—On this day, for the first time in her life, Rosalind Abel would crush a baked sweet in her hand.
"...Rosie."
Only when we're alone, he had said.
The echo of that voice still lingered faintly in the office air.
A log in the hearth cracked, low.
Rosalind was watching Lucas's back as he stood by the window. Not a single document lay on the desk. The reason he had summoned her here under the pretext of a work report was not work. She had already, unavoidably, realized that.
And knowing it, why am I standing here?
Normally, I would say something sardonic at this point.
"Your Grace, is this business, or—?"
Ask that, and things return to their usual orbit. Documents line up on the desk, the talk turns to numbers, and I go back to being the Economic Advisor. He goes back to being the Ice Grand Duke.
We should have been able to go back.
But her mouth wouldn't move.
Lucas turned around slowly.
Standing with the window at his back, his expression held its usual angle, but not its usual temperature. The eyes that people had always called ice were wavering, just slightly.
"Rosalind."
This time he had returned to the usual form of address. She understood that it was his last attempt to hold his ground.
He closed the distance by a few steps and said:
"I want you."
A beat.
"Not politically. Not for your abilities. —I want you. That's all."
Rosalind couldn't say anything.
The reply she always assembled in her head within half a second wouldn't come, not a single letter of it. No social pleasantries, no contract terms, no sarcasm, no gallows humor. The stockpile of words she had built up since her previous life had gone blank, every last one.
Lucas didn't blame her for not answering. If anything, he went on as though to say she didn't need to.
"Ever since I was born—I've been searching for no one but you."
His voice was low.
"I have never once been interested in another woman. It isn't that I lost interest. —It was never there to begin with."
The pale light outside the window traced his profile in blue.
And then he set down his final words with painstaking care. The way a man sets down something he intends to say only once.
"No one else was looking at you."
A pause to steady his breath.
"I couldn't believe it."
Inside Rosalind, something collapsed without a sound.
No one else was looking at you.
Those words had been meant for the young lady by the wall of that party hall. The young lady who had held a single book on economics and turned its pages in a spot that fell within no one's field of view.
But inside Rosalind, those words reached much, much farther.
Her job had been handling numbers. She had come in earlier than anyone and gone home later than anyone. Under a boss who never bothered to learn her name, she had kept reconciling numbers that wouldn't add up until morning, collapsed still facing her desk, and never come home. That woman.
—Maybe someday, someone will find me.
That single line had been the last thing in her mind before her consciousness closed.
And that woman had now, at last, been found.
The feeling she'd had at the very end—"I wanted to be loved"—was being answered here.
It isn't too late.
I made it in time.
Rosalind kept her eyes lowered. She couldn't say anything. She felt that if she said anything, her voice would come out in a shape that wasn't a voice.
Lucas didn't ask for an answer.
He was a man who knew that silence spoke more eloquently.
...She didn't know how long they stayed like that.
Only the sound of the hearth lay between them.
At last, Rosalind finally moved.
The usual baked sweets sat on the desk. Who had put them there and when, she didn't know—one half of a morning ritual shared by the two of them alone. Her hand reached for them when she was tense; she brought them to her mouth when she was tired. A small refuge that had always swallowed her emotions for her.
She reached out.
The usual motion. The usual escape.
But she couldn't bring it to her mouth.
Strength went into her fingertips.
The sweet crumbled in her hand with a small sound.
The broken crumbs fell onto the desk.
At that sound, Lucas came closer. Without a word, he gently wrapped her hand in both of his. As if to hold it anew, crumbs of the broken sweet and all.
"...There's no rush to answer."
Lucas's voice sounded very close.
"But whatever you choose, I'll abide by it."
Rosalind couldn't lift her face.
If she lifted it, he would probably see what kind of face she was making right now. That, at least, she wanted to avoid. It was something like a corporate slave's last scrap of pride.
Instead, she forcibly dragged out her usual tone.
"...Your Grace."
Her voice came out hoarse, as if it weren't her own.
"Please give me a little time."
A beat.
"I may process numbers faster than anyone,"
A beat.
"but processing my own emotions is the one thing I am fatally bad at. I suspect I have been for a very long time. —Pretending not to notice is what I do best."
Like her usual sarcasm, like her usual self-deprecation—her usual tone.
But only the ends of her words were faintly wet.
Lucas said nothing.
He only kept her hand wrapped in his, and she thought the corner of his mouth moved, just a little.
The sense that the Ice Grand Duke had been about to smile.
It didn't complete itself. He didn't let it. He wasn't showing her that much yet.
But something had certainly moved.
Only the warmth inside the hand he held was there.
"Please give me... a little time."
Just how long that "a little" meant, Rosalind didn't know herself.
Only one thing was certain.
It was not the "a little" of running away.
That night, Rosalind sat at her desk and spread out a single blank sheet of paper.
Not her usual projection tables.
From the very back of the drawers in her head, she took out the employment contract template she had kept stored there, and began rewriting it from the first clause.
As she began to write, her pen tip stopped for just a beat.
Numbers she could assemble in half a second. Even projection tables that wouldn't balance, she had filled in until morning.
And yet the one line that came next, she simply could not write.