The first thing that woke her was the light.

London in July did not rise gently. Even softened by the thin hotel curtains, the morning sun came through in a pale, steady brightness that filled the room whether anyone inside it was ready or not.

Noelle stirred under the duvet.

For a moment she did not open her eyes. Her body felt heavy in that rare, luxurious way that only happened after very deep sleep—the kind that arrived suddenly and took the whole night with it. She shifted slightly, drawing one knee higher under the covers, and felt the faint pull of wrinkled fabric around her legs.

Then the light pressed again against her eyelids, persistent.

She opened them.

The room was washed in quiet morning.

Sunlight had found the narrow space between the curtains and was pouring in across the desk, catching on the glass kettle and the porcelain tea cups they had left there the night before. Dust motes floated slowly in the beam of it. The air looked warm, almost golden, though the room itself still held the cool softness of early hours.

For several seconds Noelle simply lay there, blinking.

Her thoughts came back slowly.

The forum.

London.

The hotel.

And then—

She turned her head.

Charles Welles lay beside her.

The memory of the night returned all at once.

He had not moved much since sleep had taken him. He still lay stretched awkwardly on top of the covers, long legs angled slightly toward the edge of the mattress as though he had never intended to stay long enough to need comfort. One arm rested beneath his head; the other lay loosely curled across his chest.

He had never taken off his shirt.

The sleeves were still rolled once at the wrist from when he had loosened them sometime after midnight. His jacket and tie were folded with almost unconscious neatness over the back of the chair. Even asleep he looked improbably tidy.

Sunlight reached him only partially, touching the side of his face and the line of his throat.

In it he looked younger.

That surprised her more than anything.

At school Charles always carried a certain severity about him—not cold exactly, but controlled in a way that made other people instinctively careful around him. Even his stillness seemed deliberate, as though he were measuring the room without appearing to do so.

But here, asleep in the quiet of her small hotel room, the tension had loosened.

The crease between his brows had softened. His mouth, usually held in that restrained near-line she knew from classrooms and assemblies, had fallen slightly open with sleep.

He looked—

not harmless exactly.

But boyish.

Noelle watched him for a while.

The night returned to her in fragments.

The corridor.

His voice—quiet, precise—telling the man to let her go.

The walk by the river.

The strange ease of talking once they had begun.

Tea.

The chipped cup.

The ridiculous amount of sugar she had put in hers and the way he had watched it happen with polite, silent disbelief.

She pressed her lips together to stop a small smile.

Then the hours that followed.

The long conversation that had somehow unfolded between them as though it had been waiting for years to do so. The careful way he had taken off his jacket. The moment he had loosened his tie and looked unexpectedly younger for it. The stories. The questions. The quiet.

And finally—

The bed.

She had not meant to fall asleep.

They were only going to lie down for a minute. Just until the exhaustion passed. Just until the room stopped spinning slightly with how late it had become.

But then they had been talking more softly, their voices slipping into the kind of quiet that belonged only to late hours.

And sometime after that—

Sleep.

Noelle’s gaze drifted down.

Their hands were still tangled together between them on top of the coverlet.

She hadn’t realized that.

Her fingers were curled loosely between his, exactly as they must have been when sleep found them. His hand was larger and rougher than she had expected the night before—callused across the palm and the base of his fingers from years of rowing—but warm now in the soft heat of the room.

She remembered noticing that too.

The roughness.

It had surprised her.

Charles Welles—with his immaculate jackets and terrifying reputation and perfect exam scores—had hands that felt like someone who had spent years gripping oars in cold river water.

Noelle shifted slightly.

The movement tugged faintly at their joined hands.

Charles stirred.

It was subtle at first. A small tightening of his fingers. A breath drawn a little deeper than the last. Then his shoulders shifted against the mattress and he made a low sound—something halfway between a sigh and a protest at the return of consciousness.

His eyelids flickered.

For a second he stared straight up at the ceiling without comprehension.

Sunlight had moved further across the room now, and the brightness made him squint slightly as the world assembled itself again around him.

Then he turned his head.

He saw her.

Recognition arrived almost immediately.

So did memory.

Charles blinked once more and closed his eyes briefly again as if hoping the situation might reorganize itself into something simpler.

When they opened again, he exhaled slowly through his nose and said, hoarsely:

“…fuck.”

The word was quiet and deeply sleep-rough.

Noelle pressed the sheet over her mouth to muffle the laugh that escaped anyway.

Charles pushed one hand through his hair and attempted to sit up. Halfway through the movement his shoulders protested violently enough that he stopped and fell back against the pillow again with a faint wince.

“I didn’t mean to—”

He rubbed once at his face.

“I mean—I wasn’t—”

“No,” Noelle murmured, still smiling into the sheet. “Neither did I.”

Charles glanced down at the bed as if verifying that the evidence remained exactly as incriminating as it appeared.

The twisted duvet.

His shoes neatly beside the chair.

Her hair a mess from sleep.

Their hands still linked.

He looked back at her.

“I’m sorry.”

The apology came automatically, though whether it was for releasing her hand or for holding it, she wasn’t sure.

Noelle lowered the sheet.

“I’m not mad.”

Charles blinked.

“You’re not?”

“No.”

She shifted slightly onto her back and looked toward the window. The sunlight had climbed higher now, brightening the ceiling.

“What time is it?” he asked.

Noelle reached for the clock on the bedside table.

“Almost nine.”

Charles stared at the ceiling for a moment as the information settled.

Nine.

His brothers had almost certainly returned to Belgravia hours ago.

Thomas would have noticed he’d vanished. Edward too.

Julian might assume something scandalous and be delighted.

Frederick would probably assume nothing at all and file the event quietly for later inquiry.

Strangely, none of that seemed urgent.

“You can stay a little longer,” Noelle said after a moment.

Charles turned his head toward her.

The offer was made with the same careful gentleness she had used the night before—as though she understood that asking too strongly might break something delicate in the air between them.

“It’s still early,” she added.

Charles looked back toward the window.

The light said otherwise, but the city itself still felt quiet. The room had that suspended calm particular to late morning in small hotels—breakfast finished, departures not yet begun.

He hesitated.

Then he nodded once.

“Alright.”

He shifted slightly, settling back into the pillow again exactly where he had been before.

Still careful not to take up too much space.

They lay quietly for a few moments after that.

The sunlight moved slowly across the wall. Somewhere far below a car door shut and someone laughed faintly in the street.

Noelle turned her head toward him again.

Charles was staring up at the ceiling with the expression of someone still negotiating the return of consciousness. The exhaustion from the day before lingered visibly in him. Even the act of lying still seemed to require effort.

She reached across the small space between them and touched the sleeve of his shirt.

“You alright?”

His eyes shifted immediately to where her fingers rested.

Then to her face.

He studied her for a second longer than the question required—as if confirming again that the night had not been invented by sleep.

Her hair was tangled from the pillow. One cheek still carried the faint crease of the duvet. The sunlight made her eyes look darker than they had the night before.

Something in his expression softened.

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

He paused.

Then, after a moment:

“I am now.”

For a little while after that, neither of them moved.

The sunlight crept slowly farther across the floorboards, catching on the leg of the desk and the porcelain cups still abandoned beside the kettle. Somewhere down in the street a van rolled past over the damp road, its sound softened by height and glass into part of the city’s late-morning murmur.

Charles eventually sat up.

The movement was careful, as though his body had not yet fully decided it belonged to him again. He pushed himself upright by degrees, one hand braced against the mattress, and immediately felt the protest of muscles that had stiffened in the night. A faint wince crossed his face before he could stop it. He reached back and rubbed a hand over the nape of his neck, then lower, across one shoulder blade, as if pressure might undo some of the damage.

Rowing fatigue lived deep in him even on good days. But this was something heavier than ordinary training soreness. Henley had been yesterday. The race itself had stripped him clean. Now the cost of it had arrived properly: the ache laid thick across his shoulders and upper back, the stiffness through his ribs and trunk, the dull pull in his forearms, the tired, overused heaviness of hands that had spent years closing around oars and had given everything they had the afternoon before. Even his legs felt wrong—tight through the hips, tired along the thighs, as though the effort still sat in them.

And then there was everything that had come after. The formal dinner. The bar. The walk through the London night. The hours in this room, talking long past sense into something softer and stranger than either of them had meant to allow. The narrow bed had offered more rest than he would have thought possible and less comfort than his body had any right to forgive. He had slept, yes. But he had slept half-dressed, half-curled, careful even in unconsciousness not to crowd her.

Now the accumulated fatigue felt carved into him.

“I should—” he began, then stopped.

Noelle watched him from the pillow.

“The bathroom’s through there,” she said, nodding toward the narrow door near the desk. Then, after the smallest pause, because she could already hear the awkwardness gathering and wanted to spare him some of it: “I think they left spare things in there. Toothbrush and all that.”

Charles looked at her.

For a second he seemed almost absurdly relieved by the practicality of the information.

“Right,” he said.

He stood.

His shirt, which had already been creased from the night before, was now thoroughly wrinkled, the cotton marked by sleep at the waist and along the sleeves. The top button still hung undone where he had loosened it in the early hours, and one cuff had worked itself lower than the other. He glanced down, almost unconsciously, at his wrists.

Both cufflinks were still there.

That, strangely, seemed to steady him.

Noelle saw the glance and had to press her mouth together to stop a smile.

Charles noticed that too, unfortunately.

“They’re still on,” he said, as though some explanation were necessary.

“I can see that.”

A faint look—half embarrassment, half reproach at being observed so exactly—crossed his face. Then he crossed to the bathroom, the wrinkled shirt still on his back and the undone collar hanging slightly open at the throat.

The door shut softly behind him.

The bathroom beyond was small but elegant, tiled in pale stone that still held the coolness of the morning. Light fell from a shaded wall sconce above the mirror, soft rather than bright, catching on the chrome fittings and the glass shelf above the basin. Everything in the room had been chosen with the sort of discreet expense that asked not to be admired too openly: thick white towels folded beneath the sink, a narrow tray of hotel toiletries beside the soap dish, the tap polished to a dull shine.

And woven through the hotel’s quiet order was Noelle’s.

Her things had been arranged with the same unobtrusive neatness as the rest of the room. A lavender hair ribbon lay squarely beside the basin. Her face wash and a small bottle of lavender lotion stood together near the mirror, aligned almost unconsciously. A folded washcloth rested beside them. On the edge of the shelf the hotel had left its own little offering of spare conveniences—wrapped soap, sewing kit, shower cap, two small bottles, and a toothbrush still sealed in translucent paper.

Charles stood at the sink for a moment without moving.

The bathroom had the odd, suspended quiet of rooms entered before one’s thoughts had fully caught up. Behind the door, the rest of the suite existed in softened suggestion only: the shape of the bed, the sunlight, Noelle beyond it. He could almost feel the fact of her through the wood, not as sound but as presence.

He reached first for the cufflinks.

The gesture was automatic, born of habit more than vanity. He worked them loose one at a time and set them carefully on the narrow ledge beneath the mirror. Gold flashed briefly in the weak light before going still. Then he unbuttoned the cuffs themselves and rolled the sleeves another turn higher, exposing his forearms.

After that he hesitated only a second before unfastening the rest of the shirt.

It came off more slowly than it should have, the cotton clinging faintly at the shoulders where the night’s warmth and sleep had left it rumpled. He drew it free and hung it over the towel bar behind him.

The sight of it there—creased, slept-in, indisputable—gave him an odd inward jolt.

He had slept in Noelle Yoo’s hotel room.

Not in the abstract. Not as a possibility he might later doubt or romanticize into something vaguer than it had been. The shirt on the rail was proof enough. So were the cufflinks on the sink. So, if he were honest, was the unfamiliar looseness still somewhere under his ribs.

Charles braced both hands lightly on the edge of the basin and leaned forward.

His own hands looked harsh against the pale porcelain.

The calluses stood out more clearly in the morning light—thickened across the palms and at the base of his fingers, the skin roughened by years of oars and river water. He had never thought much about them. They were useful hands. Rower’s hands. That was all.

But now, with them spread on the sink before him, he felt again the brief, disorienting contrast of the night before.

Noelle’s hand had been so much smaller in his.

Finer-boned. Softer than he had expected. Not weak—there had been answer in it when her fingers curled between his—but soft in a way that had made him instantly more careful.

And she had felt the roughness.

He knew she had.

He had felt the moment of it when his thumb moved over her hand and the callused skin at the pad of it must have told its own story at once. For one absurd, mortifying second in the dark he had thought only: God.

Yet she had not pulled away.

If anything, her fingers had tightened.

The memory came back to him now with such clarity that he went still over the basin, his gaze fixed on his own hands as though they belonged to someone slightly less self-possessed than he had been yesterday.

After a moment, he lifted his eyes.

The mirror gave him back a version of himself he was not used to seeing.

He looked tired, certainly. His dark chestnut hair had been flattened strangely at one side, dark at the temples where sleep and water had begun to mix. A faint shadow of strain lived beneath his eyes. His shoulders still held the clean, hard fatigue of the race; the skin across his palms and fingers was roughened and faintly abraded in the places the oars had worked most insistently over years.

But what unsettled him was not the disarray.

It was that he looked so unmistakably young.

Fifteen. Bare-shouldered in a boutique hotel bathroom in St. James’s, blinking into the soft hotel mirror light with his heart crowded by something too tender to examine directly.

He turned on the cold tap.

The water ran sharp and bright into the porcelain bowl. He cupped it in both hands and splashed it over his face once, then again, harder the second time, as though force might restore some proper boundary between the night and the morning after it.

Droplets ran down from his jaw to his throat and along the line of his collarbone. He reached for one of the towels and pressed it against his eyes.

The cotton smelled faintly of starch.

When he lowered it, the mirror had not improved matters.

He looked no more composed than before. If anything, the cold water had only heightened the strange clarity of everything. The sunlight. The lateness. The fact that Noelle was in the next room, probably sitting on the bed with her hair still loose from sleep, waiting without quite waiting.

His gaze dropped to the wrapped toothbrush on the sink.

After a moment he picked it up, tore the paper open, and set it beside the little tube of hotel toothpaste. The ordinariness of the act steadied him in a way almost nothing else could have. The cap twisted off. The mint smell rose clean and medicinal in the small room. He brushed with a sort of grim concentration, one hand braced again on the sink, as though the mechanical familiarity of it might keep his thoughts from straying too far.

It did not help much.

He kept seeing fragments instead.

Noelle’s hand in his.

Noelle’s face in the first weak corridor light when she had smiled at him and said she’d like him to walk her back.

The look on her face this morning when she woke and found him still there.

He spat, rinsed the toothbrush, rinsed his mouth, and stood very still again with both hands flat on the sink.

From the other side of the door came the faintest sound: the rustle of movement in the bedroom, fabric against sheets, perhaps the brush of someone crossing to the window or lifting something from the chair.

He imagined, against his will, the shape of her moving about the room.

Then immediately resented himself for it.

Charles dried his face more carefully this time, then reached for his shirt from the towel rail. The cotton was cool now where it had hung for a minute in the bathroom air. He slipped it back on, the fabric settling across his shoulders with the familiar drag of day being resumed. He did not bother fastening it fully. One button was enough. Then another. The collar remained open.

He looked at the cufflinks on the ledge.

For a brief second he considered leaving the cuffs undone.

That felt, absurdly, too revealing.

So he fastened them again, one by one, though more slowly than he would have in any other room in any other city in any other morning of his life. By the time he finished, some measure of order had returned to him. Not enough to disguise what the night had done, but enough to let him step back into the room without looking entirely as if he had wandered there from a dream.

Before opening the door, he paused once more and glanced at himself in the mirror.

Still young.

Still tired.

Still altered in some quiet way he did not yet understand.

Then he opened the door and stepped back into the sunlight.

The first thing he noticed was the faint scent of lavender.

It lay lightly in the room now, no longer the sharper hint of soap and steam that had lingered after she first moved about it in the morning, but something softer and warmer, caught in the folds of fabric and the air turned by sunlight.

Then he saw Noelle.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, already dressed now in a clean blouse and skirt, one stockinged foot tucked slightly beneath the other as she drew a brush slowly through the ends of her hair. The morning had reordered her, but not entirely. Sleep still lingered in the looseness of a few dark strands near her face, and in the quietness with which she sat there, as though she too had not yet wholly caught up to the fact of the day.

She glanced up when he entered.

For one brief second something uncertain moved across her face.

Not fear. Not awkwardness exactly. More the quick, unguarded question of someone trying to determine which version of a person has returned to them after a door has closed between one moment and the next.

The boy from school, with his careful reserve and unreadable silences.

The boy from last night, whose hand had curled around hers in the dark as though it had always known how.

The boy who spoke little, but when he did, meant it.

Charles stopped just inside the room.

His hair was still damp at the temples. The open collar of his shirt made him look less finished than he normally did, and something about that—combined with the sunlight and the lateness of the morning and the still-lingering softness in his face—made him seem, suddenly, much less like the Charles Welles of St. Edmonds than like some quieter, truer version of him she had only just been permitted to meet.

Noelle cleared her throat.

“Um,” she said, and set the brush down beside her on the bed. “I was thinking…”

Charles waited.

Noelle’s fingers moved once over the edge of the coverlet, smoothing what did not need smoothing.

“I owe you breakfast,” she said. Then, because the words sounded too direct in the air and she felt it at once, she added, “For, you know… last night.”

A tiny pause followed.

“My treat.”

Charles did not answer immediately.

He remained standing where he was, one hand still faintly damp from the bathroom towel, looking at her as though the suggestion of breakfast were, somehow, the strangest thing that had yet occurred to him.

Which, in a way, it was.

Not breakfast itself. That was ordinary enough. It was the shape of what she was offering. An extension. A morning. More of this. Not letting the night close too neatly into memory before it had even finished becoming real.

Noelle misread the silence at once.

A small, sheepish smile appeared, fragile at the edges.

“If you’re not busy,” she added.

There it was again—that carefulness he had already begun to recognize in her. The instinct to make room for refusal before she could be refused. To soften her own desire for something by pretending it was only practical.

Charles looked at her for another second.

Then he nodded.

Once.

Small.

Certain.

“Yes,” he said.

The change in her was immediate.

It was not dramatic enough that another person might have remarked upon it, but to Charles, standing there and watching her, it seemed almost astonishing. Her whole face brightened—not in performance, not in flirtation, not in any practiced way at all. It was simply that something in her eased and lit at once, like sunlight catching suddenly on water.

She was pleased.

Not politely. Not vaguely.

Genuinely pleased that he had said yes.

Charles felt the fact of it with ridiculous force.

He had the odd, disarming sensation that some invisible part of him—some guarded place he had not known was listening—had been waiting for exactly that look, and now that he had seen it, it seemed impossible to imagine not wanting to see it again.

Noelle reached for her wallet on the desk and then for a light jumper folded over the chair back.

“There’s a café around the corner,” she said, gathering herself more quickly now that the uncertainty had passed. “I saw it yesterday morning on the way to the forum. It looked nice. Not too crowded.”

She spoke as she moved, and there was a music to it he had not noticed fully the night before only because there had been too much else to notice all at once. Not the sound of the words alone, but the way her voice changed slightly when she was trying not to sound too pleased by her own idea.

Charles listened.

He had the disorienting sense that he would have followed that voice almost anywhere this morning.

Noelle crossed to the desk and gathered up her wallet, slipping it carefully into her bag. Then she reached for the light cardigan draped over the chair back and drew it over her shoulders with quick, neat movements, smoothing the sleeves afterward as though the morning might settle more properly if she put herself in order first.

Charles bent to lift his blazer from where it lay over the other chair.

The familiar weight of it in his hand should have restored something of his usual composure. It did not. He put it on more slowly than he normally would, one arm and then the other, his attention already divided—somewhere between the scent of lavender still lingering in the room, the warmth of the sunlight on the carpet, and the fact of Noelle standing only a few feet away, speaking to him now as though breakfast together were the most natural continuation in the world.

“There were little tables outside,” she said. “Or I think there were. Unless I imagined them because I was hungry yesterday.”

“You were probably hungry.”

“I was definitely hungry,” she admitted. “But they still may have had tables.”

The corner of Charles’s mouth shifted.

Noelle saw it and looked almost absurdly pleased with herself.

That, more than anything, was what undid him.

He had known, in some abstract way, that she smiled warmly. He had known that since before he had ever spoken to her. But knowing it at a distance had not prepared him for the strange bodily effect of being the reason for it. Each time it happened, something in him seemed to loosen before he could stop it.

Noelle reached for the room key on the desk and turned back toward him.

“Do you mind if we walk?” she asked. “It’s only around the corner.”

“No.”

“Good.”

Another tiny pause.

Then, with an effort at casualness that convinced neither of them, she added, “I thought it might be nice.”

Charles looked at her.

She had said it simply. Not as an invitation that required interpretation. Not as anything more dangerous than what it was. And yet the words landed with an intimacy wholly disproportionate to their size.

Yes, he thought.

It might.

Noelle glanced down briefly, as though aware she had let a little too much sincerity show, then adjusted the strap of her bag and moved toward the door.

Charles followed.

The room looked slightly altered now that they were leaving it—less like a place in which something improbable had happened and more like any other hotel room in late morning: the teacups cooling where they had been left, the curtains still half-drawn, the bed no longer holding the shape of the night quite so clearly as it had an hour before.

And yet the air still seemed faintly charged with it.

Noelle opened the door.

A softer, cooler draft from the corridor moved into the room at once, stirring the curtains by the window just enough to set them swaying.

She stepped out first.

Charles reached back automatically to pull the door closed behind them.

The latch clicked softly.

For a brief moment they stood side by side in the corridor without moving, as though both of them had become aware, all over again, of the oddness of what the morning now was. Not scandal, not quite. Not innocence either, at least not untouched innocence. Something gentler and more precarious than both.

Noelle looked up at him.

“Ready?”

Charles nodded.

They began walking.

The corridor was quiet at this hour, full of the subdued order of hotels between breakfast and check-out. Somewhere below them crockery shifted faintly; somewhere farther off a maid’s trolley rattled and then went still. Sunlight fell in rectangular patches across the wallpaper from the stairwell window at the far end.

Noelle walked beside him at an unhurried pace, close enough that he remained aware of her without having to look.

Though he looked anyway.

Not obviously, he hoped. Just enough to catch the smaller details now that he knew he was permitted to. The clean line of her blouse at the shoulder. The looseness of one dark strand near her cheek that had escaped whatever effort she had made at tidying herself. The way her fingers played once, absentmindedly, with the strap of her bag before going still again.

He found himself absurdly, helplessly glad to be there.

They reached the lift.

Noelle pressed the button and then looked at him with a quick, almost shy brightness that had not fully left her since he said yes to breakfast.

“You really don’t have to let me pay, if you think it’s ridiculous.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You were thinking it.”

“No,” Charles said.

Noelle tipped her head.

“No?”

“No.”

He paused, then added with a dryness that made her mouth start to lift again:

“I was thinking breakfast seemed a disproportionate reward for not abandoning you in a corridor.”

That earned him a laugh—small, warm, immediate.

The sound moved through him with startling ease.

The lift arrived with a soft mechanical shudder. They stepped inside, and for a moment the enclosed quiet of it felt almost too intimate after the corridor, the morning light catching on the brass lattice and turning everything softer than it should have been.

Noelle stood with her hands folded lightly over her bag. Charles stood opposite her, one shoulder near the mirrored wall, close enough to see the faint drowsiness still lingering beneath her eyes.

Neither of them spoke during the descent.

Neither of them seemed to mind.

When the doors opened onto the lobby, Noelle stepped out first again, and Charles followed her through the hush of the reception area and out onto the street.

The morning met them fully there.

London had already begun its day in earnest: black cabs passing, shopfronts opening, voices carrying in brief, indistinct currents along the pavement. The air still held a trace of coolness beneath the sunlight, enough that Noelle drew her jumper a little closer around herself as they turned the corner together.

She glanced up at him as they walked.

“I’m glad you said yes,” she said.

She seemed to decide only after saying it that perhaps it had been too direct, because she immediately looked ahead again, as though the row of parked cars had become of urgent interest.

Charles felt the words settle somewhere deep and quiet inside him.

“So am I,” he said.

This time there was no hesitation in it at all.

Noelle did not answer right away.

But he saw the smile come back, soft and impossible for her to hide, and he looked away before she could catch how much that smile had begun to matter.

They kept walking.

At the next corner she began pointing out the café—something about the awning and the little tables and the pastries she had seen through the window the day before—and Charles listened with an attention he could not have disguised even if he had wanted to.

He did not notice what remained behind in the room they had just left.

He noticed only the sunlight on the pavement, the cadence of her voice, and the simple astonishing fact that he was walking through London beside Noelle Yoo toward breakfast, with the whole morning stretching quietly ahead of them.

And as she spoke, and he followed, and the city opened before them in pale gold light, something like happiness—quiet, unguarded, almost boyish in its simplicity—moved through him before he could bring it to heel.

He lowered his gaze for a second, not trusting his face.

And smiled.