“Thank you for coming, Rebecca,” he said, his voice a dark summons that set her stomach aflutter. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“Your invitation had me at a disadvantage,” she whispered. “It’s hard for me to resist the stars.” There was no need to let the man know she felt an even stronger tug toward him.

“No need to keep quiet now,” he said. “No one will hear us up here.”

“But we might hear something if we listen hard enough.”

He cocked his head. “What?”

“The music of the spheres.” Rebecca lifted her arms to the Milky Way spilling across the heavens, a frothy band of white against the eternal dark. When she was a child, she imagined the cloud of stars flowed in an unending stream from a giant’s upturned milk pail. The image still made her smile.

“Music of the spheres? That’s hokum, surely.”

“Pythagoras didn’t think so. Neither did Sir Isaac Newton,” she told him. “There is a demonstrable relationship between sound and mass and movement.”

John stood silent for a moment. Wind sighed through the garden below. An owl hooted in the distant woods. No grand symphony dropped to them from the sky.

“I don’t hear anything out of the ordinary,” he said.

“I’m not surprised. I’m convinced it’s not something we can hear with our ears,” Rebecca said. “But I believe if I listen hard enough, someday I’ll hear the music of the spheres with my heart.”

“Then I’ll have to trust you to describe it to me, since my heart is probably not able to perceive anything so sublime. But there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, and I expect to see some fireworks in the sky. Come.”

He led her to a place roughly in the center of the roof, near the octagonal skylights that looked down into Somerfield Park’s foyer four floors below. If the foyer’s crystal chandelier had been lit, this would have been a wonderful vantage point to spy on the nocturnal comings and goings in the great house.

Next to the skylights, John had made what looked like a camp bed. There were a couple of straw ticks topped with a feather one, so that it reached Rebecca’s mid-calf. He’d layered several blankets on the ticks. He blew out the candle and set the holder down on the roof beside the mattresses. “What’s this?”

“It’s chilly here on the roof, so I figured we’d need blankets,” he said. “And is there a better position for stargazing than flat on your back?” She’d often taken a quilt from her bed and lain out on her terrace to watch the stars wheel overhead. “No, I suppose not.”

He lifted one corner of the blankets.

“John, did you even think for a moment about how improper this is?”

“You mean did it occur to me that this is a thinly veiled attempt to get you into my bed? Of course. But you can’t deny it’s also a sensible way to stay warm and look at the night sky. Two birds. One stone.”

He caught up her hand and brought it to his mouth for a soft kiss.