Passion by Lauren Kate Page B

girl he’d already lost and the girl he had to save.
    “I’m sorry,” he whispered. This was exactly why he was so terrible as an Anachronism. He got completely lost in the smal est of things.
    One touch of her skin. One look into her deep hazel eyes. One whi of the scented powder along her hairline. One shared breath in the cramped space of this tiny shop.
    Lucinda winced as she looked at his cheek. In the mirror, it was bright red where she’d slapped him. Her eyes traveled to meet his—and his heart felt like it was caving in. Her pink lips parted and her head cocked slightly to the right. She was looking at him like a woman deep in love.
    No.
    There was a way it was supposed to happen. A way it had to happen. They were not supposed to meet until the party. As much as Daniel cursed their fate, he would not disrupt the lives she’d lived before. They were what kept her coming back to him.
    He tried to look as uninterested and scowly as possible. Crossing his arms over his chest, shifting his weight to create more space between them, keeping his eyes everywhere but where they wanted to be. On her.
    “I’m sorry,” Lucinda said, pressing her hands over her heart. “I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never done anything like that.…” Daniel wasn’t going to argue with her now, though she’d slapped him so many times over the years that Arriane kept a tal y in a lit le spiral notebook marked You’re Fresh.
    “My mistake,” he said quickly. “I—I thought you were someone else.” He’d already interfered with the past too much, rst with Lucia in Milan, and now here. He began to back away.
    “Wait.” She reached for him. Her eyes were lovely hazel orbs of light pul ing him back. “I feel almost as if we do know one another, though I can’t quite remember—”
    “I don’t think so, I’m afraid.”
    He’d made it to the door by then, and was parting the curtain on the window to see if Cam was stil outside. He was.
    Cam’s back was to the shop, and he was making animated gestures, tel ing some fabricated story in which he was surely the hero. He could turn around at the slightest provocation. Then Daniel would be caught.
    “Please, sir—stop.” Lucinda hurried toward Daniel. “Who are you? I think I know you. Please. Wait.” He’d have to take his chances on the street. He could not stay here with Lucinda. Not when she was acting like this. Not when she was fal ing in love with the wrong version of himself. He’d lived this life before, and this was not how it had happened. So he had to flee.
    It kil ed Daniel to ignore her, to go away from Lucinda when everything in his soul was tel ing him to turn around and y right back to the sound of her voice, to the embrace of her arms and the warmth of her lips, to the spel binding power of her love.
    He yanked the shop door open and ed down the street, running at the sunset, running for al he was worth. He did not care at al what it looked like to anyone else in town. He was running out the fire in his wings.
    SEVEN

    SEVEN
    SOLSTICE
    HELSTON, ENGLAND • JUNE 21, 1854
    Łuce’s hands were scalded and splotchy and tender to the bone.
    Since she’d arrived at the Constances’ estate in Helston three days before, she’d done lit le more than wash an endless pile of dishes. She worked from sunrise to sunset, scrubbing plates and bowls and gravy boats and whole armies of silverware, until, at the end of the day, her new boss, Miss McGovern, laid out supper for the kitchen sta : a sad plat er of cold meat, dry hunks of cheese, and a few hard rol s. Each night, after dinner, Luce would fal into a dreamless, timeless sleep on the at ic cot she shared with Henriet a, her fel ow kitchen maid, a bucktoothed, straw-haired, bosomy girl who’d come to Helston from Penzance.
    The sheer amount of work was astonishing.
    How could one household dirty enough dishes to keep two girls working twelve hours straight? But the bins of food-caked plates kept