And he still didn’t feel like he had learned any more than he’d already known when he’d come in here.
“I don’t suppose you brought coffee,” he asked Vivienne, not looking up. He’d just come across an anecdote about a Scottish farmer who suspected his crops were cursed and had attempted to reverse the spell.
Going by the illustration, it seemed to have ended with him turning into a rather large cat, but it was still better than nothing.
“If I tried to bring coffee into this part of the library, Dr. Fulke would hang me up by my toenails, so no,” Vivienne replied, coming to perch on the edge of the table.
As she did, Rhys caught that scent again, that sweet, almost sugary smell that clung to her skin, and his fingers tightened around his pen.
“How goes it?” she asked, leaning in to see what he was writing, and Rhys sat back in his chair, rolling his shoulders to alleviate some of the tension that had gathered there.
“Not well,” he admitted. “But to be fair, I’ve only been at it for a little while. And of course, since I can’t alert the other witches here as to what I’m doing, I’m stumbling in the dark a little bit.”
Vivienne frowned, a wrinkle appearing over her nose, and Rhys wanted to reach out and smooth it away with his thumb.
Then she stood up. “Well, I’m here now, and I can help. What books haven’t you looked at yet?”
Thirty minutes later, she sighed and closed the last book, its spine creaking ominously.
“So this one is useless.” Leaning across the table, she reached for another from the stack, but even as her fingers closed over the cover, Rhys shook his head.
“Already tried that one.”
“What about this one?” she asked, tapping her fingers on another book, and Rhys barely looked up before shaking his head again.
“Also a dud.”
Vivienne sat up straighter in her chair. “Okay, so this entire endeavor has been a bust, then?”
Rhys finally looked up at her. “Did you think this was going to be easy?”
Rising from her seat, Vivienne rubbed the back of her neck. “No, but it just . . . it shouldn’t be this hard to reverse a curse. Especially a curse this stupid.” Throwing up her hands, she added, “I mean, we were barely even a thing.”
Rhys was tired. He was cranky. And he was quite literally cursed, which is probably why those words . . . irked.
More than irked, really.
Infuriated.
“Enough of a thing that you cursed me when I left.”
Vivienne frowned, her hand resting again on the back of her neck. “You didn’t leave,” she reminded him. “I left you after you suddenly remembered you were engaged.”
Tilting his head back to look at the ceiling, Rhys groaned. “I was not engaged, I was betrothed, which is not—”
“I know,” she said, standing up. “Not the same thing. So you tried to say at the time, but I gotta say, Rhys, I was not in the mood for a discussion about semantics then, and I definitely am not now.”
Had he forgotten that she could be this frustrating, or was this a new trait, another facet of Adult Vivienne he hadn’t learned?
Rising from his chair, Rhys stepped closer to her, suddenly aware of just how small the study room was, how close they were.
Christ, he should go home. To Wales. He should say “bugger it” to all this and leave.
Instead, he said, “That summer was important, Vivienne. It meant something.”
Her lips were parted, her breath coming fast, and every cell in Rhys’s body wanted to touch her even as his mind was screaming for him to back off.