Free Never Too Late by Amara Royce

have to worry about your siblings and your mother? Where would you go? What would you want to be? What would you want to do?”
    “Such idle speculation is a waste of energy. It is dangerously fanciful.”
    “My father didn’t think so,” she replied coldly. She turned and went back to the nearest display case. “After my mother passed, he became extremely reflective and philosophical.”
    No good can come of that , he thought, but thought better of saying it aloud.
    “As much as he loved the bookshop, he’d originally wanted it as much for my mother’s sake as for his own. After she was gone, he held on to it in her memory but didn’t want me saddled with its keeping. He didn’t want to dictate my future. Every few months, he would ask me, ‘What would you do if you could do anything without reservation? ’ It became a game, actually. I started with reasonable education and travel goals and eventually embellished wildly, sometimes just to see his reaction. At one point, I wanted to be an inventor of the male version of a corset. And then I wanted to be a mortician. And then I wanted to be a harem girl.”
    “A harem girl?” He stared at her as illicit images of her flesh wrapped in sheer scarves flashed through his mind.
    “So that I could lead the harem in a revolt and subvert the entire Persian ideology of women, of course.”
    He snorted, his imagination firmly tamped down, and thought briefly of the profile from Withersby. She was certainly intellectually and philosophically capable of producing subversive documents, and she had the machinery and wherewithal to print and distribute. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The turn of their discussion had diverted him from his mission; he needed to regain focus, but her voice kept drawing him to the dark corners of his mind, to questions—and emotions—he’d ruthlessly suppressed.
    “So,” she said softly, “what would you do . . . if you could do anything without reservation?”
    He shook his head.
    She waited.
    Seconds stretched out to minutes.
    At first, he refused to consider the idea. But she simply watched him with those doe eyes, soft, sympathetic, somehow familiar. She watched him and she waited. And when he truly thought about what he wanted to do, what he would do if he had no responsibilities, no obstacles, no rules, only one answer came to him. It had nothing to do with exotic places or dazzling careers. It had nothing to do with Withersby and his clients or even with the Devin family. It had to do with this room and this moment and this luminous woman in front of him. He walked toward her slowly, tentatively, at first, but then more confidently as he found his voice.
    “What would I do if nothing stood in my way?”
    She nodded.
    “What would I do if I had no one to answer to and nowhere to be?”
    “Yes, in your wildest, freest dreams, what would you do?”
    He was close now. One more step, and her skirt would brush his trousers. He could see smile lines on her cheeks, the promise of joy and approval. Her eyes, open and frank, narrowed slightly at his approach. Her lips, full and lush, seemed on the verge of spreading in glee.
    He took one last step toward her and said, “Assuming there were no objection . . . what I would do, in my wildest dream, is kiss you.”
    She backed away, her brow furrowing, but he noticed the change in her breathing. Faster, shallower.
    “Don’t toy with me. I was being serious,” she said. He was almost certain he heard something very unladylike whispered under her breath as well. She walked toward the door.
    “I am not joking. That is what I want to do.”
    She halted and looked at him, a rather unwelcome look. “Stop. I was wrong to be so forward, so presumptuous as to ask you about your deepest desires. I had no right to ask such intimate questions, and I am duly chastised. There was no need to be snide. It’s best I return to the party.”
    “Wait! Please. I was not being snide or