The embers glowed red in the grate. The lamp finally hissed out, leaving them in shadow broken only by the dying firelight.
She should ask what this meant. Where they went from here.
But speech felt like a blunt instrument, and she was tired—worn down by sensation, emotion, the exhaustion that followed complete surrender.
His arm tightened around her waist.
“Sleep,” he murmured against her hair, the word both command and invitation.
Alice closed her eyes.
The embers crumbled into ash. Their discarded clothing lay around them in quiet proof. The Turkish carpet held them in its rough embrace, and somewhere between one breath and the next, Alice drifted into sleep with Samuel’s heartbeat steady beneath her cheek and his fingers still tracing patterns she could not decipher.
Tomorrow would bring consequences. Questions. Complications.
But tonight, she slept in his arms, and that was enough.
Dawn arrived with the harsh light that reveals everything one would rather not see.
Alice woke slowly, consciousness returning in fragments. The scratch of wool against her cheek, the lingering scent of smoke from a fire long dead, the unfamiliar light filtering through curtains she did not recognize. Her body felt heavy with languor, and for a moment she could not remember where she was.
Then memory rushed back, vivid and sharp.
Her hand reached across thecarpet before her mind fully caught up, seeking the warmth she expected to find. Her fingers met only cold wool.
She sat up.
The library resolved itself in gray and gold, dawn light streaming through curtains that had been drawn sometime in the night. A heavy wool blanket lay pooled around her waist—one she had not brought and certainly had not arranged.
He had covered her.
The realization landed somewhere between comfort and cruelty.
Alice pulled the blanket tighter, suddenly aware of her nakedness in a way she had not been hours ago. Last night, she had felt desired—fully present in her own skin. Now she felt exposed. A woman on a library carpet at dawn, surrounded by the evidence of her recklessness.
Except there was no evidence.
She scanned the room, noting absences with the same merciless precision Samuel might have used. His coat was gone. His cravat was gone. His shirt, his waistcoat, every piece of clothing that had fallen to the floor during their mutual undressing, gone.
The lamp’s wick had been trimmed. The grate swept clean, as if no fire had burned at all. Even the carpet looked tended—impressions smoothed, signs erased.
He had not simply left.
He had cleaned.
A man who fled in haste might be forgiven. A man who took the time to erase every trace—who restored the library to neutrality before slipping away into the dawn—was something else entirely.
Her nightdress lay folded beside her. Folded.
She reached for it with hands that shook and dragged the familiar muslin over her head, grateful for the armor of cloth. She found her wrapper draped over the arm of the chair she had meant to sit in before everything changed.
She was straightening the collar when she saw it.
A glove, dark leather, tucked almost entirely beneath the mahogany leg of a reading chair. A riding glove. Supple, expensive, scuffed by use. Something that might slip unnoticed from a pocket while its owner was occupied erasing other proof.
Alice picked it up.
The leather was soft beneath her fingers, warmed only by the room. She should put it back and let a servant return it with bland efficiency.
