His lips turned up. “You cannot promise. I wish you could. But I will promise you something, milaya. I will never put you in the position of wondering if I am using you. Tell me nothing that the admiral or your father says. Tell me nothing you see in your work for them. Never disobey him.”

“After this.”

“After this.” He leaned in just a bit more, touched his lips to her cheek in a move too soft, too lingering to be classified as a simple kiss. “My one request—not a direct disobedience, though likely only because he did not yet think of it. Letters—may I write to you? Send them with Clarke? I am told this is how one courts a girl here in England.”

With all that had gone wrong in the last day, such words shouldn’t be able to make a thrill course through her. But they did. “I would like that.”

He kissed her then. Not an invisible touch, like in the car. There was heat in this one, and the urgency that came of not even knowing when next they’d see each other. She could taste his grief and his determination and his wish that it could be different. No doubt because they mirrored her own.

When he pulled away, his breath was ragged. “I never . . . I never thought I was the sort of man who would feel this way. Certainly not now.”

That thrill coursed again. “I wish This Lily were here. She would have something clever to say.”

He chuckled. “I do not need clever flirtations. Just these precious moments in your company. They will see me through the long days ahead.”

Days, perhaps even weeks or months, without seeing him. Without snapping his picture. Without trying to reveal one more layer.

Days, perhaps weeks or months, when he would have no one to believe in him.

“The last time we were standing by this tree, I told you I trusted no one. But I have found that this is untrue.” He pressed one more kiss to her lips and then pulled away a few inches, his gaze tangled with hers. “I trust you, Lilian Blackwell. I have from the first.”

A sweeter declaration than one of love at this moment. She rested her hand over his heart, as she had daringly done that day. “Zivon, I need you to promise me one thing more.”

“Anything.”

“Last night, when you spoke of what the Bolsheviks did . . .” There, his eyes darkened again. She pressed a bit more against his heart. “Guard yourself against those feelings. It’s understandable that you hate them. But—”

“I do not hate them.” Yet even as he said it, vitriol filled his words. “We are told to love our enemies.”