’t seem to have occurred to him that the back way was faster from the kitchens), and she had fallen into step with him without thinking about it—without wanting to think about it. She compromised by not speaking and going over the night’s numbers in her head, instead. The silence felt oddly companionable, and yet oddly charged.

Outside his room, he stopped. She could have kept walking, but instead she stopped with him. “Thank you for your help today,” she said, meaning to sound businesslike and sounding grateful instead.

He smiled and ducked his head. “You’re welcome.” Was it her imagination, or was his low, rough voice a little lower and rougher than usual? He raised his head and met her eyes, and she thought that yes, it must have been, because he was giving her a low, rough look.

That doesn’t even make sense, she thought. A look can’t be low and rough. And then it didn’t matter, because he was leaning in to kiss her.

She took a step backward, and he missed. But instead of giving up, as she wanted—expected—feared—he gave her a reproachful look and tried again. His lips brushed against hers softly, gently, as if it were her first time. It wasn’t her first time. It was her thousandth time, her millionth, and she had never, in her whole life, felt anything like this. She felt as if she were a neat page in a ledger and he’d spilled ink across her. She could feel it spreading over her skin, soaking in, making her messy and vivid and irrevocably destroyed.

He gasped against her mouth (when had they opened their mouths? the world tasted like almonds and pears) and put his hands on her hips, turning them so they fell against the door to his room. She could feel the carved wood against her back with more immediacy than she’d felt anything in ages. Someone could see them, a guest could walk by and see them. She cared about that. She should care about that.