Instead, she tucked it into the pocket of her wrapper.
After that, dressing became mechanical. Buttons found their holes. Pins anchoredher hair into a semblance of respectability. Slippers slid onto feet that suddenly felt too cold.
She did not look in the mirror.
Oakford Hall was already stirring with maids beginning their rounds, the kitchen alive with breakfast preparations. Alice moved through the corridors, slipping into alcoves when footsteps approached, timing her steps to the rhythms of servants who had no reason to watch the walls.
Every creak sounded like accusation.
She reached her chamber unseen.
The door closed behind her with a soft click, and Alice stood with her back pressed to the wood, eyes shut hard against everything she did not want to feel. The glove weighed in her pocket. The taste of him lingered on her mouth. The memory of his hands, his voice saying her name as if it were something sacred.
Tears rose without permission.
She pressed her forehead to the door and let them fall—silent streams on her cheeks, no sound, no ceremony. She did not sob. She wasn’t certain she remembered how.
She had been careless. That was the truth. Five seasons of careful navigation, and she had still managed to give herself to a man who had erased every trace of their night as if it had never happened.
But worse than the leaving, worse than the cleaning, worse than the deliberate erasure, was the knowledge she could no longer deny.
Somewhere between verbal sparring and last night’s surrender, she had begun to care.
Not merely desire him. Not merely find him attractive or brilliant.
She cared about Samuel Baldwin, Viscount Crewe, with a ferocity that terrified her, and a depth she had not known she possessed.
The crack she had felt on the hillside widened now, breaking through defenses she had spent years constructing.
She cared. And caring, as she had always known, was the most dangerous thing she could do.
Alice straightened, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, and began to rebuild the walls that had failed her. The glove remained in her pocket, pressed to her hip—the single piece of proof she could not talk herself out of.
She would not cry again.
Years ago, she had promised herself she would not cry over men who left, over hopes that crumbled, over the pain of wanting something that could be taken away.
And yet her throat ached, and her eyes burned. When she finally faced the mirror, she barelyrecognized the woman who stared back—disheveled, hollow-eyed, marked by a night that had changed everything and a morning that had offered no promise at all.
The house awakened around her.
Alice Pickford stood in her room, a stolen glove hidden in her wrapper, and wondered how she had allowed herself to fall for a man who seemed to have already decided to let her go.
CHAPTER 15
Morning light streamed through the tall windows of Oakford Hall’s dining room, bright and unforgiving, revealing shadows beneath eyes and turning concealment into an act of will rather than circumstance. Alice paused at the threshold, arranged her features into the easy brightness she had perfected, and stepped inside like a woman who had slept soundly and dreamed only of bonnets.
The glove pressed against her hip, tucked into the hidden pocket of her morning dress, where it had no business being, and where she had no business keeping it. She had considered leaving it behind. She had stood before the mirror with the leather in her hands, telling herself that carrying evidence of her recklessness was foolish.
And yet she had slipped it into her pocket anyway, because foolishness, it seemed, had become her native tongue.
She saw him at once.
Samuel sat at the far end of the table, as distant from her customary seat as geometry would permit, his attention fixed on his plate with the intensity of a man deep in concentration. His jaw was set in that rigid line she knew well. The line that meant he was controlling something, forcing his face to reveal nothing of the chaos beneath. His movements as he cut his food were precise and methodical, suggesting he tasted nothing at all.
He did not look up when she entered. Nor when she greeted the baroness. He did not glance her way as she crossed the room to her chair, exchanging pleasantries with Mrs. Whitmore about the weather and with young Miss Hartley about the evening’s planned entertainment.
He simply continued eating, bite after measured bite, as if she were furniture.
