They still clamored and buzzed, those crashing images. But his lips hushed them. He pulled her back to the here and now—exactly where she wanted to be.
She slid one arm around his neck, rested the other against his chest, and felt a rush of contentment. This, this was what she had been waiting for for so long. This gentle touch of a kiss that somehow both wanted and gave. That touched her heart as well as her lips. When he pulled her close, she wanted to melt into him, to stay just there where all else faded. Where she was safe, protected, cherished.
The kiss took her deeper, and she marveled at how it could while also making her soar. His first embrace, two months ago nearly to the day, hadn’t had this effect. Something had changed. Between them, or perhaps in them. It wasn’t just wanting anymore.
That terrifying realization may have sent her a step back had he not angled his head and melded his mouth to hers a new way, drawing her back in.
Perhaps she had toyed with the word love in connection with him, but she hadn’t been thinking of it right. She had been thinking of the quick tumble in and out that she had felt with the Hugheses. The new and innocent kind that had blossomed so slowly over the years with Walker.
This was neither, and both. This was the unfurling of a rose. The summer heat of the sun. The steady rush of a gurgling stream. This was beauty and life and…and surety. How that was possible she couldn’t have said. But for the first time in her life, she knew it wasn’t a matter of just wanting to be in the arms that held her—it was a matter of belonging there.
As he stroked his thumb over her cheek and eased away, she knew his feelings must have grown too. Did he love her? Did he feel this same stretching of his soul toward hers? This yearning to simply be in the presence of the other? She wanted to believe he did, that he must.
“I don’t know what that was down there,” he whispered, resting his forehead against hers, “but don’t ever do that to me again.”
She wasn’t even sure what he was talking about. Closing her eyes, she toyed with his lapel and tried to ease back into her mind. But there was just so much. The actual memories of her actions in the castle tangled with the things she had seen. The pictures kept shifting, turning, realigning.
The election poster hovered, Mr. Lincoln’s face with that dreadful smear. She remembered looking at it, recalling the first time she had done so from the secondary tunnel. For some reason, that had triggered the whirlwind.
Gripping his coat, she refused to be swept up again. Not now. She clung to Slade, shaking the images away and searching for him in the memories of when she stood before the poster. No images, but his voice was there. Begging, pleading with her.
Marietta opened her eyes, narrowed, at his handsome face. “Did you call me kitten?”
His blink was blank, but then a smile tugged a corner of his mouth. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
She felt his shrug as much as she saw it. The lopsided smile made no attempt to even out. “You have cat eyes.”
A soft laugh filled her throat. Her fingers, of their own will, feathered through the hair at the back of his head. “Should I call you ‘puppy’ then?”
Another blink. “Pardon?”
She grinned. “You have wolf eyes.”
And oh, how she loved the glint of amusement in them. “Nice. But no. Don’t even think about it.”
Another laugh soothed its way through her, but quick on its heels came the press of images. Too many, too fast. She kissed him again to force them back, but even as it worked, she knew it was but a stopgap. A rickety dam that would give way at any moment.
She eased back down from her toes. “I need paper and pen to work through this.”
Slade nodded and loosened his arms. The worry took over his eyes again. “Yetta…has that ever happened before?”
“Not to that extent. But as soon as I can bring some order to the thoughts, they will settle.” She let her hand trail down his neck and then over his shoulder. She was reluctant to let go but had no choice. “I am sorry to have startled you. Or I would be, had it not inspired you to kiss me again.”
Chuckling, he turned her toward the ballroom’s exit with a hand upon her back. “You’re something else, kitten, that’s for sure.”
Maybe that shouldn’t have felt like the highest compliment she had ever received, but it lit a glow deep inside her. She walked with him toward the closed double doors, wondering if her smile looked as smug as the cat he called her.