my face that has changed; it’s the way I see the world. I’ve seen things that have permanently altered me. I’ve done things that have distorted my vision. I’ve crossed lines and tried to find them again, only to discover that all my lines have disappeared. And without lines, everything blurs together.”
His voice was so heartsick, his words so heavy, that I could only gaze back at him, moved to tears and silenced by his sadness.
“But when I look at you, I still see Anne,” he whispered. “Your lines are sharp and clean. The faces around you are faded and dull—they’ve been faded and dull for years now—but you . . . you are perfectly clear.”
“I am not her, Thomas,” I said, needing him to believe me and not daring to make him understand. “Right now, I almost wish I were. But I am not that Anne.”
“No. You’re right. You’ve changed. You don’t burn my eyes like you once did. Now, I don’t have to look away.”
My breath caught at his confession—the sound ricocheted between us—and he leaned in to gently free it, brushing my mouth with his. His lips were so soft and shy, they slipped away without letting me greet them. I followed, frantic to call them back, and he hesitated, forehead pressed to mine, hands on my shoulders, letting my bated breath extend an invitation before he accepted it and returned. His hands slid around to my back as his mouth lowered and stayed, letting me feel the warmth and the press of his kiss, so real, so present, so impossible.
Our mouths moved in a halo of swollen caresses, a brush and a slide, a nudge and a pause, reveling in the weight of lips against lips. Over and over, and then again. Plying and persuading, urging and unraveling, until the pounding of my heart trembled in my mouth and quivered in my belly. Need, need, need, it panted. More, more, more, it roared. The hound of Culann, baying a warning at the door. We both drew back in breathless wonder, eyes wide, hands clinging, lips parted.
For a moment we simply stared at one another, inches apart, our bodies charged and howling. And then we widened the distance, releasing each other. The clanging in my chest and the rushing of my blood was slower to ebb.
“Good night, Countess,” Thomas murmured.
“Good night, Setanta,” I said, and a smile ghosted past his lips as he turned and left my room. I was drifting off to sleep when I realized he’d never demanded an explanation about the truce.
The next few weeks, I moved in a sort of haze, straddling reality and an existence that was both illogical and absolutely undeniable. I stopped questioning what had happened to me—what would happen to me—and accepted each day as it came. When one dreams terrible dreams, part of the unconscious mind reassures that wakefulness will summon reality and banish the nightmare. But it was not a terrible dream. It had become a sweet sanctuary. And though that stubborn voice still whispered that I would wake, I stopped caring if I slept. I accepted my predicament with the imagination of my childhood, lost in a world I had created and fearful that the story would come to an end and that I would return to my previous life, where Eoin and Ireland and Thomas Smith no longer existed.
Thomas had not kissed me again, and I had not given him any indication that I wanted to be kissed. We’d established something that we were not ready to explore. Declan was gone, and Anne was gone. At least the Anne he thought I’d been. But Thomas was still caught between the memory of them and the prospect of me, and I was snagged between a future that was my past, and a past that might be my future. So we settled into an ever-narrowing circle of discovery, talking of nothing and everything, of this and that, of now and then. I asked questions, and he freely answered. He asked questions, and I tried not to lie. I was happy in a way that made no sense, content in a manner that called into question my sanity and surrounded by people who made me glad to be alive, if alive is what I was.
Thomas took me with him once or twice a week or when he thought he would need an extra set of hands, and I’d done my best to provide them. I’d been raised by