Alice watched him with an expression he could not categorize, something between recognition and tenderness, her usual defenses absent. Her fingers, hovering in the air, finally moved toward him—not to touch, but to indicate understanding, to bridge the space between confession and acceptance.
“We make such lovely matching monsters,” she said softly. “Both of us building prisons from our worst moments, convinced that punishment will transform guilt into something we can live with.”
The wind shifted, rustling through the grass, and Alice swayed against the fence post. Her balance, precarious from the emotional weight of their exchange, failed her for just a moment. A slightstumble, hardly more than a shift in posture, but enough to send her shoulder toward the weathered wood at an angle that promised splinters.
Samuel reached out.
The movement was instinctive, his hand finding her arm with the precision of a man trained to catch falling things. His fingers closed around the soft fabric of her sleeve, steadying her, and in the process, his palm brushed against the back of her hand.
The contact sent something electric through his chest.
She did not pull away.
Alice’s fingers remained where they had landed, her skin warm beneath his touch, her eyes meeting his with an intensity that made breathing suddenly difficult. The moment stretched in the golden morning light, while birdsong rose and fell around them, and the distant sounds of the picnic drifted upward.
Her hand turned slowly beneath his, palm meeting palm, fingers intertwining with a deliberateness that could not be mistaken for accident. Samuel felt the slight tremor in her touch, felt the answering tremor in his own, felt the significance of this simple contact after everything they had confessed.
They stood there for several heartbeats—perhaps five, perhaps fifty—time having lost all meaning in the charged air between them. Samuel noted every sensation. The warmth of her skin, the delicate bones beneath his fingers, the way her breath quickened to match his own. He understood, with sudden clarity, that this was not merely attraction or desire. This was something far more dangerous.
This was the beginning of everything he had spent his life avoiding.
“Lord Crewe! Lady Alice!”
Clara’s voice carried up from the hillside, shattering the moment. Samuel released Alice’s hand too quickly, perhaps, but the alternative was being found in circumstances requiring explanations he was not prepared to offer.
Alice stepped back, her cheeks flushed. Her ribbon had come loose again, a tendril of blue silk escaping to dance against her shoulder, but she made no move to secure it.
“We should return.” Her voice regained some of its usual lightness, though Samuel sensed a tremor beneath.
“We should.”
Neither moved.
Clara’s voice rose again, closer now, accompanied by the sounds of guests beinggathered for whatever activity Crispin had planned next. The moment was fading, the world reasserting its claims on two people who had temporarily forgotten it.
Alice met his eyes one final time. In her gaze, Samuel saw everything they had not spoken aloud. The understanding that something fundamental had shifted, the acknowledgment that their defenses had failed, and the unspoken agreement that whatever came next would be navigated together.
Then she turned and walked back toward the picnic, her green skirts whispering through the tall grass.
Samuel followed.
They rejoined the group separately, maintaining the distance society demanded, their faces arranged into expressions of pleasant neutrality that fooled no one who knew how to look. Clara caught his eye as he approached, her knowing smile suggesting she had seen more than their delayed return, but she said nothing beyond a polite inquiry about whether he had found his handkerchief.
“I did,” Samuel replied, though his hand remained conspicuously empty. “It was exactly where I hoped.”
He did not look at Alice. He could feel her presence across the crowded blankets as if she were standing beside him, their fingers still intertwined,their confessions still hanging in the air between them.
Something had changed. Something irreversible and terrifying.
Samuel accepted a glass of lemonade from a passing footman and pretended to listen to the baron’s thoughts on drainage, while every nerve in his body remained attuned to the woman in the green dress who had stripped away the last of his carefully constructed armor and left him exposed and uncertain.
CHAPTER 14
Sleep eluded her.
Alice lay in her chamber watching moonlight crawl across the ceiling in shifting bands as clouds drifted past the window. Each time she closed her eyes, she felt his hand in hers again, the warmth of his palm, the faint tremor in his fingers, the significance of that contact. The hillside played behind her eyelids in vivid repetition. His voice stripped of formality, her confession spilling free, their fingers interlacing with a deliberateness that could not be mistaken for accident.
She turned onto her side, then back again. Pressing her face into the pillow, she tried to will her mind quiet, but her body hummed with restless energy. The sheets tangled around her legs, toowarm, too confining when all she wanted was to be elsewhere.
