“He’s grown so much,” Tobias said quietly, watching Henry with an expression she couldn’t quite decipher. “Every time I look at him, I see changes I missed.”
“Children grow quickly at this age. By the time he’s three, he’ll be an entirely different creature.”
Henry toddled over, his small hands overflowing with clover blossoms. He deposited the entire collection into Amelia’s lap with great ceremony, then immediately returned for more.
“He’s making you a garden,” Tobias observed, amusement colouring his voice.
“So it seems.” She gathered the flowers carefully, touched by her son’s simple generosity. “Though I suspect the garden itself might object to being relocated piecemeal.”
They lapsed into comfortable silence, both watching Henry’s determined harvesting. The morning sun had grown warm, painting everything in shades of honey and gold. Somewhere nearby, birds sang. The breeze carried the scent of roses and freshly turned earth.
It was, Amelia realized with dawning wonder, perfect.
Not the rigid, controlled perfection Edward had demanded—every flower in its place, every moment scheduled and appropriate. But it was what she’d wanted it to be—wild and natural in its beauty.
She glanced at Tobias and found him already watching her. Their eyes met, and the world seemed to pause—the way it had last night in the drawing room, when they’d stood so close she could count his heartbeats.
“Amelia—” he began, his voice rough.
But Henry chose that moment to discover a particularly ambitious bee and shrieked with mingled delight and alarm. The spell shattered. They both moved instinctively toward the boy—protective, immediate—and Tobias reached him first, scooping him up and away from the industrious insect.
“It’s all right, lad. See? The bee is far more interested in the flowers than in you.”
“Big bee!” Henry announced, his fear forgotten in favour of scientific observation. “Very big bee, Papa!”
“Indeed it is. Quite possibly the largest bee in all of Kent.”
“All of England!”
“All the world,” Amelia added, because apparently hyperbole was contagious.
Henry giggled at their escalating absurdity, and the moment of tension dissolved into something lighter. Safer.
But as Tobias set Henry back on the grass and the boy resumed gathering flowers, their hands brushed against each other.
It was nothing. The merest contact—skin against skin for perhaps a heartbeat, maybe less. Fingers grazing in the space between them.
It was everything.
Electricity arced through Amelia’s veins, sharp and immediate and utterly devastating. She jerked her hand back as though burned, her pulse suddenly wild, her skin tingling where they’d touched.
When she dared glance at him, Tobias was staring at his own hand with an expression of almost comical surprise. As though he, too, had felt that jolt. That impossible connection.
Their eyes met again, and this time there was no Henry-induced interruption to save them. No convenient distraction. Just the two of them and the truth written plainly across both their faces:
This attraction—this whatever-it-was burning between them—was mutual. Undeniable. Growing stronger despite every effort to contain it.
And absolutely, categorically forbidden.
“Henry adores you,” Amelia said abruptly, desperately, her voice emerging too loud in the quiet garden. She looked away, fixing her gaze on her son rather than the man beside her who’d become entirely too dangerous. “He’ll miss you when… when things change.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say it explicitly. When you leave again. When I remarry. When this impossible interlude ends, and we return to being what we’re supposed to be—cordial relations bound by duty rather than… than whatever this was.
Tobias was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone rough, as though the words cost him something.
“So will I.”
The confession hung in the sun-warmed air between them, weighted with meanings she didn’t dare examine. She opened her mouth—to say what, she had no idea. To retreat into propriety’s safety, perhaps. To build back the walls they’d somehow demolished without meaning to.
