“I didn’t want to tell you. It’s possible my mother would have found them a moment later.” He had run through it many times in his own head. “But maybe not. She may have had an adult’s intuition to not pull open the door.”
She blinked at him. He was acutely afraid that she would hate him. That she would hate him for having been the agent of her destruction.
Instead, she reached out and put her hands on his shoulders. “You were a child.”
Her beauty stunned him in that moment. Not her features, which were so striking at any time, but the gentleness on her face, how it pulled him inwards.
“It wasn’t your fault. They were the adults. They should have known better.”
“But I am the adult now. I am the same age as he was when—when it happened.”
“We are the adults, but we’re not them.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“John, you’re not a married man with a family. And Henrietta isn’t your ten-year-old daughter. She is your seventeen-year-old sister.” She smirked up at him. “And she knows how to knock on a door before entering. And you know how to lock one.”
“Don’t—you acquit me too easily.” He wanted to believe her words. They felt like a balm to something inside of him that had pulsed and bled for a long time. But they were hard for him to accept.
“I’m sincere. I know how it looks—howwelook. And I understand that what you saw that day must haunt you and how you must have felt responsible. But we aren’t the same people.”
She had her hands on his chest now. His breath caught with every stray movement of her fingers.
“Every time we touch,” he said, “I take a risk. If anyone knew about us, how I feel about you, it would harm Henrietta’s chances. Her future.”
She looked up into his eyes. “It’s a risk, but it’s not thesamerisk.” She sighed, unwinding herself from him, and his body revolted against this withdrawal. “And you have to accept that, regardless of what we do, Henrietta will have a challenge before her.”
She tried to step away, but he held on to her hand. He examined it in the candlelight.
“You have ink on your hands again.”
“From the letters,” she said with a smile. “And I might have been doing a little writing before meeting you here.”
“You minx. You know what that does to me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He looked down at her fingers. “It shows you’ve been in a world all your own. Where you haven’t been thinking of me.”
“I’m always thinking of you.”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her, pressing her back on the desk until she was sitting on it. The same position as three days before but reversed.
She drew him into her, between her legs, and he realized that the desk was the perfect height for them to come together. He wanted, however, to go slowly, to savor this moment. He focused on kissing her, breathing her in and telling himself that, while he may not have Catherine forever, he had her for right now. And now there was no one here to interrupt them.
“Touch me,” she said, looking up at him. “Like you did before. In the carriage.”
He smiled at her, loving that she had enjoyed that, that she had thought about it since.
Instead of reaching underneath her skirts, however, he reached for the back of her dress.
“Patience. First, I want to see you like I did today.”
She smiled in that mischievous way. It was the same smile she had had on her face when she had bared herself to him this afternoon. And that she had worn that night, years ago, in the Tremberley gardens.
“I was so angry with you for ignoring me. I wanted to punish you.”
“You succeeded.” He leaned down and kissing the hollow of her neck, and he felt her shiver with pleasure. He drew her from the desk and spun her around so her back was facing him.
