She left it there, this last piece of evidence, this leather talisman she had no business keeping, and walked toward a future she could not imagine wanting.
Behind her, the apple blossoms fell.
CHAPTER 17
The ballroom of Oakford Hall blazed with candles, their flames mirrored in crystal chandeliers and spilling a warm, gilded glow over the guests. Alice stood near a pillar draped in white roses, her crimson gown a statement she could not quite name. She watched the dancers with a detached air.
The gown had once felt like a significant choice. Now it seemed inevitable, deep red silk clinging to her shoulders and waist and drawing attention she could not bear. Her hair, styled by Clara's maid, was swept up and pinned with pearl-tipped combs that caught the candlelight. She knew she looked like a woman ready for battle.
The irony was not lost on her. She had already lost the war.
At the far end of the ballroom, the orchestra stitched strings and woodwinds into melodies that made young people believe in impossible things. Champagne circulated on silver trays carried by footmen whose expressions hinted at years of witnessing romantic folly. Conversation ebbed and flowed around her—gossip, critiques of gowns, the speculation that clung to house parties on their final nights, when secrets were formed and alliances tested.
She danced.
That was the purpose of a ball. Dancing, smiling, and engaging in conversations neither party would remember by morning. Alice moved through the motions with the practiced grace of someone who had done this so often it required no thought. The lieutenant claimed her first, Lieutenant Harrington, still pursuing her with the cheerful persistence of a man who had not yet learned to recognize refusal in a smile. She let him lead her through a country dance, responding to his comments about the evening with appropriate expressions of agreement, her body present while her mind wandered down paths it should not explore.
Three days had passed since the orchard.
Three days of avoiding and being avoided. Mealstaken at odd hours, walks timed to miss encounters, brief glances across crowded rooms that ended as quickly as they began. Samuel had retreated behind his defenses, as if he'd found new ways to seal the cracks she had slipped through, and Alice had convinced herself this was what she wanted—distance, safety, the careful preservation of the self she refused to surrender.
Telling herself had not made it true.
The glove pressed against her thigh, transferred from her morning dress to her evening gown by a compulsion she refused to examine. She had meant to leave it behind tonight, had stood before her mirror with the leather in her hands, telling herself that bringing evidence of her heartbreak to a ball was foolishness. Yet she had tucked it into the hidden pocket of her crimson silk anyway, because foolishness had become the only language she remembered.
Another partner claimed her, a baron's son whose name she immediately forgot, whose conversation about hunting required nothing from her but occasional nods. The dance swept her across the gleaming floor, past couples whose happiness seemed genuine and others whose boredom was palpable, past Clara in her silver gown exchangingglances with Crispin, whose expression suggested he was waiting for something he had orchestrated.
Alice noticed the shift before she understood its cause.
A hush descended on one section of the ballroom. Not silence, exactly, but a change in the quality of sound, a turning of heads and shifting attention. The baron's son continued speaking about the merits of various hunting dogs, oblivious to the change in atmosphere, while Alice's pulse quickened with a recognition that preceded conscious thought.
She knew.
Before she turned, before she looked, before her eyes could confirm what her body had already registered, she knew. The stillness that settled in her chest, the way her breath shortened without permission, the sudden inadequacy of the distance between herself and the ballroom doors. All of it spoke a truth she had spent three days refusing to hear.
Samuel stood in the entrance to the ballroom, and everything she had told herself about wanting distance crumbled.
He was impeccably dressed—that much remained unchanged, the dark coat and pale waistcoat emphasizing his lean frame, the formal precision of evening wear that should have rendered him indistinguishable from any other gentleman present.But something had shifted. Alice's eyes caught the detail before her mind could process it. His cravat hung slightly loosened, the careful knot relaxed just enough for society to notice. It was a small thing, barely a transgression, but from Samuel Baldwin it spoke volumes.
His walls had cracks he was no longer trying to conceal.
Alice stopped dancing.
The baron's son said something. A question, perhaps, or an expression of concern at her sudden stillness, but his words dissolved into meaningless sound as Samuel's gaze found hers across the crowded room. The distance between them stretched impossibly and insufficiently at once—thirty feet, perhaps forty, a space filled with dancers, onlookers, and the machinery of society.
Neither of them looked away.
The moment stretched beneath a hundred candles while the orchestra played, champagne flowed, and everyone else in the room blurred into background noise. Alice felt her heart pounding, the flush rising to her cheeks, and every defense she had built over the past three days proved inadequate.
He was looking at her the way he had in the orchard. With everything laid bare and a vulnerability that made her want to cross the room.
Yet she stayed where she was.
The baron's son reclaimed her attention, led her through the remaining figures of the dance, and delivered her to the edge of the floor, sensing he had lost his partner's interest long before the music ended. Alice stood among the white roses, watching Samuel navigate the crowd, the hands reaching for him, the conversations claiming him, the social obligations keeping him on the opposite side of a room that suddenly felt too small for them both.
The evening stretched before her, a test she wasn't sure she could pass.
Somewhere across the sea of silk and candlelight, Samuel Baldwin watched her watching him and waited.
