“Well, not for nearly a month,” he said wryly.
“I must have made a big impression on you, to have you wait so long,” she said sarcastically, a little of her anger peeking out.
“You did,” he said seriously, quietly.
“And that’s why you ran away?”
He nodded. “You don’t know what those few days with the Countess did to me. I couldn’t deal with anything right then.”
She smiled, and shook her head slowly. “No, I suppose you couldn’t. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there.” It wasn’t a question.
He took a deep breath. He felt odd, detached, as if he were outside his own body looking down. The words, the honest words, came out as if from someone else’s mouth.
“Yes.” There was another long pause. “You scared me more than the Countess did, in a different way. On the one hand you w
