It wasn’t something she’d ever considered before. But then she hadn’t been around a stately home since her parents had stopped dragging her to them when she was a kid. “Oh yes. I suppose they do.”

“The thing with people”—Alain sounded unexpectedly sincere—“is that you only ever see them as they’re presenting themselves, and their context always has to be the world you find them in. But buildings are different. They reflect every self they’ve ever been.”

“Do you think so?” she asked.

“Well, take this house.”

“What about it?”

There was, Rosaline thought, something captivating in hearing somebody talk about their passions—it felt intimate, like they were giving you access to some slightly tender part of themselves. Of course, with Lauren it had always been pussy and words, so architecture was a nice change of pace.

“In the late eighteen hundreds,” Alain told her, “it was fashionable to have a hermit living on your property. Unfortunately, people who wanted one were confronted by the tiny detail that there weren’t actually any hermits anymore. So what they’d do was build something they could call a hermitage, and if anyone asked, they’d say the hermit wasn’t in at the moment.”

Rosaline considered this. “Hang on a second. A person who lives on their own but regularly goes out to get stuff or do things isn’t a hermit. They’re just single.”

“Which would probably have been a point of contention had the hermit existed.”

“It should have been a point of contention anyway. Because people would go, Hey, where’s your hermit?, and you’d say Oh, he’s nipped down the shops, and they’d say, Well, he’s not a hermit then is he?”

“I think,” said Alain, laughing, “that’s more or less what happened. So landowners took to hiring people to live in their hermitages and pretend to be hermits.”

Rosaline slanted a smile at him. “Honestly, I’ve had worse jobs.” They stepped into what appeared to be an actual grotto—a slightly crumbling archway, twined about with ivy, the rocks velveted with moss.

“You say that, except”—Alain gestured around them—“you’d have had to live somewhere like this.”

It was rather pretty at the moment, with the dappled light and the warm breeze, but it was small enough to really put her kitchen into perspective. “Okay, maybe I haven’t had worse jobs.”

“You see what I mean, though?” Alain’s voice had softened in the green-shaded gloom. “About the way history accretes to places like this?”

It was quite a change to go from talking with a man who said “ain’t” to a man who said “accretes.” “Doesn’t it accrete to people, too, though? After all, I might not still wear the leather pencil skirt I had when I was sixteen, but I wouldn’t be who I am now if I hadn’t been who I was then.”

He chuckled. “Intrigued as I am by this leather pencil skirt, it’s not the same. Your past is your past. It’s not something someone else can see and touch.”

Rosaline had never read any of those books about how to get a man, partly because she was at least as interested in women and partly because they were clearly awful. But she was sure they’d all agree that going to a secluded grotto with a guy and then arguing with him about the romantic things he tried to say was spectacularly missing the point. On the other hand, she also kind of thought she was right on this one. “I got a tattoo when I was sixteen,” she told him. “You can see and touch that. I mean, not right now, obviously.”

“You’ve got a tattoo?” He sounded . . . not shocked exactly. But the positive sort of surprised. It was a good way for him to sound.

“Yep.”

He eyed her, one eyebrow slightly raised, and asked teasingly, “Is it a butterfly?”

“Actually, it’s several butterflies.”

“Several butterflies?”

“Down my spine.”

The wide, expressive mouth that had kissed her so artfully turned up at the corners. “You don’t do things by halves, do you?”

“Well, then you’d only have half a thing.”

There was a longish pause that seemed more intense than it should have been in the narrow space and the hazy light.

“Are you going to show me?”

She blinked. “Now?”

“Only if you’re comfortable,” he said quickly. “There’s no one around of course, but I’d never want to put any pressure on you. Although I will admit I’m rather . . . ” He paused and cleared his throat. “Let’s say I’m even more intrigued about the butterflies than I am about the skirt.”

He seemed on the edge of flustered—and maybe she just had a powerful imp of the perverse, but she suspected she’d enjoy flustering him further. It could have been because he was slightly older and had his shit so much more together than she did, or simply the contrast to his usual self-assurance. Either way, these hints of something like vulnerability made her feel bold and exciting in a way she hadn’t for a long time.

She turned and pulled up her shirt. Heard his soft intake of breath.

“That’s . . . that’s rather artistic,” he whispered. “Quite the wild child, weren’t you?”

“I wasn’t trying to be. I just knew what I wanted.”

“May I,” he murmured, “may I touch them?”

Her back prickled with possibility. “Um, okay.”

“Didn’t it hurt?”

Why did people always ask that? What were they expecting her to say? No, I love having needles jammed into my epidermis. “Like a bastard.”

She felt the warmth of his fingertips following the familiar curve of wings across her spine. His touch was like his kiss: certain yet delicate, hinting at pleasure rather than pushing it upon her. After a moment or two, he turned her and drew her close.

“I hope you don’t think I was avoiding you today.”

She definitely had, but there was no way she was admitting that to him. “I was mostly just making a pie.”

“I thought it was best not to do anything that might start people talking.”

It was embarrassing how relieved she was. “That makes sense. Thank you.”