The pounding at her front door would have startled her awake on any other night, but it was midnight on Christmas Eve, there was a blizzard pounding Chicago into submission, and Aeryn Bridgers had barely made it home from the museum’s holiday gala in one piece.

She was already wide-awake.

Not only that, she had barely had time to do more than shrug out of her parka and kick off her boots. She had left her impractical gala shoes in her office at the legendary art museum and had trudged her way up the last bit of the Magnificent Mile in the worsening snow and wind because there was no hope of getting a car. And she had been so cold when she’d made it to her front door on a quiet stretch of Elm Street not far from Lake Shore Drive that she’d gone immediately into her kitchen to put the kettle on.

Aeryn hurried back out to the foyer now, frowning at the snow coming down sideways outside and piling up high against the windows of her living room. Having grown up in the Chicago area, she knew whiteout conditions when she saw them.

Which made it even more alarming that someone was at her door.

Her mind immediately leaped to the worst-case scenario—one of the gifts she’d received with motherhood. She’d gotten a beautiful, healthy baby girl and, as a bonus prize, an endless, twenty-four-hour-a-day doomscroll of what-ifs that outdid each other in horribleness. One after the next.

The pounding continued as she hesitated in the living room, the sparkling colored lights of the tree not quite as soothing as they’d seemed when she’d staggered inside not ten minutes earlier. Now she felt adrenaline and fear flood her body.

Something must have happened to her daughter, Faith. And if something had happened to Faith, that meant something had also happened to her parents, because eighteen-month-old Faith had been staying with them for the past couple of days while Aeryn handled her museum’s gala preparations. They’d all planned to spend Christmas morning together as a family, as always, but if someone was hammering at her door that could only mean the worst.

When Aeryn threw open the locks and wrenched the heavy front door open, her heart catapulting against her ribs, her first impression was of the storm. The snow howled its way inside, the wind roaring along with it, bitterly cold and nothing short of dangerous. It was already far worse than it had been on her rather ill-advised walk home, something she’d regretted almost immediately but had carried on with because it wasn’t that far from the museum. Then it had been pretty bad. Now it sliced straight through her and took her breath.

It took a moment to understand that she wasn’t seeing what she thought she would. She’d expected flashing police lights. Or police officers themselves, in handy uniforms that identified them and those stoic looks on their faces as they delivered terrible news.

There was none of that, but it wasn’t the relief it should have been, because there was a creature in front of her. It took her a panicked moment to realize it was a man, because he was covered in snow—caked with it, really—and it looked as if there was blood on his face too.

Aeryn immediately went to close the door, because this was Chicago. And while the Gold Coast neighborhood where she lived was considered safe and tony besides, it was still in the middle of a city with all the same problems cities had everywhere.

“You.”

She froze at the sound of his voice, not simply from the blast of the cold. Because she knew that voice. She hadn’t heard it in two years and she’d never heard it in that rough, raw tone—or, perhaps, the single glass of wine she’d sipped over the course of the gala had gone to her head more than she thought.

Because there was no way she should be hearing that voice here.

And certainly not from the man on her doorstep who looked like some kind of animated abominable snowman. Except far more dangerous, because he was real and within reach and standing in her open doorway at midnight in the middle of a winter storm.

“It’s you,” he croaked out again. He reached out.

Aeryn couldn’t help herself—she shrank back and then felt foolish when all he did was grab at the doorjamb as if he was unsteady. Her gaze followed that hand and she could see that his knuckles were bloodied, but there was also the glint of a ring.

A signet ring, something inside of her whispered. A ring she had played with more times than she could count. A ring she had toyed with, turning it this way and that on his finger. A ring that had warmed against the flesh of her own body as he moved his hands over her, teaching her things about herself she often wished she didn’t still know.

Aeryn felt her mouth drop open. Like her jaw was on a broken hinge. Then her gaze swung back to him even as he wiped at his own face, dislodging the caked-on snow, and then there was no pretending any longer.

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It was him.

Vesuvius.

King Vesuvius of Liandero, as he was more commonly known, who had absolutely no business being on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Much less here, on her doorstep.

Or rather, she corrected herself cynically, his doorstep, if she wanted to be excruciatingly correct about it all.

In that split second of recognition and whirling snow blowing in all around her, she discovered that, in fact, she did not wish to be anything even remotely like correct. That was the old Aeryn, a commoner who had fallen helplessly in love with a king. This Aeryn was the woman who had survived him.

Vesuvius was the great and tragic love of her life, no matter which version of herself she was tonight. Vesuvius had given her Faith, the most profound blessing of her existence, but had never met his own daughter because the risk was too great that if he had, they would have been found out and a great scandal would have ensued.

This meant that she had last seen him when she was pregnant with Faith at the end of her first trimester. She’d had to muddle through the rest on her own.

It was true—if unfortunate—that she had never stopped loving this man, not once in all these years, but she had long been aware that she hated him a whole lot too.

She had the distinct urge to slam the door in his face no matter how terrible the weather was.

He was a king. Aeryn had no idea what he was doing bloodied and covered in snow, but that could have nothing to do with her. She felt vindictive, and furious, but even as that swelled within her, a kind of shame took its place.

She was used to that, too. It had been her constant companion these last years.

Because she had known exactly who he was when she’d met him. She had known the parameters going in when he’d kissed her and she’d kissed him back, greedily. Aeryn had never been able to help herself, was the trouble. She had told herself, time and again, that a love like theirs was worth anything and everything, even the agony of losing him to his duty.

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And of all the gifts he’d given her, Faith was by far the greatest—and how could she want to turn back time if that would mean missing out on being Faith’s mother and getting to bring that bright little life into the world?

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

But aside from all of that, it had been two years since she’d last seen him in person. It was the longest she’d gone without seeing him since they’d met, and despite all that had happened since that last meeting—like a whole, new person she’d given birth to, not that she was counting—it turned out that she was still weak.

That wasn’t something she had expected to find out tonight. The gala had been such a success. She had finally felt redeemed. On the arduous walk home, she’d found herself thinking that this was a new leaf turned. That she was truly moving on with her life and making it everything she wanted it to be now. With what she had and who she was now. Having nothing to do with the past.

And now here he was. Literally on her doorstep.

Another too-complicated, not un-positive emotion rose in her, but she tried to tamp it down. She stepped back and beckoned him in.

“It’s a blizzard out there and we’ll make a snowdrift in the front hall if we stand here like this,” she said, frowning at him. Crossly, she hoped. Like this was an annoyance, not a catastrophe.

Like that was all he was to her now. Because that was all he ought to have been.

Vesuvius seemed dazed as he shuffled inside—not his usual, masterful stride, which was strange—and then looked around as if he’d never seen the interior of a brownstone before. Which, if she considered it for a moment, he probably had not. When would he have had occasion to spend time in Gilded Age Chicago? She didn’t think he’d ever been to the Midwest of the United States before, much less this city.

She looked around too, wondering what this house that she thought was the finest she’d ever seen looked like to a king.

He had been very generous when he’d told her they could never see each other again. When he’d made his final decision—and she didn’t like to think about those days. How desperate she had been, how brokenhearted and bereft. Loving on the one hand that he was the kind of man who felt so deeply about his duty to his people, and yet on the other, feeling deeply betrayed that he could not feel that kind of loyalty to her.

She had not wanted his money. She had not wanted the gifts he’d given her anyway, settlements that would keep her then-unborn daughter cared for and more than comfortable for the rest of her life. Settlements that she had told him, unflinchingly, had made her feel like a whore after all.

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He had flinched too, but he had insisted.

Aeryn had allowed herself such grand ideas when she’d left Liandero that last time. She would not touch a penny, she had vowed. She would not take his guilt money and allow him to think that somehow offset his refusal to be her lover, her partner, and her daughter’s father.

She would not allow him to pay his way out of the mess he’d made of her life.

But reality had set in, the way it always had, in her parents’ unpretentious living room in a quiet suburb outside the Loop. She had poured out the whole story to them, finally telling them what had been going on with her the previous three years. Making her sudden obsession with European getaways make sense, she supposed, but she was sure the news that she was pregnant and decidedly unmarried disappointed them deeply.

Not because they were the sort of people to pass judgment and condemn her. But because she was certain that they had wanted better for her than this. Better than the secret mistress to a king. Then discarded by him, pregnant and alone.

That was not how they’d raised her.

Aeryn and her mother had cried. Her mother had held her hand and hugged her close, and had told her fiercely that one way or another, they’d figure it all out.

It was her father who had stayed silent. And only after clearly turning it all over in his head a few times had he looked her way and held her gaze.

She’d seen no criticism there. Aeryn hadn’t understood how much she’d expected to until then, when the lack of it made a new sob lodge in her chest.

I don’t know anything about a king and I don’t want to, her father had said. But I don’t know that I’d turn down an easier life for you and for your child out of spite. Or pride. She’d made a soft noise, but he’d carried on in his usual quiet, direct way. Maybe you got to this place in a way you don’t like, but you never have to worry again, Aeryn. That’s the long and short of it, and I can’t see adding insult to injury.

But Dad, she’d started, protesting.

Take the money, he’d urged her. He’d held her gaze. Doesn’t seem to me that you can get rid of it anyway, so you might as well use it for good.

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And Aeryn had tried. Oh, how she had tried.

In order to keep her job at the museum, she’d had to tell them that she could no longer work on the Liandero collection that had been the reason she’d spent so much time in Europe, and had met Vesuvius in the first place. And because she could not expose him—and not only because she had signed NDAs to ensure she never would—she’d had to tell her academic mentor, who had been instrumental in getting her a coveted position at the famed Chicago art museum in the first place, why. Why she would turn her back on what should have surely been the triumph of her career.

She’d had to invent a reckless, one-night affair with some nameless playboy in some other European country that had nothing to do with Liandero or Vesuvius. She’d had to embarrass and diminish herself in the eyes of her colleagues—but, in the end, she’d decided that had been a small price to pay.

Because she’d also bought this house, outright, in a celebrated part of her favorite city in all the world. She knew while still pregnant that she could afford to give her child a marvelous life, filled with opportunity, from education to whatever else her daughter might come to desire. She had been able to recover quickly from Faith’s birth when it happened, not just because her parents had helped out so much, but because she’d had the means to hire night nurses and nannies to help her round the clock. She’d been able to get back to work and to repair her reputation because she knew that Faith was in excellent hands.

She had suffered not at all, and sometimes when she was brutally honest with herself in the small hours of very long nights, she felt guilty about that.

And now, currently, the source of that guilt was standing in her foyer, looking…beset.

When Aeryn had never seen Vesuvius anything but extraordinarily controlled except, perhaps, when he was naked, and in bed, and undone—

But there was absolutely no need to go down that road.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him, when he did not speak. When he continued to look around as if he couldn’t fathom where he was. She couldn’t understand it. “Why on earth are you staggering around in weather like this? You do realize that people die in these conditions, don’t you? Surely it snows in the mountains where you come from too. You should know better.”

His gaze seemed unfocused, but it sharpened on her then. There was snow matted in that rich, dark brown hair of his. It had a tendency toward curling, but he’d always kept it at what she felt was a roguish sort of length for a man with a throne. Maybe that was the only rebellion he truly intended to embrace.

Yet when his eyes met hers, regrettably, they were still that piercing, intense hazel that seemed to sink deep into her, even now. Like a weapon, she tried to tell herself.

But she felt it more like a caress, intimate and consuming.

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“What mountains?” he asked.

She tugged her gaze from his because he was dripping now, the snow melting from his body, right here in this foyer where she had vowed to forget him more times than she could count. Aeryn was convinced that this was either some kind of strange dream, or perhaps she was the one who’d succumbed to the snow, and was even now slumped somewhere along the Magnificent Mile, slowly freezing to death and with no chance of discovery until the weather cleared.

But on the off chance that this was real and King Vesuvius was actually in her house in Chicago, Illinois, instead of off in his royal palace in a little wedge of an ancient alpine kingdom between Italy and Liechtenstein, she thought she’d better fetch him a towel.

“Wait here,” she said, her frown beginning to feel a lot more like a scowl. “How long have you been outside?”

“Too long,” he said, and there was something almost haunted about his expression then. Maybe even confused—but this was Vesuvius. He had never been confused about anything in his life, mostly because it had been tightly plotted for him before he drew his first breath. “It was… It was a long walk.”

“From where?” Aeryn shot back at him. “When have you ever been allowed to wander about on your own? Surely you should have an entourage or two?”

“An entourage.” He repeated that, then frowned back at her.

Again with that look that couldn’t possibly be anything close to confused.

That settled strangely inside of her, but Aeryn couldn’t think about it. The more pressing issue was the puddle he was leaving on her floor, which, if she thought about it, was a bit of an apt metaphor for his…entire influence on the course of her life. Of course a snowstorm blew him in on Christmas Eve. Of course he was making her comfortable, deliberately undramatic life these days a mess.

She turned on her heel and moved across the front hall to the linen closet beneath the stairs to pull out a stack of fresh towels. When she marched back and handed them to him, for a moment, she almost thought he didn’t know what to do with them.

“You’re dripping all over my floor,” she said, and pointed, when surely he could feel his own sogginess. But then, maybe his great majesty had never actually been in a state that could be considered soggy before.

“I am,” he agreed after a moment. And after looking down as if to confirm the situation. He blinked, and then he started toweling himself off, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen him do that before. She’d never thought she would see it again, though. And this was different.

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It was clear to her that the towels weren’t exactly doing the trick. They took all the matted snow off, which was both a positive and a negative to her mind. Positive in that Vesuvius was no longer caked in snow. Negative in that she could now see him entirely too clearly.

Every part of him. Damn him.

He was named Vesuvius and it was appropriate. He was volcanically beautiful.

For he had the kind of lean, muscled form that begged to be captured and immortalized in marble and bronze, and given his station in life, likely had been. He was naturally athletic, though it also looked as if formalwear had been created specifically to honor his form. He was taller than was fair and the combination of his powerful shoulders and narrow waist often left his many throngs of admirers near to the vapors.

She had tried many times to take him apart, feature by feature to find a flaw, and she supposed she had come up with a list. His nose was a shade too bold. His jaw was a trifle too square. He was not perfect—and yet, there was something about him.

Vesuvius made an empty room feel full when he entered it. He made an overpacked room fall away when he arrived, as if no one existed but him and whoever had his attention. He seemed to carry his own atmosphere with him, perhaps even his own galaxy, and created his very own gravitational pull by simple dint of appearing.

He was a work of art in every sense of the term. Aeryn had never been able to explain it another way.

The King of Liandero was immersive and magnetic. He was impossibly compelling. One look at him turned into a stare, and it felt physically impossible to break that stare. The first time Aeryn had seen him in person she’d forgotten to breathe and had nearly made herself faint. He required a second look. Longer contemplation.

He was fascinating.

The longer she’d looked at him, the more she’d wanted to look at him more—and that had been before she’d met him.

He was funny, which should not have been a possibility in a man who lived a life so divorced from reality. He was self-deprecating. He was good at making others do the talking rather than monologuing himself, which he certainly could have done without comment, as the king of all he surveyed. Literally.

But Vesuvius always seemed genuinely interested. He was never afraid to admit he didn’t know something and always seemed eager to learn new things. Aeryn had found everything about him surprising and intriguing—and that was before she’d understood the ruinous chemistry between them. That was before she’d experienced the exquisite joy and horror of his hand on hers.

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The touch that had changed everything and set them on this path, years ago.

Vesuvius had a smile and a laugh that were both carefree and contagious, though he saved the full force of them for the private moments where he could be himself. That meant only her, he had told her once, and the two close friends he considered his brothers. Everyone else got the dutiful king.

And he was nothing if not the epitome of duty.

He had taken his throne at the tender age of twenty-two and had always conducted himself appropriately in the public eye. Oh, there had always been whispers of more salacious behavior, particularly in the company of his friend Kyriakos—currently the ruling Prince of Zaccaria, an island kingdom in the Mediterranean. It had always been the calming presence of his best friend and highest minister, the aristocratic and ruthlessly correct Saviero Cimarosa, who had usually quieted those whispers.

Vesuvius had been a revelation to Aeryn. She had not considered herself particularly naïve or foolish when she had first gone to Liandero. She had done her doctoral work on Marcellus Dano, the Lianderoan artist whose work was almost entirely the property of the Lianderoan crown. The museum had agreed that she was the perfect one to curate the collection in the Lianderoan Royal Art Gallery, representing the Chicago art museum where she’d worked in some or other capacity since interning there when she’d been an art history major at Northwestern.

Aeryn had traveled quite a bit. She’d been to most major cities in North America by that point and had been working her way around Europe. She’d spent her junior year abroad in France and had spent the summer before and after backpacking around with friends, interacting with all kinds of different people along the way.

All of this to say that she had not been some wide-eyed, idiotic farm girl with a target on her back—not least because her parents had never had a farm—when she’d found herself in the Kingdom of Liandero, face-to-face with King Vesuvius himself.

And still, it had been like being hit with a sledgehammer. She’d never quite recovered.

Now, staring at him as he stood there in her foyer, no longer caked in snow but still wet and soaked through, she felt much the same as she had back when she’d first laid eyes on him five years ago.

“You’re going to catch a terrible cold,” she said, grudgingly. “You’d better take a hot shower to warm up. I’ll see if I can find you something dry to wear. And then maybe you can tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”

She thought there was something troubled in that hazel gaze of his, but she couldn’t engage with it. Not when she was too busy trying not to free-fall back into that same dizzy, delighted space she’d been in five years ago. Something that should not have been possible, given that she knew exactly what had happened in between.

Aeryn shooed him up the stairs of the brownstone, ordering herself not to think about what she was doing. If it was anyone else she knew, turning up on her step in the middle of a blizzard on Christmas Eve of all nights, she would do the same. She wouldn’t conduct an interrogation with them half-frozen to death in her front hall.

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Or anyway, she hoped that she wouldn’t. Though she never would have thought that he would allow her to see him again, so really, she needed to accept that anything could happen.

She did not take him into her bedroom when they reached the next floor, with its attached bathroom, because that felt entirely too intimate and suggestive. And then she hated herself for thinking such a thing. Still, she led him to the guest bedroom and pointed him toward the bathroom there. Then she left him to it.

And it was possible she closed the door a little bit performatively. She could admit that. She made sure it was shut tight behind her. She was also aware that her heart was still pumping much too hard in her chest. But it wasn’t until she heard the water turn on, the old pipes kicking into gear in the old walls, that she kicked herself into gear too.

She had to go back downstairs to look in the far reaches of the linen closet for any sort of clothing that might fit him, and came up with a pair of gray sweatpants and a flannel shirt her father must have left here at some point or another, possibly when both Aeryn and Faith had succumbed to a terrible flu when she was still a tiny baby. That time was a blur, but her parents had been here, taking care of both of them. She’d forgotten that she’d never returned those clothes to him.

Now she was grateful, because she went back upstairs, put the clothes on the guest bed, and then fled the room before she heard the water turn off again.

Because the last thing she needed to do was be anywhere near a bed when Vesuvius was present. And naked. That was begging for trouble.

She ducked into her own room, exchanging the dress she’d worn to the gala for something far cozier and more protective, if she was honest. A fleecy, cozy set of lounging pants and a half-zip top that was both comfortable and in no way alluring. She even put her hair up, knotting it on the back of her head because she knew how much he liked it down. How much he liked to pull his fingers through it and, sometimes, use it to anchor her head just so, so he could keep her in place while he—

None of that, she ordered herself.

Out in the hallway again, she listened for him and heard the vague sounds of someone moving around the old redone floors in the guest room, so she quickly padded downstairs to the kitchen. She turned the burner on so the kettle she’d only had time to fill with water after she’d come home would heat, and then she went into the living room. The Christmas tree gleamed in the dark, but that was too cozy, so she turned on the lights. And the gas fire while she was at it, just in case it was too cold.

It was a few minutes later when she heard him on the stairs, and she had to order herself not to hold her breath. Moments later, she watched him come into the living room…almost gingerly. Some kind of strange awareness seemed to prickle through her then as she tried to understand why he was acting like this. Not at all his usual commanding self.

“You look like you’re hurt.” She frowned at the gash at his temple. He had rolled up the sleeves of the flannel shirt that was almost too small for him, since he was far more muscular than her father, and she could see another gash on his arm. “What on earth happened to you?”

What she meant was, how could anything happen to a man who was never alone? Who could not take a step without a security briefing and several teams in place?

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Vesuvius looked around the room and his frown grew deeper. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but at that moment, the kettle let out its piercing wail.

Aeryn hurried into the kitchen, not sure if she was relieved or annoyed that he’d been interrupted. She wasn’t surprised when he trailed after her, then looked around at the remodeled kitchen as if he’d never seen one before. It had been modernized in many respects, with glass doors that looked out over the small backyard. It also led to her greenhouse, where she grew all the plants she liked all year round and could settle in to read books even in the dead of winter. She considered it part of the medicine she used to fend off these dark Chicago winters, but then, she’d never imagined having to justify her lifestyle choices to Vesuvius, of all people.

A feeling that intensified as she watched his gaze move to the restored brick, the gleaming range, the graceful sway of the pots above the kitchen island.

She couldn’t decide if she felt embarrassed that she’d used his generosity at all, or if she was worried that he thought she was too extravagant, or if she was furious that he was here at all, looking at his handiwork.

Aeryn decided it was all three. Then she poured them both steaming mugs of tea, and set them on the counter. Perhaps with slightly more force than necessary.

“It’s a mint tea,” she told him, in case he couldn’t smell that for himself. “Very soothing. You can drink yours and then, I’m hoping, go back to whatever it is you were doing before you came here.”

She supposed she could call an embassy, or something. Alert his kingdom that he was on the loose in Chicago, because surely that had to be an error. She was certain she would have heard if a whole king was on the loose in Chicagoland. It seemed like the sort of thing that would merit a mention on the nightly news or some gossip at the museum, at the very least.

Vesuvius moved closer to the counter and then stood opposite her. And she watched as those aristocratic hands of his, always harder than expected but no less elegant, wrapped slowly around the mug of tea she’d prepared.

He was such an outrageously beautiful man, she had explored every inch of his body, and she knew him more intimately than she knew herself, in some way.

She had accepted some time ago that she was never going to get over that.

Not that it mattered.

Because the other pertinent fact about King Vesuvius of Liandero was that he was betrothed. He had been betrothed since he was a child, possibly since birth. And it did not matter that his betrothed future queen was by all accounts a hateful woman. Aeryn had always found her so herself, but then again, she understood that she was not impartial.

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Sintia had always viewed her ascension to queen as a business move. Just as Sintia had always viewed herself as the consummate businesswoman. She did not like or care about Vesuvius at all, something she made perfectly clear. Her focus, always, was on how she could enrich herself, center herself, and retain the spotlight at all times.

To say that she and Vesuvius were ill suited for one another was to vastly understate the situation, but again. Aeryn was hardly impartial.

None of that mattered at all, she reminded herself. Because Vesuvius had chosen his ambitious betrothed bride. He had chosen the duty that had been laid out for him when he was a child. He had chosen, there had been no possibility of change in his mind, and she had accepted that choice.

She might not have accepted it gracefully, but she’d accepted all the same.

And him standing here in her kitchen churned all of that up again. She told herself she resented that, plain and simple.

She blew out a breath. “It’s Christmas Eve. I don’t know why you’re here, but you can’t stay. If you have something to say, you should say it. And then go.”

It seemed to take him a long while to lift that hazel gaze of his from his mug to her. And she was sure she’d never seen that particular expression on his face before. Again, it was almost…beset.

Baffled, perhaps.

“I was in the snow,” he told her. “That’s all I remember. That and I knew I had to get here. To this address. And I recognize you.”

Now that gaze was something far more…arresting.

She could feel it everywhere.

Her heart was beating harder and faster in her chest, and surely there were words on her tongue, but she couldn’t seem to find them. He kept looking at her in that same intense, almost too intense way.

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“But I find that I cannot remember your name or who you are to me,” he told her, with a certain matter-of-factness that was supremely Vesuvius.

And also made everything inside of her seem to pull tight. Particularly when she saw a glimpse of that self-deprecating curve to his mouth that she’d used to know so well. That some part of her still wanted to kiss, as if she had never been hurt.

But he wasn’t finished. “I hope you will not be too offended,” he said, and that curve of his mouth deepened, “because as it happens, I also cannot remember myself. Not my name. Not what I’m doing here. Not a single thing to explain the fully grown man I saw in your mirror, who, as far as I’m aware, has only existed in the snow outside tonight.”

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