Page 88 of The Shadow Key

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Whatever for?’

Miss Carew lifts her shoulders in a shrug. ‘It’s only that it is a terrible thing, to have an unhappy childhood.’

‘Yours was unhappy?’

A beat. ‘Yes.’

She looks so sad, so wistful. She truly is so very beautiful, Henry thinks, and until this moment he did not realise quite how much he yearned for her. A soft breeze loosens a long red curl from her bonnet, and with it, the scent of lavender. Very gently Henry leans over, tucks it back. He hears her breath hitch, sees the flutter of her dark eyelashes, and he cannot help doing what he does next. Henry cups her soft round cheek with the palm of his hand, draws her lips to his.

It is a soft kiss, quick, barely lasting above a few seconds, but in that instant he feels within him a deep and lustful longing. He wants to press her close, to have her kiss him back, but already she has pulled away.

‘No,’ she whispers, pressing her fingers against the bow of her lips. ‘No.’

Henry watches her, breathless with disappointment, his hand still on her cheek.

‘Rowena, I—’

‘Don’t, Dr Talbot.’

She pushes his hand away, and he sees in its absence how the pillow of her cheek has spotted pink. Her eyes have shifted from brown to that rich amber he finds so fascinating and Henry thinks, then, she has never looked lovelier or more tempting.

‘Please,’ he says, voice thick with passion. ‘Call me Henry.’

‘No. I cannot. I won’t,’ Rowena says – and it is Rowena to him, for Miss Carew simply will not do – and looks determinedly away across the valley again.

Henry wills his body to calm itself. It is some moments before he can speak again.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘That was wrong of me,’ and in reply Rowena lets out her breath.

‘We barely know each other.’

‘No, I suppose we don’t. I want us to, though. So very much.’

Still she does not look at him. Will not, it seems.

‘You’ve been very kind,’ Rowena says quietly, and Henry hears a tremble in her voice. ‘But what you want from me I cannot give.’

‘What is it you think I want from you?’

A little laugh escapes her. ‘What all men want.’

His chest tightens at the implication. Has Rowena been with another man? Did he wrong her? Henry wants to tell her he is nothing like whoever it is she thinks of, to convince her she is safe with him, but Rowena is opening her reticule, is removing the glass vial he gave her from its depths, and the moment has passed.

Gravely she holds it between them. A spool of sunlight pierces the grey glass, casting her chin with delicate rainbows.

‘You were right,’ Rowena says softly. ‘This is not laudanum.’

It takes Henry a moment to compose himself, to apply himself to the change of subject. He lets out a calming breath, and she pulls the gold Turk’s-head stopper from the bottle’s neck.

‘It’s a clever concoction; it took me some time to identify the ingredients. I had to refer to my own stores and replicate it.’

Rowena passes the bottle over, and Henry takes a sniff.

‘Careful,’ she warns. ‘It works best by ingestion, but I cannot vouch for its potency when inhaled too deeply.’

‘What is it?’

---