Sometimes I watched his fingers move over the old pages; sometimes I shut my eyes and listened to his liquid voice rise and fall as rain drummed on the roof outside. Bear didn’t stop reading until the grandfather clock reminded us twice more on the hour that the outside world was waiting.

“Here.” He passed me the book. “You should have this.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, but already I was thumbing its pages.

“I’ve already finished it.” He traced a finger over the back of my hand.

My breath caught, and I grew very still.

“Read it.” Bear’s eyes were soft. “It’ll make you brave.”

We collected ourselves in silence and returned to the great front doors, waiting fruitlessly for a break in the rain. “Thank you for bringing me here today.” I hesitated. “My mother would have liked this place. She would have liked you.”

“Really?” Bear pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around me. He settled it onto my shoulders, tugging it by its front snugly around my waist. I breathed in the smell of its leather, soft and warm and aged with work.

Bear’s hands pulled me closer as if of their own accord.

I nodded, swallowing. “Momma and I used to hole up in our library for hours. ‘It’s not what you look like, it’s how you see,’ she used to always say, and she believed someone who didn’t read only ever saw through their own eyes.”

But my eyes hardly saw the torrent of rain outside the dim foyer, hardly felt the shrieking wind dashing it into our faces as Bear fixed me for the thousandth time with his heady blue gaze.

“I love your eyes.” He ran a thumb along my hairline, his gentle, precise accent undoing my will. “Myrddin insists our fates are written in omens and dreams, but yours is written in your eyes. Green as England. I knew you’d understand.” He cradled my jaw with one hand. My pulse tore off in a sprint beneath his palm.

I’d never felt this before. Peter—perfect Peter, with his earnest words and careful fingers and the gap between his teeth that showed when he smiled—had only liked me as a friend. He’d never put his hands on me.

“Bear—”

“Blindman’s buff,” he broke in, tone strangled. “Did you know that sometimes the children play so the blind man has to guess who he’s captured by the touch of the person’s face?” I shook my head; his fingers grew more tangled in the hair at the nape of my neck.

My heart was a burning star, singeing my lungs, setting fire to my nerves.

Was it my fault, really, that my chest couldn’t hold it?

I dragged tremulous fingers over Bear’s cheekbone and down the corner of his mouth. His breath caught. “I could guess yours,” I said, voice uneven. “Could you guess mine?”