Chapter 21

Their steps were quick as they made their way to the hall where faculty meetings were held. The long room was filled with several massive tables, along which department heads and professors were seated. Researchers who didn't teach and assistants sat in chairs lining the walls. Saffron followed Alexander inside. His overcoat was slung over two chairs next to the door.

Alexander had saved her a seat. She glanced at him, but he'd given his attention to the person currently speaking at the table. It took her only a moment to see that he was angry. His jaw was clenched, his nostrils still flared. In his lap, his right hand rested, fisted so tightly his scars were white.

"I'm sorry for making you late," she whispered to him as they sat down.

He shook his head slightly.

"I appreciate you coming to collect me," she added.

"Don't mention it," he said from the corner of his mouth.

She fell silent for a minute, listening to someone from finances drone on about budgets. "You saved me a seat." He glanced at her and nodded. "Why?"

She could barely hear him sigh. "I wanted to speak to you about what I said the other night."

"You did?"

To Alexander's left, someone cleared their throat. Alexander was quiet until the talk of budgets ended and the main table moved on to the class schedule for the next semester. "I wanted to apologize. I spoke without thinking, and I wasn't being fair."

"I wasn't being fair," she said, putting her hand on his hand for the briefest of moments. "I had no right to demand to know anything. I'm sorry."

Alexander turned just enough to look at her. He was frowning. "I would like for you to have the right to … ask me things. I would like for us to be able to speak to each other openly. About personal matters."

Her mouth fell open for a moment. "You—you want me to ask you things. Personal things."

He nodded slightly.

Naturally, the first question that came to mind was "How do you know Nick?"

Next to her, Alexander stiffened. She poked his arm. "Well?"

"That isn't something I can tell you."

"But you just said—"

"I find it difficult to discuss Nick with you when you smell like him."

Saffron gasped with embarrassment and surprise. "What?"

Half the room turned to her with a mix of curiosity and annoyance. She hastily coughed.

She forced herself to be quiet for five minutes. When she was sure the newest topic of discussion, the question of wage increases, had riveted the entire room's attention, she leaned over to Alexander and whispered, "The house with Wells's body stank to high heaven and Nick doused my handkerchief with scent. I smell like him so I didn't have to endure the stink Wells left behind."

Alexander slanted her a glance, but she couldn't discern his expression. "I see."

He was infuriating! "Forget it. Forget all of it. I see your notion of personal questions means questions like a favorite book or food. Nothing real."

His fist tightened further in his lap. "Nick and I met in Greece."

Her heart leaped. "During the war?" He nodded, and she asked, "In Salonika?"

With another shallow nod, he said, "I can't say more."

"But why were you there? Why was Nick there?"

He shook his head slightly.

She thought furiously about the theories that had crowded her mind over the last day. Despite her protestations, she'd been unable to prevent herself speculating. Lee had mentioned it was a diplomatic trip. Alexander might have had family in political positions, but he likely would have mentioned that when describing Adrian's unintentional pro-Constantine activities. That would have had greater implications if their family was in a place of political power.

Alexander would have been coming out of healing from his injury then, and if he'd been well enough to travel, he might have been shipped out to fight again. That left only a few options.

Her first guess was the one she'd thought was the most likely. "You were a translator?"

She could feel him going still next to her. She tried to peer into his face. He gave her the smallest of nods.

Relief and something else overtook her in a warm wave. A translator. That was so simple, so reasonable. He wasn't some sort of spy, like Elizabeth imagined Nick to be. He could speak Greek; he was already in the military. It made sense that he could have been chosen to come along to assist with communication.

And the idea that he'd served England in that way, after he'd already been injured, was admirable. Very admirable.

Saffron did not ask more questions after that. A mystery had been solved, the answer something simple and logical. Alexander had allowed her to figure it out, helped her to understand him. It made sense, too, why he hadn't simply told her. He'd been keeping his word, he'd said. Of course, he couldn't just go talking about it; the things he must have heard were confidential.

She was lighthearted when she was called upon to speak. She found the usual self-consciousness that a hundred staff members all watching her brought on was absent from her brief speech about the progress of her pigmentation study.

She was still in the clouds when the meeting adjourned what felt like hours later.

"Will you come to visit the strychnos seeds now?" she asked Alexander as they stood. The words were polite, but the look she gave him suggested it was not the seeds that a visit to her office promised.

His face gave nothing away when he agreed.

The sound of the office door closing was loud in contrast to the utterly quiet building. With the sun disappeared beneath the city horizon, the university had settled into a relaxed state of slumber.

Saffron didn't feel relaxed in the least. She'd convinced Alexander to follow her up here, but now she wasn't sure what she wanted next.

"They've sprouted," Alexander commented. He'd moved to the window, where he bent over the third makeshift terrarium. "I was worried I wouldn't be able to do any better than Winters. But your notes were very thorough"—he slanted her a smile—"if a little disorganized."

She couldn't help but smile back. "Not everyone wants their world to be as strictly organized as you."

He straightened up to his impressive height. "That is true. I do like my world to be orderly. I like to know precisely where things are, how they fit together." He reached a hand to her cheek. His touch was feather-light along her cheekbone. "You drive me mad, you know."

"Oh?"

"When Lee told me you were missing, it hit me very hard. I'd been through a war, I'd been threatened with a pistol and forced to drink poison—but that was a distant, numb sort of fear that could be put aside in order to survive." His hand cupped her cheek, his fingers threading through her hair. "But when you were taken, it was different. It was immediate. Hot. I felt like I would tear apart the city." He exhaled, a rueful smile on his lips. "I hated it."

Saffron held still, worried that if she moved or interrupted him, he would stop speaking. She didn't necessarily enjoy his words, but she was desperate to understand what he was saying.

"The meditation I do helped me ease the fear and anxiety I felt—feel, still. It helped me let go of my feelings. I stopped dropping dishes, smashing beakers, losing myself when a loud sound jolted me." He swallowed. "I have sat, cross-legged and barefoot on the floor, for hours since I met you. No amount of meditation helps. You are too bright, too captivating for my mind to let go of."

Saffron had no words to match his quietly spoken confession. She kissed him.

He returned her kiss but only for a moment. "The window," he murmured.

With her office illuminated, anyone below in the Quad would see a pair of shadows doing things better left in privacy. She dragged him from the window and toward the couch.

She started their kiss anew, fierce with a determination that stemmed from his words and her own need to stave off the despair at the sights of death and pain she'd seen that day. This was warmth and life and something somehow better than logic and evidence and method, a rightness that did not need words to define.

That feeling of rightness was peerless in her experience. Perhaps that egged her on, encouraged her hands to tangle deeper into his hair, her body to press closer against his. Saffron believed in reason and answers to the questions of why and how, and she wanted to know why Alexander cared for her if she drove him mad, and why she wanted to understand him when he was so insufferably inscrutable, and how they could make things work between them.

Things were working very well, in her lust-hazed opinion. She'd managed to situate herself very nearly in Alexander's lap, and she could see his face perfectly. The way his brows furrowed as if in concentration as he returned her kiss, the hints of wrinkles across his forehead that would grow deeper with time, the three gray hairs hiding in the black at his right temple.

Likely sensing her distraction, his lips slowed, then stopped. He gazed up at her. His eyes, which were so often as impenetrable as his mind, were deepest brown. She could see the striations like layers in the soil. She could count each thick eyelash.

He leaned so his lips touched her throat. She shivered. His lips inched upward.

"I want you to do something for me," he murmured, breath tickling her ear.

She sighed with pleasure. "Yes?"

"Please leave off this business with Nick."

It was like she'd been drenched in cold water.

"Oh, no," she said, scooting off him, batting his hands away. "I will not put up with that again, Alexander." She got to her feet. "You were the one to ask me to investigate on Adrian's behalf!"

"This is different."

She glared at him. "I'm helping solve what might be a murder. And helping your brother in the process! I am not doing this with you again!"

"Nick is dangerous."

She opened her mouth, then closed it. She could no longer dismiss the idea of Nick being more than what he seemed. He'd shown her he was. He had permission to examine a body before the police had even visited the scene, and he knew about measurements of a dead body's decay. Alexander had known him while on a diplomatic mission during the war, during which Nick had no doubt killed men from the other side. More than anything else, however, Saffron had seen how Nick had changed his entire personality like he was switching hats. She'd seen his intensity, his coolness in the face of death. She could believe Nick was dangerous.

Deflated, she said, "There will always be danger of some kind. I might be hit by a bus on the street or catch 'flu. I work with poisonous plants for a living! Why is working with Nick any different?"

Alexander ran a hand through his hair, mussing the curls she'd already disordered. "I just want you to know that he isn't as he appears."

"One doesn't watch a man go from making quips about cows to examining a dead body with the clinical air of a professional without something being not quite right," she said flatly.

Alexander shot her a look of consternation. "Yet you agreed to help him."

"In part to help Adrian."

"And in part because …? Did you find it hard to say no to Nick?"

The tone of his question rankled her. She crossed her arms over her chest. "I found it hard to say no to a member of the government asking for my help in solving mysterious deaths because figuring out if it was accidental or intentional is important to the security of the laboratory."

Alexander watched her with a grim look. "He told you that the investigation was a matter of securing the lab?"

"Well, it's true, isn't it? If someone is killing off members of the lab, it might be because of something they're researching. Perhaps the Russians are after it."

He sighed and got to his feet. "It's late, Saffron."

"Come to my flat." She didn't want to lose the ground they'd gained. He was not arguing with her, or threatening to prevent her involvement, but giving information in his subtle way. She wrapped her arms about his waist, and he eyed her with a sort of wary curiosity that she found delightful. "For supper. Elizabeth no doubt is cursing my name for being so late, and she does love to show off her culinary efforts."

He agreed, and Saffron found herself unable to stop smiling the whole way home.