“Step,” the Duke murmured.
Gwen stepped. He had not taken her hand. She felt his presence to her left, an inch beyond the folds of her cloak. She found the gravel by sound rather than sight.
Her body adjusted quickly, as bodies did when they were allowed to be clever.
“Again,” he instructed.
She walked. The ground told her what she needed. Here, the crunch shallowed. Here, the stones were larger. Here, a root had lifted the path, so she must raise her foot an inch.
She had known these things all her life and yet had never listened to them with her eyes closed.
“Do you still think the windows are watching you?” the Duke asked.
“Yes,” Gwen replied, before she could stop herself. Then, she listened. Nothing but the slow, even breath of the hedge and the distant, watery cough of the river. “Perhaps not.”
“You do not trust me… Say it.”
“I do not trust you.”
“Good,” he uttered. “Now, allow me to earn some of what you withhold.”
“How?”
“By returning you to the power of your own senses.”
“That is not yours to return,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “It is yours to claim.”
They came to the little bend near the plane tree. Gwen felt it as a cooler patch in the air, as if the tree’s hand still shadowed the ground. The Duke said nothing and kept pace.
She did not need his voice to know he was there. She knew it as one knows the shape of one’s own hands in the dark.
He halted. She halted as well. The cravat remained gentle on her eyes. She had thought it would chafe, but it did not. It freed.
The thought surprised her so much that she laughed quietly, as if she had caught herself in some small and novel sin.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Color without edges,” she replied softly. “Myself, oddly. I hear the gravel. I can count my heartbeat. I know where you stand.”
“Where do I stand?”
“A little too close for comfort.” She felt his smile, though she could not see it.
“You may ask me to move,” he offered.
“Do so.”
He shifted a pace away.
The air cooled at once. She missed the warmth and scolded herself for it.
“Now,” he said, “walk with me for five more minutes. Then, we will sit. You may remove the silk when you choose. You may keep it if you prefer. The choice will always be yours while you are with me.”
Always is a dangerous word. It tempts foolish women to believe that a gentleman means what he says beyond the hour in which he says it.
Yet the word did not feel like bait in his mouth. It felt like a line he had carved into stone for himself as much as for her.
