Alice turned.
Samuel stood beside a gnarled trunk perhaps twenty feet away, and the sight of him nearly caused her to buckle.
He looked undone.
His cravat hung loose, the knot abandoned, revealing a patch of bare skin that yanked her mind back to the library and the sensation of pressing her mouth to that exact spot. His hair was disordered. Evidence of turmoil he could no longer contain. His waistcoat was unbuttoned. His coat absent. For the first time since she had known him, he looked like a man who no longer cared about his appearance.
His gray eyes found hers across the distance, and Alice felt her pulse respond before her mind could catch up.
He moved toward her.
There was none of his usual precision in his approach. No measured steps, no controlled posture. He walked as if navigating uncertain ground, hands hanging loose at his sides, jaw tight with determination…or fear.
Alice held her position, though every instinct screamed at her to retreat.
He stopped an arm’s length away.
“I need to tell you something.” His voice was rough, scraped raw by emotions he could no longer hide. “And I need you to listen. Even if, especially if, you do not wish to hear it.”
She should speak. Should deploy the wit that had always served as her armor, should cut the tension with a clever remark and restore distance.
But her throat constricted around words that refused to form.
So she only nodded.
Samuel drew a breath that seemed to cost him.
“Charlotte.” The name came out, his voice faltering. “You know the tale. Perhaps better than anyone.”
The afternoon light fell across his features, highlighting the tension in his jaw and the desperation in his eyes.
“I built walls,” he continued, voice dropping to a whisper. “Protocols upon protocols.Control upon control. I told myself it was protection for others—from my own worst impulses. But Clara…” He broke off, swallowed, then forced the words through. “Clara made me see I was lying to myself. The walls were not protecting anyone. They were keeping me safe from the possibility of caring enough to be hurt.”
Alice’s fingers found the rough bark of the nearest trunk, steadying herself against its solid presence.
“I have spent the past fifteen years afraid of repeating my failures,” he said, and his gray eyes met hers with painful intensity. “Afraid that if I allowed myself to want someone, I would destroy them through the very act of wanting. That my passion, if I ever let myself feel it, would become the cause of someone else’s ruin.”
His words hung in the orchard air, weighted with years of self-imposed penance.
“And then I met you.”
Alice’s pulse quickened—at her throat, her wrists, the tender chambers of her heart, which began beating to a rhythm she did not recognize.
“You,” he said, voice cracking, “with your wit and wildness, and your absolute refusal to be anything other than what you are. You, who looked at my walls and walked through them as if they werepaper. You, who made me desire things I had forbidden myself to want.”
A petal drifted down between them, pale pink against the air.
“I love you, Alice.”
The confession hit beneath her ribs and detonated.
“I love you,” he repeated, as if the words needed to be spoken twice to become real. “And I am terrified that loving you will destroy us both. But I cannot, will not, spend another day pretending otherwise. Not when pretending costs more than the truth ever could.”
Alice stepped back.
It was instinct. Her body responded to the intensity in his eyes before her mind could intervene. Her fingers fumbled with a fallen petal on her shoulder, brushing it aside with a gesture that had nothing to do with the petal and everything to do with needing something, anything, to occupy her hands.
He loved her.
