After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(53)

Adrian sighed. “Let’s pretend bears hunt. It’s probably true. Mr. Namdak, maybe it’s trying to catch your dream-star-fish thing?”

He could feel the excitement growing in the room as they worked, sketching over each other.

“That’s it.” Mr. Namdak smiled, stepping back. “That’s it. We’ve done it.”

There were handshakes all around. Adrian stood back and looked, and thought, and…

“No,” he said, to everyone’s groans. “We haven’t. Not quite. First, we’ve promised an eight plate series. What we have here is one plate at best. And it’s not even fully fleshed out.”

“An utter tyrant,” Mrs. Song said. “We are employed by a tyrant. And here it is, ten at night.”

“Second,” Adrian said, “I don’t love the sketch of the bear cub. I’m not sure what’s wrong, but I want more of a sense of play here. This is a cub, not a full-grown animal.”

“Hmm.”

“And third, we have this cub catching the—dream-star, whatever it is—on the first plate. That can’t be right. It’s an eight plate series; it ought to tell a full story. You don’t catch your dreams on the first try, after all.”

“Lots of people do.” Mrs. Song rubbed her eyes. “But I suppose I see your point.”

“Still, we have a direction.” Adrian smiled. “We have something that is almost a preliminary design. And this is going to be amazing once we’ve finished. Enough for the night.”

“We couldn’t have done it without you.”

Adrian just stared at Mr. Namdak and shook his head. “You literally could have done exactly that. You’re the ones drawing.”

“Oh, stop being modest and go home,” Mr. Namdak said. “Don’t you have something about an annulment to think about, too?”

All thought of bears and designs dropped from Adrian’s head. Home. God, home. He had a thousand things to do. The designs needed more work tomorrow, and he still had his uncle to please and an annulment to plan.

Well.

He sighed. Good thing there was the rest of the night.



* * *



Adrian had expected to find his cottage dark when he returned, and from the outside, it appeared that way. But as he was hanging up his hat and coat, he noticed a dim glow from the study.

Bemused, he drifted down the hall.

Camilla sat at a table, a book in front of her. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She bit her lip and found a strand, worrying it between two fingers as she frowned at the book in front of her. The lamp painted her face in gold and brown—a tiger’s palette, he thought.

“Hello, tigress,” he said aloud.

She jumped; her hands flew in the air. The pen she’d been holding landed halfway across the table, splattering ink.

“My God.” She glared at him. “You scared me.”

“I scared you?” He couldn’t help but smile. “You’re the tiger. Why should I scare you?”

Her eyes narrowed at him. “Clearly you need to sleep.”

“Clearly,” he replied, “I need to do nothing of the kind. Why are you still awake?”

Their eyes met again. He was tired, tired enough that he couldn’t quite summon the willpower to politely look away, as he should. Tired enough that he let his gaze wander down the swell of her breasts to her waist, down past the smooth curve of her hips. She wasn’t wearing shoes, and he could see her ankles. They looked like bronze in the dim light of the lamp.

“Your feet must be freezing,” he said, and that made him think of kneeling on the floor in front of her, taking her foot in his hand…

To warm them, of course. Nothing more.

“Oh, my feet rarely get cold.”

Ah. Maybe he was not purely selfless, then, because that image didn’t go away.

She gave him a smile. “It’s one of my best traits.”

He couldn’t touch her. It wouldn’t be fair to her, dependent on him for everything. It wouldn’t be fair to him, because if he touched her, he would have to stop. He’d known up until now that he thought her attractive. He’d known that he liked her. She was pretty and kind and clever, but she was also legally married to him and no matter how lovely she was, he didn’t want that state to persist.

He couldn’t touch her. But he wanted to. He wanted it with an ache that was…probably just weariness?

Right. That was it. Weariness. He’d sleep it off and it would all be better in the morning.

Except he had too much to do to sleep.

“Camilla.” He said her name just to say her name.

“Mmm?”

Question. He needed to ask her a question. “You didn’t tell me why you were still awake.”

She blinked at him. “Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? You said we’d have to write questions for Mrs. Martin, to send out tomorrow morning?” She gestured to the paper. “I’ve been doing them.”

He frowned. He looked at the paper, then at her, then back at the paper. He was tired, and…

“I should do that.”

“Too late.” She smiled. “I’m almost finished.”

“You don’t really care about the annulment the way I do,” he told her, “and it doesn’t seem fair that you should have to, under the circumstances… It’s not really a bother. I can handle one more thing.”