“You’ll never be bored again,” she murmured, the words pressed against fine wool.
Samuel’s arm tightened around her. “I find myself willing to accept that risk.”
“It is considerable.” She shifted to look up at him, a familiar spark returning. “I am told I have excessive particularity—opinions on everything—and a tendency to do precisely what I wish, regardless of consequence.”
“All qualities I find myself drawn to.”
“Drawn to?” She arched a brow. “I had hoped my charms were more explicable than that.”
His hand rose to cup her face, thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone with a gentleness that unmoored her. The old distances, the measured restraint, fell away.
“Your charms,” he said quietly, “are the least of what I love about you.”
Alice reached into her pocket.
The glove emerged softened by days of carrying, worn by the friction of her fear and her slow choice toward trust. She held it between them.
“You left this,” she said. “In the library. That morning.”
Samuel’s expression shifted from surprise, to recognition, then something like wonder. He took the glove, turning it over as if rediscovering it.
“I thought I had lost it.”
“You had.” Alice smiled, unguarded. “I found it. I kept it. I carried it like a talisman against everything I was afraid to feel.”
He pressed it briefly to his chest, then set it aside as though it had served its purpose. His hand found hers instead, fingers interlacing.
“And now?”
“Now I find I no longer require talismans.” She tightened her grip, letting him feel the steadiness she was choosing. “I have something far better.”
Samuel bent and pressed a kiss to her temple. One so tender it left a sharpness behind her eyes she did not bother to blink away.
Through the window, Oakford Hall fell back into a smudge of stone and sunlight. Ahead lay London—questions, negotiations, and the unromantic work of turning this understanding into something the world would recognize.
Fear would return. Habit would raise its little barricades. There would be days when trust turned skittish and courage ran thin.
But they would face it together.
Alice closed her eyes and leaned into Samuel’s shoulder, the measured rhythm of his heart beneath her cheek. His arm encircled her waist, holding her as someone who had looked her through, and chosen to stay.
Behind them, Oakford Hall vanished around the bend.
Ahead, the road unwound, unapologetically carrying them forward.
EPILOGUE
The Serpentine caught the afternoon light and scattered it like diamonds, all glitter beneath a sky so perfectly blue it felt almost theatrical in its insistence on summer. Alice walked with her arm threaded through Samuel's, their steps falling into the easy rhythm of two people who had learned how to move together. She thought, not for the first time, that Hyde Park had never looked so beautiful as it did from the vantage of contentment.
Three months of marriage had taught her many things. Among them, Samuel could not abide wrinkled newspapers. He read correspondence in order of arrival rather than importance, a system she found baffling. And he made small sounds in his sleep when dreaming. She had become unreasonablyfond of those sounds, beginning to measure the quality of her nights by their presence or absence.
She had also learned that his pocket watch emerged from his waistcoat approximately once every half hour, regardless of whether time held any relevance to their activities.
"We have nowhere to be," Alice observed, watching the familiar motion of his hand moving toward his watch chain. "No appointments. No obligations. Nothing requiring the consultation of that device."
His fingers paused over the silver chain. "I was not?—"
"You were."
