Maddie bit her lip. She might already be doing that. “What if I get it wrong?”
“You won’t,” Ashley said gently. “Because if you’re thinking about him this much, I promise, he’s thinking about you more.”
Maddie sat upright, brows drawn indetermined concentration. “All right. So I step closer. I linger. I look at his mouth. And I… tilt my face?”
Ashley’s eyes sparkled. “You’re really planning this.”
“I’m trying not to blunder through it!” Maddie said, exasperated. “What if I tilt the wrong way? What if he leans in and I trip on something, and we bang noses and he reconsiders everything and—”
Ashley flung an arm around her and laughed into her shoulder. “Stop, stop. You’ll be perfect. You’re already perfect.”
Maddie exhaled into a smile. “I just want it to be… special.”
Maddie smoothed her hand across her skirts, suddenly too aware of every crease, every stray thread. Special. She’d said it like it was a simple thing. But it wasn’t simple at all.
What she wanted, what she ached for, wasn’t just a kiss. It was that look he’d given her in the snow. The almost-touch. The not-quite kiss that had felt more real than anything else in her life. She wanted a moment that meant something. That marked her. That she could hold onto in all the quiet years to come, when she doubted herself, or the world, or the way her heart still dared to hope.
She wanted to know what it felt like to be wanted. Not politely. Not passingly. But deeply. Intentionally.
And she wanted it from him.
He made her feel different. Like she wasn’t just a quiet girl with neat hair and clean hands. With him, she felt wild. And visible. And very much alive.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt like that before.
And if he kissed her—if hechoseher—it would mean she hadn’t imagined it. That she was more than just safe and sweet. That she could be the kind of woman a man like Sebastian would wait for.
That, to her, would be special.
Ashley looked at her for a long, quiet beat. “It already is.”
*
“I need youradvice,” Sebastian announced to his friend as he entered the study.
His friend looked up from his newspaper, bemused. “Good happenstance to you too. What’s the matter?” He folded the pages and set them aside.
Sebastian slumped into the armchair opposite him. “Romantic agony,” he said grimly. “Which you are experienced at, no?”
Thomas grinned, the kind of knowing smile reserved for a man who had weathered a few stealthy storms before marriage. “Well, of course. A wife does that to a man.”
Sebastian stared at the flickering fire. “Miss Madeleine…” was not exactly his wife.
Thomas chuckled softly. “Ah. Miss Madeleine. I thought as much. You’ve been struck hard, haven’t you?”
Sebastian’s jaw tightened. “More than I expected. She’s been tending me, fussing over… my ailments….”
Thomas leaned forward. “The lady, tending to you, all alone in your room?”
“How did you—”
“I know everything.
Confound it.
Sebastian sighed. “Yes. That moment… It changed everything. Well, perhaps it’s more apt to say it shifted everything. All moments shift everything with her. She looks at me in a way that I… I don’t know… mattered to her. And I wanted to kiss her. I nearly did. Still do.”
Thomas smiled knowingly. “So, why haven’t you?”
