The music swelled toward its crescendo, and Alice felt something break open inside her, some final resistance she had maintained through sheer will. She thought of her mother, of disappearing, of all the fears that had kept her running for five seasons. She thought of the glove pressed against her hip, evidence of a crime she had not known she was committing until the verdict was already rendered.
She thought of Samuel, steady Samuel, controlled Samuel, vulnerable Samuel with his walls, his cracks, and his confession of love spoken in the shade of apple blossoms.
"I want all of it." The words trembled but came out firm, pulled from deep inside. "Even if it terrifies me. I want the risk, the uncertainty, and the chance that it might destroy us both. I want." Her voice cracked, but she pushed on. "I want you, Samuel. I want to believe that we can build something that doesn’t require either of us to disappear."
His breath caught.
She felt it against her hair, felt the rise and fall of his chest, felt his grip tighten on her hand until the pressure bordered on painful. The music continued around them, but they had stopped dancing, frozen in the center of the floor while other couples swirled past, oblivious or courteous or too caught up in their own dramas to notice the one unfolding before them.
"Alice." Her name emerged like something he had been carrying for too long and could finally set down. "I would spend the rest of my life learning how to love you without constraining you. I would tear down every wall I've built if it meant standing beside you in the ruins."
Tears pricked at her eyes. Not from sorrow, but from relief, recognition, and the joy of being understood in ways she had not known she needed.
"Then we rebuild together," she whispered.
The music wound toward its end, and Alice became aware of the ballroom reasserting itself around them. The watching eyes, the whispered speculation, the weight of society's attention trained upon two people who had just declared themselves in the most public manner possible.
She did not care.
Samuel's hand remained in hers, their fingers intertwined in a deliberate grip that communicated everything words had failed to express. The finalnotes faded into silence, and the applause that followed felt distant, background noise in a world that had narrowed to the space between his gray eyes and her dark ones, the small distance that remained between two people who had finally, terrifyingly, chosen to close it.
"People are staring," she said, her voice finding a hint of its usual lightness.
"Let them." His thumb traced a circle on the inside of her wrist, sending sensations through nerves that had no business responding so dramatically. "I've developed a remarkable indifference to observation."
Around them, the ballroom began its gradual transition toward whatever entertainment would follow the final waltz. Couples dispersed toward refreshment tables and quiet corners. The orchestra packed away their instruments with the efficient movements of people anticipating their own suppers. Crispin caught Alice's eye across the crowd and raised his champagne glass in a toast that required no words.
But Alice remained where she was, standing in the center of a dance floor that had witnessed her surrender, her hand warm in Samuel's grip, her heart beating with a rhythm she did not recognize and did not wish to regulate.
The world lay before them, filled with complications and the difficult negotiations that love required. Tomorrow would bring questions she could not answer and decisions she was unprepared to make. But tonight, tonight she stood in a candlelit ballroom beside a man who had offered her forever and waited while she learned to desire it.
Tonight, she was exactly where she wished to be.
CHAPTER 18
Dawn crept in after the storm, soft gray light filtering through the tall windows of Alice’s chamber and casting muted shades across furniture made bare by her departure. Alice stood before the mirror, studying a reflection that did not quite belong to the woman who had arrived at Oakford Hall a fortnight ago.
She looked like someone who had been tested and decided what to do with the result.
An hour earlier, footmen had carried her trunks down, brass fittings glinting as they were loaded onto waiting carriages in the courtyard. Through the glass, the organized chaos of leaving unfolded. Horses harnessed, wheels checked, guests moving between vehicles as though the past two weeks had been a pleasant interlude and not a pivot.
The sounds drifted upward. Gravel crunching, harness leather creaking, servants calling directions with calm efficiency.
Alice turned from the window and surveyed the room that had held so much. Her tears, her anger, the fragments of her mother’s letter scattered across the carpet, the sleepless nights spent building and dismantling walls she’d once believed essential.
Now the chamber looked larger, stripped back to its impersonal elegance. The bed was made with a precision that felt almost accusatory. The writing desk stood empty; the blotter had been cleaned; even the inkwell removed. Nothing remained to suggest she had ever occupied the space.
Except.
Her fingers found the hidden pocket of her traveling dress and closed around the soft leather tucked there. The glove, his glove, had rested against her hip for days, first as a reminder of heartbreak, then as something more stubborn.
Not proof.
A choice.
She would return it today, she decided. Or perhaps she would keep it. The distinction mattered less than it once had.
A knock sounded at the door. Three measuredtaps she recognized before her hand even reached the latch.
