“Apparently he couldn’t wait,” Sophie remarked. “I wonder why.”
Camille’s fingers fumbled with the hat’s ribbons, but even she could see how prettily her gray eyes sparkled, how becomingly her skin flushed. She bit her lip and smiled.
“You look absolutely delicious. He will devour you like a pastry.”
“Hush!” Camille swatted at Sophie with a fan. “Adèle, would you let him know I’ll be there in a moment?”
* * *
When she came downstairs, the doors to the courtyard stood open. Lazare was leaning against the door of his carriage. His beautiful face was turned away, but Camille could never mistake his tall shape nor his elegant, lanky ease, the gloss of his long black hair. Lazare being in the country at Sablebois hadn’t agreed with Camille, but it’d certainly agreed with him—his skin had deepened to a bronzy brown across his cheekbones, as if the sun now lived inside him. His tricorne hat tucked negligently under his arm and head tipped back, Lazare seemed to be absorbed by a flock of swallows swooping across the cloudy sky. The way he looked at things made her want to see what he saw, or, she thought, be seen by him.
Etiquette said to be coy, but she didn’t care. Instead she ran across the cobbled court. Five steps away, then three. Two. One—and he turned and pulled her to him.
Her heart was pounding ridiculously fast. “You’ve returned,” she said—and instantly felt foolish for saying this most obvious thing. With him in front of her, she was suddenly shy.
“Seeing you, I understand why each moment in the country felt like an eternity.” Slowly, he kissed the back of each of her hands, one by one, before releasing them. It would have been chaste, not violating any of etiquette’s rules, except for the way he looked at her. Hot, as if his gaze could kindle flames. The brush of his lips thrilled—a hand kiss from Lazare was much, much more than such a small thing had a right to be.
“Oh,” breathed Camille. Why go anywhere else, when he was here? Absently, she straightened a fold of his cravat, her fingers grazing his skin. “Do you think … would Rosier really miss us? Could we not perhaps sneak away?”
“There is nothing I would rather do,” he said in a way that made her feel like she was flying, “though he would certainly be disappointed. But now that I’m returned to Paris, nothing will induce me to be parted from you.”
Her fingers curled against the warm skin of his neck, she imagined a different autumn in Paris. Not the one that she’d been living, disturbed by the house’s magic and dissatisfied by her destiny.
Instead, it could be this.
She pulled herself back to the moment. “And your parents? Are they well?”
She remembered them from the opera—his bejeweled stepmother’s disdain; his distant father, a pale inverse of Lazare. Lazare’s warm coloring and inky hair came from his father’s first wife, an Indian from Pondichéry, whom he’d met while visiting his family’s spice plantations. When she’d died of malaria, he and a very young Lazare had returned to France. Whatever India had been to his father, it was no more. That door was firmly closed, even to Lazare. His father insisted, Lazare had told her, that he be more French and less Indian. It hurt and bewildered him.
At the mention of his parents, a muscle in Lazare’s jaw tightened. “Well enough. Some angry peasants had threatened to burn down a neighbor’s château. They’d managed to work themselves into a fright by the time I arrived. Anywhere, they said, would be better than Sablebois.”
Lazare loved Sablebois, she knew. “They’re not thinking of becoming émigrés and leaving France?” After the storming of the Bastille last month, some noble families, following the lead of the king’s brother, had fled to England or Austria. She couldn’t imagine turning her back on her home, and she knew Lazare felt the same.
“They haven’t gone quite that far,” he replied. “But they did decide it was safer in Paris, where at least they could rely on the police. Which means they returned with me and are now settling in.”
She had the feeling both she and Lazare would have preferred them to stay in the country. “You did tell them that it’s hardly better here?”
“They wouldn’t listen.” One corner of his mouth rose up. “Perhaps they wish to keep an eye on me.”
“Why would they do that?” she teased. “What secrets have you been keeping?”