“Probably not,” Tyb admitted, not bothering to glance about to find out the hour. Still, private conversation or no, it hadn’t been the sort of thing he’d been at liberty to say in public, ‘happy valentine’s’, had it? There was to be no yelling about that date of celebration when no one was supposed to imagine you had anything to celebrate. Maybe he ought to have made a show of passing out a card to some random girls in the street, just so as to make it look like he was looking? (He was a little relieved he hadn’t thought of this earlier.)

And he couldn’t disagree with Elsie’s next remark, either. There was no way he could bring himself to quite let go of her now that she was here and so warm against him. If her head made a home on his shoulder, he really didn’t think he’d mind. “So much better,” Tyb told her, grinning in spite of the fact she couldn’t see his face, grinning purely at his good luck.

He did pull back slightly so that he could look her in the eye to add, a serious lilt to his expression even as he said the words in teasing: “And you know you’re worth the wait.” Oh, the wait was unbearable - the length of an evening, another month before the next one, a year or three before enough might be altered in their situation to make a change of it - but even having her here alone for the scarcest minute managed to remind him how desperately he liked being with her.

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