The music swelled around them, but Jillian felt as though the room had narrowed to a single point—the place where his hand held hers and his breath warmed her cheek. She wantedto step away. She wanted to step closer. She wanted a thousand contradictory things all at once.
“Miles—” she began.
He waited.
She drew in a breath that trembled just enough for him to feel it. “If we admit anything tonight… if we say anything truly honest… what then?”
He studied her, searching her expression even through the shelter of the mask, and in that silence something passed between them that was both terrifying and undeniable.
“Then,” he said quietly, “we stop pretending.”
Her lips parted. Her pulse fluttered visibly at her throat. For the first time since their marriage, Jillian felt truly exposed—not because she wore no mask, but because she wore one. It made honesty easier. It made truth inescapable.
And she realized she wanted this truth.
She wanted him.
But before she could answer, before she could take the irrevocable step forward, a bell chimed through the ballroom announcing the unmasking at midnight. The guests around them sighed with theatrical delight. Jillian and Miles stood suspended in the moment, their decision unfinished, their admission hanging between them like a fragile ornament.
Jillian exhaled shakily. “Perhaps,” she whispered, “we should discuss this… later.”
Miles inclined his head, though his eyes burned behind the mask. “Later, then.”
As the crowd moved toward the center of the ballroom to watch the ceremonial unmasking, Jillian turned slightly away to steady herself. Her heart felt too large, too full, too vulnerable. She had expected many things tonight—curiosity, gossip, entertainment—but she had not anticipated this potent mixture of longing and fear.
She had not expected Miles.
And she certainly had not expected the terrifying, thrilling possibility that her husband might truly want her, not out of duty or honor, but out of something far deeper.
Something she felt too.
The ballroom clock chimed. The crowd counted down.
And Jillian closed her eyes, aware that the mask had freed her more completely than anything else could have… but that removing it might change her life forever.
Chapter
Nineteen
Later came sooner than Jillian expected.
The unmasking had scarcely concluded before she fled the center of the ballroom—heart hammering, breath uneven, the lingering warmth of Miles’s hand haunting her skin with every step. She slipped through the press of guests, ignoring the speculative glances and teasing remarks that followed her in the wake of her haste. She needed air. She needed space. She needed?—
She did not know what she needed.
She reached the dimly lit anteroom off Lady Gilmartin’s long gallery, a small alcove meant for respite from the chaos. Or trysts. A single candelabrum glowed faintly in the corner. Beyond the archway, laughter and violins shimmered through the air, but here the world seemed miles distant.
Jillian pressed her palms to the cool marble of the window ledge, breathing deeply.
It was foolish—shockingly, dangerously foolish—how one evening in a mask could upend everything she thought she knew about herself. She had always prided herself on logic, clarity, control. Yet standing beside Miles on the dance floor, hearingthe confession in his voice, feeling the truths trembling between them…
She had never been so terrified.
She had never been so alive.
A soft footfall reached her ears. She did not turn. She knew the cadence of that step, the quiet certainty in it.
“Jillian,” Miles said gently behind her. “You left too quickly.”
