Unlocked (Turner, #1.5)

But grateful was altogether the wrong word. She knew it looking into the dark brown of his eyes. She might have looked into them all evening and not noticed the passing of time. No; it wasn’t gratitude she felt. It was something rather more electric.

“Grateful,” he said, the syllables of the word clipped. And then he shook his head and smiled ruefully. “Of course you are. But there’s no need to be.”

“There is. Every need.”

“That is what friendship means.” His voice dropped and so did her stomach.

She felt almost weightless, ready to blow away.

“In fact, tonight happened because of another one of my friends—Fritz Meissner, an old partner from Chamonix who hails from Hanover. I sent him a courier, and he badgered his uncle to show the work to Miss Herschel. From there, I had only to make certain that Miss Herschel’s response was widely known. It was nothing.”

“I assure you,” Sir Mark put in, “few friends would think the same.”

“Oh?”

“Most friendships,” Sir Mark continued, “are nothing more than a similarity of temperament, or a smattering of common interests. Friendship is about jokes told and laughter shared.”

While Sir Mark spoke, Westfeld shook his head. “I used to think the same—that so long as we were laughing together, it was enough. That was before I took an interest in mountaineering.” Westfeld was talking to the entire group, but his gaze kept returning to Elaine. “My entire notion of friendship altered when I depended on someone for more than just the pleasant passing of time. Once you’ve trusted a person with your life, it changes everything. It’s no longer enough to call someone ‘friend’ simply because you visit the same haberdashery. Once someone has risked his life for yours, and you’ve risked yours for his—once you’ve yoked yourselves together, knowing that one misstep could kill the both of you—well.” He shook his head. “Everything after that seems very pallid in comparison.”

“Ah.” Sir Mark smiled. “We’re boring.”

“Not at all. Maybe that’s what I have been looking for. When storms and rockslides threaten, I am looking for someone who will hold on to me and not let go.”

He was talking about friendship, but the way he looked at her… She would crackle like fire if he touched her.

“Is that what you were doing?” she asked softly. “Not letting go?”

“We’re friends.” His smile twisted ruefully. “And what that means is this: I won’t let anyone hurt you. Not if I can stop it.”

She couldn’t stop the stupid grin, too large and too painful, from creeping out on her face. She could feel herself lighting up under his perusal. And his smile—that awkward quirking smile, just a twitch too bitter. He had said they were friends. But…

She’d managed to put all thought of his long-ago proposal out of her mind. He joked with her so often that she’d assumed that it had been offered out of a sense of duty and obligation—and perhaps a hint of the desire he’d felt a decade before. He’d wanted to make up for past wrongs. And he knew—he knew she couldn’t marry him. She’d thought he had accepted it, because until this moment, until tonight, she’d believed he felt nothing for her but friendship.

But no. There was a savagery to his smile, and a darkness in his eyes when he watched her.

He was in love with her. And it hurt him.

Evan had to get away.

The air in the hall had become overheated. As he’d spoken, Elaine had begun to look at him with something like dawning horror. Her conversation had dried up. And once again, she’d wrapped her arms around her waist, drawing in on herself until she was as closed to him as a locked room.

So. She’d figured it out. He strode down the steps of the hall and signaled to his footman waiting in the drizzle. But there was no way to escape easily; the line of carriages stretched into the distance, and the waiting throng had begun to spill out onto the steps of the hall. He wouldn’t be rescued from that crush for at least half an hour.

Instead, he darted across the street to wait. The weather was more fog than rain, but the mist clung to his coat wetly. In the relative haven of the small square, he could pretend to be alone. The crowds across the way were blocked by dense shrubbery; the first tentative spring leaves on trees overhead dampened the carrying conversation. If he could stop up his ears and shut out the persistent clop of horses’ hooves, he might imagine himself very private indeed.

He’d made himself give up all hope of Elaine. Most people would have taken such a surrender as an admission of failure—capitulation, by definition, was the very opposite of success. Then again, most people imagined that the successful mountaineer climbed Mont Blanc by persisting in the face of unimaginable peril and privation.

Not so. A mountaineer who kept going when a snowstorm arose was not successful. He was dead. Only an idiot wagered his life against the flip of Mother Nature’s coin.