Matron didn’t mean . . . well. But Lucy felt the color rising in her cheeks all the same. Before, she and John had always been in public, in Delmonico’s, in Central Park, in Mrs. Whitney’s studio, snatching their moments of privacy in the midst of dozens of uninterested people. But on the seventh floor, they would be well and truly alone.
There were, thought Lucy, feeling a silly giggle rising in her throat, rules about gentlemen in one’s room, but this wasn’t her room, was it? It was the secret room on the seventh floor. So that was all right, then.
“Thank you,” said John Ravenel, snatching Lucy’s arm and speaking, for him, quite rapidly. “I surely am grateful for this opportunity.”
“You must let me know what you think of our little treasure,” said Matron serenely, before turning, and saying in quite another voice altogether, “Miss Brennan!”
John whisked Lucy to the stairs at a gait just short of a run.
“Eager to see what’s on the seventh floor?” said Lucy breathlessly, as they rounded the curve of the stair on the fourth floor.
“Eager to see you,” said John, pausing so abruptly that Lucy nearly ran into him. “Ever since I received your message, I’ve been hoping—” One of the bedroom doors opened, and John broke off. “Oh, for the love of— Let’s get upstairs. We’ll have some privacy there.”
“Do you think . . . ,” said Lucy, feeling suddenly shy. “Do you think that’s what Matron had in mind?”
“An honorable woman like Mrs. Johnston?” said John, his drawl thickening. His voice turned serious as he looked at Lucy. “She just wants to make sure a hidden artistic treasure gets proper appreciation.”
“Or improper appreciation?” said Lucy daringly.
“That, too.” His dark eyes rested on her lips, moved lower. “Er—where do we go from here?”
The transition was so abrupt that Lucy laughed. “Like Matron said, the main stairs stop on the fifth floor. We’ll have to take the servants’ stairs. If you don’t feel too cheapened by that.”
“Nothing to do with you could ever be cheap,” said John.
“Then you don’t know the cost of this skirt,” retorted Lucy, but her hand trembled on the banister. The force of his regard made her feel weak, shaky, as if she were no longer entirely in possession of herself.
From the time she was very small, she had known she had to be strong. Her mother was so withdrawn, her father someone to be protected as much as a protector. With no siblings, her cousins largely estranged, Lucy had kept mostly to herself, a quiet, self-contained child, an anomaly in her father’s large, boisterous German family.
For the first time, she contemplated what it would be to let herself go, to relax that stern control. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, the idea of relinquishing her own strength, allowing her to lean on someone else.
There was something so sturdy about John, so reliable.
It didn’t take them much time to find the stair to the seventh floor, in an alcove Lucy had always assumed to be a broom closet. The stair itself was narrow and unassuming, the walls painted with the same graying whitewash as the servants’ floor, the stairs uncarpeted.
At the top, John paused. “Before we go in— I just wanted you to know that I would be here even if no Pratt had ever set foot in this house. I came for you. Not for them. When they gave me your message—”
Lucy touched a finger to his lips. “Hush,” she said firmly.
John hushed.
“Yesterday—I knew as soon as I’d left you that I overreacted. It was just . . .” Lucy struggled for the right words. Her family had never been one for sharing their emotions; this was an uncharted vocabulary. She felt like a toddler, just learning to use language. “I was scared.”
“I scared you?” John’s face was the picture of remorse. “Lucy, I swear on my father’s soul, I never intended . . .”
“No, no,” Lucy said quickly. “You didn’t scare me. I scared me. The Pratts were just an excuse. I got scared and I ran away. It’s just—” She took a deep breath and said, quietly, “I’ve never felt like this about anyone.”
John’s arms wrapped around her, folding her close, his cheek resting against the top of her head. “Neither have I,” he murmured. “Neither have I.”
They stood in the cramped stair, neither of them feeling the heat or minding the musty smell of an enclosed space too long neglected. Lucy leaned the full weight of her body against his, her chest molding to his, her head fitting perfectly into the space between his ear and his neck, and knew that she had, at long last, come home. Wherever John Ravenel was, that was home.
“Do you think,” she said, after a very long time, “that we ought to see that room?”
“Most likely,” said John, making no effort to move. “We wouldn’t want to disappoint Matron.”
Lucy thought of the twinkle in Matron’s eye. “I don’t think she would be disappointed.”
John’s arms tightened around her. “She’s an excellent woman, your Mrs. Johnston.”
Lightly, Lucy said, “Shall we invite her to the wedding?”