her dying-of-shame plan. Then Jamie, her beautiful, beautiful, timely brother, opened the door and looked rather surprised.
“Nick!” he said, smiling. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” Mae lied promptly. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, I think we know where he’s been,” Nick said in a dark voice from the window.
Mae hadn’t even thought about where he’d been until that moment, when she looked into his sunny, open face and saw magicians written on it, as if Gerald had already set his mark there.
“I suppose you wouldn’t believe I was signing us both up for Yogilates.”
Nick’s silence was answer enough.
“Would you like me to read you a couple of chapters?” Jamie offered, brightening further at the thought of homework rather than knives. “We can’t practice self-defense now—what a shame! Because it’s too dark.”
“Knife work at night is something you’re going to have to learn,” said Nick. “You have to train your eye to catch the glint of metal in the dark.”
There was a horrified pause.
“Seriously,” Jamie said. “I think Yogilates is my calling.”
Nick laughed and moved toward Jamie in a few quick strides. His glance over his shoulder at Mae said he was leaving this situation and they would never speak of it again.
“Okay, you can read one chapter. And you can stop talking about Yogilates.”
“Oh, but”—Jamie’s eyes flickered to Mae—“I could come down here with the book,” he suggested. “I could do a dramatic reading!”
“I’m good for dramatic reading just now,” Mae told him, and waggled her fingers in clear dismissal. Nick shepherded Jamie out of the door.
Mae went over to her armchair and tried very hard not to relive the last few minutes of the dance.
She clutched her hair in her hands, remembered grasping Nick’s soft hair in handfuls, and let go, nails biting into her palms instead.
She didn’t know what was wrong with her. She’d made passes and been shut down before. That happened when you had a tendency to take a chance rather than wait for guys to make their move. It didn’t matter, not at all.
It had just been a stupid thing to do. That was what had her tied in knots. She wasn’t usually stupid.
Nick had already made it very clear he wasn’t interested.
So she’d leap at Seb next time she felt leaping urges, Mae told herself firmly, and went downstairs to make herself some coffee. She had gone through half a pot and had Dorothy Parker’s
“Hello,” her mother said, going for the fridge. Mae waved her coffee cup in greeting and watched as Annabel drew out a packet of lettuce leaves that had turned brown and dispirited. “Oh dear,” she said. “Thai food all right by you?”
“I’ll be honest: I wasn’t going to eat salad either way.”
Annabel nodded with just a hint of pain. She and Mae had gone back and forth on this a thousand times, and Mae had made it extremely clear that she cared more about eating cheese sandwiches today than being skinny when she was forty. “Is James home? I’ll ask him what he wants.”
“Yeah. Um, he has a friend from school with him. They’re studying.”
Mae realized what an enormous tactical error that had been when she saw her mother’s face light up.
“A friend?” she asked. “Jamie?”
“Yeah,” said Mae, getting up very quickly and almost spilling her coffee in the process. “Look, maybe you shouldn’t—”
“A girl or a boy?” Annabel asked, and went for the stairs.
She was much too fast for a woman in six-inch heels, Mae thought, and dashed after her.
“A boy,” she called after Annabel’s swiftly ascending back, stricken with horror at the very idea of her mother opening Jamie’s bedroom door expecting a studious young lady, possibly in a blouse and spectacles, and finding Nick Ryves.
“He must stay for dinner,” Annabel said with determination, doing a wickedly fast turn on the landing and heading for the second set of stairs. “I’m so glad that James is getting on better at school. I couldn’t think what to do. He said he didn’t want to move schools.”
“I didn’t know you wanted him to change schools!” Mae shouted after her. Annabel was outside Jamie’s door now, and Mae wasn’t going to reach her in time. Disaster was inevitable. “How do you move so fast?”
“All my shoes are designer,” Annabel informed her. “Quality always tells,” she added as she opened the door.
“‘There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well,’” Jamie read out, doing what Mae thought was supposed to be an upper-class Victorian lady’s voice. He sounded as if someone was choking him to death with bonnet ribbons.
He was sitting on the window seat, feet up on a chair.
Nick was sitting on Jamie’s bed. Only the lamp in Jamie’s room was on, a yellow pool of light stopping short at Nick’s feet, throwing tiny yellow shards of light into the dark hollows of his eyes. He was turning his magic knife
