Clockwork Princess

your hair,” he said, his breath ghosting across her cheek. “Technically, I believe that means anyone can kiss you at any time.”
    She widened her eyes at him. “Do you think they’re likely to try?”
    He touched her cheek lightly; he was wearing white chamois gloves, but she felt it as if it were his skin on hers. “I’d kill anyone who did.”
    “Well,” Tessa said. “It wouldn’t be the first time you did something scandalous at Christmas.”
    Will paused for a moment and then grinned, that rare grin of his that lit up his face and changed the whole nature of it. It was a smile Tessa had worried once was gone forever, gone with Jem down into the darkness of the Silent City. Jem was not dead, but some bit of Will had gone with him when he’d left, some bit chiseled out of Will’s heart and buried down there among the whispering bones. And Tessa had worried, for that first week just after, that Will would not recover, that he would always be a sort of ghost, wandering about the Institute, not eating, always turning to speak to someone who was not there, the light in his face dying as he remembered and fell silent.
    But she had been determined. Her own heart had been broken, but to mend Will’s, she was sure, would mean to mend her own somehow. As soon as she’d been strong enough, she had set herself to bring him tea he did not want, and books that he did, and harried him, in and out of the library, and demanded his help with training. She told Charlotte to stop treating him like glass that would break and to send him out into the city to fight, as he had been sent before, with Gabriel or Gideon instead of Jem. And Charlotte had done it, uneasily, but Will had come back from them bloody and bruised, but with his eyes alive and alight.
    “That was clever,” Cecily had said to her later, as they’d stood by the window, watching Will and Gabriel talking in the courtyard. “Being Nephilim gives my brother a purpose. Shadowhunting will mend the cracks in him. Shadowhunting, and you.”
    Tessa had let the curtain fall closed, thoughtfully. She and Will had not spoken of what had happened in Cadair Idris, the night they had spent together. Indeed, it seemed as distant as a dream. It was like something that had happened to another person, not her, not Tessa. She did not know if Will felt the same way. She knew Jem had known, or guessed, and forgave them both, but Will had not approached her again, not said he loved her, not asked if she loved him since the day Jem had left.
    It seemed that endless ages went by, though it was only about a fortnight, before Will came and found her alone in the library, and asked her—rather abruptly—if she would go for a carriage ride with him the next day. Puzzled, Tessa had agreed, privately wondering if there was some other reason he wanted her company. A mystery to investigate? A confession to make?
    But no, it had been a simple carriage ride through the park. The weather had been growing colder, and ice was riming the edges of the ponds. The bare branches of the trees were bleak and lovely, and Will made polite conversation with her about the weather and city landmarks. He seemed determined to take up where Jem had left off her London education. They went to the British Museum and the National Gallery, to Kew Gardens and to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, where Tessa finally lost her temper.
    They had been standing in the famous Whispering Gallery, Tessa leaning on the railing and gazing down into the cathedral below. Will was translating the Latin inscription on the wall of the crypt where Christopher Wren was buried—“
if
you seek his monument, look about you
”—when Tessa absently reached to slip her hand into his. He immediately drew back, flushing.
    She looked at him in surprise. “Is something wrong?”
    “No,” he said, too quickly. “I simply—I did not bring you here that I might maul you in the Whispering Gallery.”
    Tessa exploded. “I am not
asking
you to maul me in the Whispering Gallery! But by the Angel, Will, would you stop being so
polite
?”
    He looked at her in amazement. “But wouldn’t you rather—”
    “I would not rather. I don’t want you to be polite! I want you to be Will! I don’t want you to indicate points of architectural interest to me as if you were a Baedeker guide! I want you to say dreadfully mad, funny things and make up songs and be—”
The Will I fell in love with
, she almost said. “And be Will,” she