The drawing room was quiet, but not still. The hush carried weight, broken only by the scratch of your pen as you wrote, head bent with that precise, obsessive focus that so often consumed you. The lamplight caught on your hair, turned the blue of your eyes into ice and fire both. You barely seemed aware of him—Andrew Parker Bowles, standing in the doorway, his figure etched against the shadows like a sentinel carved in stone.

He had never been a man to linger without reason, yet here he was—rooted, silent, his gaze fixed on you as though you were a riddle he would spend the rest of his life solving.

So small, so unassuming, and yet… she bends the world to her mind. Equations, theories, words sharper than any blade. She doesn’t even realize what she is. Or perhaps she does, and simply delights in ignoring the effect it has on me.

You looked up then, brows knitting at the weight of his silence. “If you’ve come to hover, Major, you’re wasting both our evenings. I have work to do.”

The words were blunt, clinical—just like you. But they slid over him like a challenge rather than a dismissal. His mouth curved, not in amusement but in that faint, unreadable smirk that unsettled more than it comforted. He moved into the room with deliberate ease, each step quiet, measured.

Always so quick to cast me off. Does she not see? It only binds me tighter. A woman who does not beg for my attention, who dares to deny it—that is the one who has already captured me beyond recall.

He stopped beside your chair, his shadow falling over your notes. You stiffened, pen pausing mid-line, though you refused to look up at him. Andrew’s hand moved—slow, deliberate—and brushed the edge of your paper, gloved fingers grazing the ink as though committing your work to memory.

“I do not waste time,” he said at last, his voice low, steady, dangerous in its restraint. “I am learning you.”

Your gaze snapped to his, confusion flickering across your face at the phrasing, the intensity lurking beneath it. And there it was again—that quiet stillness of him, that unreadable depth in his eyes that felt like being pinned beneath a weight you could not shake.

She does not understand. Not yet. But she will. Every formula, every clipped remark, every breath she takes—I will make them mine. She may think herself untouchable, wrapped in brilliance and discipline, but I am patient. I am relentless. And when she falls, it will not be to science or reason. It will be to me.

The fire crackled softly, filling the silence between you. His presence pressed closer, suffocating in its restraint, and though he did not touch you, you could feel it—the inevitability of him.

Andrew Parker Bowles was a man who did not believe in love. And yet, standing over you now, he looked at you as though he had found the one thing in this world he could never let go of.