Amelia touched the map, her fingers trailing softly across Asia and then down, to the southernmost tip of Africa. “Look how big it is,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

“The world?” he said, and she heard the smile in his voice.

“Yes,” she murmured.

Thomas stood next to her, and one of his fingers found Britain on the map. “Look how small we are,” he said.

“It does seem odd, doesn’t it?” she remarked, trying not to notice that he was standing so close that she could feel the heat emanating from his body. “I am always amazed at how far it is to London, and yet here”—she motioned to the map—“it’s nothing.”

“Not nothing.” He measured the distance with his smallest finger. “Half a fingernail, at least.”

She smiled. At the book, not at him, which was a much less unsettling endeavor. “The world, measured in fingernails. It would be an interesting study.”

He chuckled. “There is someone at some university attempting it right now, I assure you.”

She looked over at him, which was probably a mistake, because it left her feeling somewhat breathless. Nonetheless, she was able to say (and in a remarkably reasonable voice), “Are professors so very eccentric, then?”

“The ones with long fingernails are.”

She laughed, and he did, too, and then she realized that neither of them was looking at the map.

His eyes, she thought, with a strange kind of detachment, as if she were regarding a piece of art. She liked his eyes. She liked looking at them.

How was it that she had never realized that the right one had a stripe in it? She’d thought the irises were blue—not pale, or clear, or even azure, but a dark, smoky shade with the barest hint of gray. But now she could see quite clearly that there was a brown stripe in one of them. It ran from the pupil down to where one would find the four on a clock.

It made her wonder how she’d never seen it before. Maybe it was just that she’d never looked closely enough. Or maybe he’d never allowed her close enough, for long enough, to do so.

And then, in a voice as contemplative and muted as hers surely would have been, had she had the nerve to speak, he murmured, “Your eyes look almost brown just now.”

Amelia felt herself jolted back into reality. And she said, “You have a stripe.”

And promptly wanted to flee the room. What a pea-brained thing to say.

He touched the bruised skin of his cheekbone. “A stripe?”