Aries's reaction happened in the hallway.
This was not where Lena had expected it to happen — she'd anticipated the sitting room, or the garden, or the library, some space with enough room for a man of his dimensions to have a significant reaction in. The hallway was narrow. He was large. The combination created a specific kind of compression that she registered as significant before she understood the full shape of what was happening.
She'd come in from the garden with Damon, both of them still carrying the particular quality of the morning's opening — Damon with his new, careful fullness, the practised management gone and something more tentative and genuine in its place, like a room the windows have been opened in for the first time. She'd come through the back door and up the hall an
