Booth pulled back from her, his eyes wide with shock, his cheeks flushed.
“Wendy . . . I . . .” She stepped back from him, raising both hands to her face. She was suddenly so ashamed. What if he hadn’t wanted to kiss her? What if his opinion of her had suddenly changed? What if he thought she was of loose moral character? What—
Booth pulled her close and pressed his lips against hers for the second time. They fell hard against the bookshelf behind Wendy, and a shower of loose notebooks fell around them. His lips traced the corners of her mouth.
“My light soul . . .”
With each kiss, Wendy was falling deeper into him, realizing that she would never again be able to live without his touch. She traced her fingers through his messy hair, and he smiled, tugging carefully on the light blue ribbon in her hair.
“We mustn’t go much further, otherwise, I’m not sure . . .”
“We couldn’t stop,” Wendy whispered.
“Exactly.” Booth turned away from her then and sat on the corner of his bed, pushing aside a pile of clean laundry to make room for her beside him. They both sat in silence for a moment, Booth wrapping his hand around her own.
“What do we do now?” she asked. Booth squinted in the dusty attic, his eyes trained on the ceiling. She could see that he was thinking, calculating.
“We should tell your parents that I would like to court you.”
Wendy shook her head. “No. Booth, they will never let us be together.”
“What other option do we have?”
She struggled to find a solution that wouldn’t involve her mother screaming and wailing, tugging at her own hair until Wendy acquiesced. She suddenly saw herself climbing into a black carriage, a suitcase at her side.
“Booth, they would send me away. To a boarding school. We can’t tell them. Even John said that they never would allow it.”
“John knows?”
She turned her head away from him. “John knows everything.”
“That nosy little prat.”
Booth stood and crouched in front of her, his hands resting gently on her knees.
“Wendy, even if they won’t allow it, I feel the right thing would be to tell your parents. I am fond of your family, and I will not sneak around behind their backs. That would be dishonest. I want ours to be a public love, not something we hide in the shadows.” Wendy buried her face in her hands. In her mind, she saw her mother’s reaction to Booth’s advances, the disappointment in her father’s face as he realized that his second-favorite child would fall from her rightful social status. It couldn’t happen, not now. Not until she could figure out a way to raise Booth from his status as a bookseller’s son . . .
“I can see the wheels in your head turning, Wendy. But there is no other way if we want to be together now.”
Wendy found her voice, which had been pressed back against her throat. “Booth, if we can just wait, wait until you become an accountant, wait until you have the chance to . . .”
He stood up. “To what, Wendy? How long should I wait for you? Until I am thirty and you have been betrothed to one of your father’s older colleagues? Or perhaps until you get sent off to a girls’ college? Perhaps I can climb a vine up to your window . . .”
His voice had turned cold. Wendy stood up and reached for him. He pulled her against his warm chest, and Wendy felt herself curling into him, fading into the smell of him, the intoxication of the bookseller’s son being so near. His lips traced her brow.
“I can’t wait that long for you, Wendy. You are going to have to be brave. Can you do that for me?”
Her lips opened just slightly. “I need time, Booth.”
A door slammed from below the attic, and they leapt apart from each other, Booth’s feet skittering on an empty lantern. He looked up at Wendy, annoyed.
“This is what we have to look forward to if we decide not to tell your parents.”
“Booth?” The shopkeeper’s voice echoed sharply up through the attic. “Booth, what are you doing up there? I need you to carry some books for Miss Rochester!”
Booth leapt up, snapping his suspenders and pulling on his pageboy cap. He spun back toward Wendy, putting his hands over her warm cheeks.
“Let me look at you, just as you are now, so that later I can remember the moment you became mine.” Time seemed to slow as she fixed her eyes on his perfect face, golden fragments of dust circling around it, the face that she longed to see above all others. Booth leaned his cheek against hers, and Wendy closed her long eyelashes, taking in the feel and the smell of him. A peace she had hardly known in her life welled up inside of her.
“I will remember always,” she promised. “I will remember for both of us.”