He had no answer.
The conservatory felt suddenly stifling, its humidair heavy in his lungs. The blooms watched with bright, indifferent beauty.
Clara placed her hand on his arm.
The touch was light, barely a pressure through coat and linen, yet it seared. Warmth spread beneath her fingers, and something in his chest tightened.
“You’re not your past, Samuel,” she said softly. “And she is not your punishment.”
Her words settled beneath his ribs and detonated.
“What if I ruin her?” The question broke free before he could stop it, raw with a fear he had not dared to give voice. “What if my caring for her destroys the very thing I’m trying to protect? What if I become exactly what I’ve spent my life guarding against?”
Clara’s smile held a thread of sadness, as if she had expected this. “What if you’re both already flawed in ways that don’t matter—and perfect in ways that do?”
Samuel stared at her, his mouth parting around a response that refused to form.
“She sees you,” Clara continued, gentle and inexorable. “Not the Viscount. Not the paragon of propriety. Not the man who never makes mistakes because he never allows himself to want anything enough to risk them. She sees you,Samuel.” Her gaze sharpened. “And that terrifies you far more than any fear of ruining her.”
She withdrew her hand, stepped back, and smoothed her skirts with practiced grace.
“I will not tell you what to do,” she said. “That has never been my way. But I will tell you this. The walls you have built are impressive. They’ve kept you safe for fifteen years, and they have kept you alone.” She moved toward the door, pausing at the threshold to look back at him. “Consider whether safety is worth the price you have been paying for it.”
Then she was gone, her rose-colored silk vanishing around the corner, leaving Samuel among orchids and palms with her words lingering in the air.
He stood there, watching the light shift through the glass, watching condensation trace slow patterns down the panes. The vine continued its climb toward the ceiling, growing without permission, reaching for the light simply because that was what living things did.
The choice before him felt suddenly simple, and impossibly complicated. Remain behind his walls, safe and alone, or step through the breach Clara had made and risk everything on the possibility that she was right.
That they might be perfect in all the ways that mattered.
That the ruins he and Alice had made of themselves might somehow form the foundation of something worth building.
Samuel pressed his palm against the glass, feeling the cool surface warm beneath his touch.
For the first time in fifteen years, he moved.
CHAPTER 16
Alice had walked farther than she intended, drawn along the shaded path by the peculiar quality of light filtering through the orchard’s gnarled branches. The afternoon had grown long, shadows stretching across the grass, and she let her feet carry her away from the house. Away from whispers and weighted glances, away from everything she did not know how to face.
The glove still pressed against her hip.
She had meant to discard it. Each morning since the library, she had told herselftodaywould be the day she surrendered this last piece of evidence. This talisman she had no business keeping. Yet it remained in her pocket, worn soft by the friction of her movements, a secret held tight against her skin.
The orchard spread around her in rows of twisted trunks and reaching branches, apple trees that had witnessed generations of Hallworths grow, marry, and die beneath their watch. Fallen petals carpeted the ground in drifts of white and pale pink, and the air smelled of green wood and the faint sweetness of fruit beginning to form. It was quiet here—the particular quiet country estates offered to those who knew where to seek it—and she had thought solitude might provide the clarity she needed.
She had been wrong.
Her mind circled the same questions it had grappled with for days. His breakfast defense, spoken with cold fury. The corridor confrontation, where anger had crackled between them. The conservatory, where Clara had disappeared with him and emerged alone, her expression suggesting conversations Alice was not meant to overhear. And beneath it all, like a current running deep underground, the library—his hands, his mouth, the desperate tenderness with which he had taken her apart and then put himself back together without including her.
She brushed her fingers against the petals on a low-hanging branch and watched them scatter.
What did he want from her?
The question offered no answer. He defended her with passion, avoided her with precision, kissed her with desperation, then concealed the evidence of their encounter as if it were a crime. The contradictions formed a pattern she could not read, a code written in a language she had never learned.
A sound reached her. Footsteps on the soft earth, too deliberate to be a gardener’s, too hesitant to belong to anyone who fit easily here.
