Page 83 of The Dandelion Princess
“Would you stop if I asked you to?”
My eyelashes flicker. I wonder if there’s anything I wouldn’t do for Marc. I work my fingers under his heavy palms and his hands slip from my waist, trying to keep some kind of distance.“What are you working on tonight? Seong, Han Heyden, or Lindenholm?”
He digs into his bag, powers up a tablet, and settles into the sofa. “Come here,” he says, stretching one arm out. “I want your opinion.” I slide into the crook of his shoulder, slotting in as smoothly as a new graphics card into a motherboard. He scoots me closer and presses an absent-minded kiss on my temple. I weave my arms over my stomach to keep myself from holding him.
“It’s Alix,” he says. “She approached me about turning part of Lindenholm into a boutique hotel. Five suites in all.”
I turn my face up to him to find our lips a breath away. I want to kiss him as lightly and easily as he kisses me, but he laid out a deal with guardrails and guidelines to protect himself from the danger of taking this further. To protect himself from me. So, I train my eyes on the screen, frozen on a slide deck. “Do you need the money?”
He turns my face up and takes the kiss I held back, slowly, thoroughly, until the voice of warning in my head drops to a barely audible whisper and my skin whispers like a field of grass bending in the wind.
He lifts his head and clears his throat. “Ammaleft the estate in good shape if we carry on exactly as we have been. I want Lindenholm to be self-supporting, and the numbers don’t leave room for risks.”
“So you tell her no.”
“Look at this proposal,” he says, scrolling up and down a slide deck full of footnotes and pie charts.
“Is this Tom’s work?” I ask.
“She says he only provided her a list of things any good investor would want to know. She collected the materials herself.”
Alix’s intellectual life reminds me of Clara’s sorority sisters—girls who did their projects with hot pink glitter pens, but still had their flowcharts locked down. I take the tablet and skim through the proposal. “Cons?”
He wraps a finger around one of my curls, rubbing it against his lower lip in thought, and flips to slide seven. Alix hasn’t been sparing about the costs of her scheme. Her vision doesn’t include a few AKAE bunkbeds thrown together on a weekend.
“It complicates the estate,” he murmurs. “We’d have to add an actual carpark instead of the temporary one we’re putting together for the concert. Then there’s the installation of a professional kitchen… Here’s the footnote detailing local regulations. They’re not insignificant.”
“Lawyers can help you manage that.”
“She included the name of a local legal firm.” His hand drops over a hip and he wedges me closer. “But we’d have strangers coming and going. Weddings every weekend all summer…”
“In a sliver of the estate.” I brush my finger across the tablet, taking in the bigger picture. “She’s capable of doing this, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s smart that she wants to work out the kinks by starting in the walled garden,” I say, “adding a suite or two as she goes.” I nudge him. “It’s only the east wing. There’s nothing really important over there.”
“There are the woods,” he says.
My cheeks flame and he catches my chin, planting another slow, deliberate kiss on my lips. I look down again. Marc is in a mood tonight, and I fear California won’t be far away enough to ravel up the tangled threads between us and snip each one.
I clear my throat. “Pros?” I ask.
“Ammawants to relocate to Seong full time. There’s an old friend who wants her to stay. He—”
“He?” I grin.
“He’s helping her navigate government agencies, getting aid into the right hands.” Marc is happy for his mother, I can hear that, but he’s uncertain, too.
“Tom is based in New York,” I say. Where does that leave Marc? Alone. Chained to his ancestors in Sondmark.
“Alix says he’s willing to relocate.” Marc chews on his lip.
“Handsel could use an investment banker of Tom’s caliber.”
He nods. “Alix would be close. Her children would be close. I wouldn’t be running this place by myself.”
A hard knot forms in my throat, thinking of baptisms. Of flying into Handsel to stand at a font next to Marc as godparents, a tiny baby between us. Of Marc having his own babies after I’ve gone to California to enjoy endless MangaCon and the weightlessness of immense wealth.
I tuck a hand against his chest and think long thoughts about the path that led me here and the one that promises to lead me away again. I trace a button, flicking the edge of it with my thumb, and feel the steady beat of his heart. “Why don’t you say yes?”
The button slips through the hole—an accident—and he does it back up. His laugh shakes through me and he taps the back of my hand, trapping it with his own. “No scope creep.”
