"Good morning." His voice was neutral, giving nothing away. "Did you manage to sleep?"
"Eventually. You?"
"Some."
They regarded each other across the breakfast table, and Harriet found herself searching his face for some sign of what he was thinking. But Sebastian's expression was as carefully composed as ever, revealing nothing of the man who had confessed his fears in the candlelit library.
"Mr. Thornton has already gone to the study," Sebastian said. "He's eager to begin reviewing the accounts."
"Then we shouldn't keep him waiting."
"No. We shouldn't."
But neither of them moved. They stood there, breakfast cooling on the sideboard, servants discreetly not noticing, while something unspoken crackled in the air between them.
"About last night…" Harriet began.
"We don't need to discuss it." Sebastian's voice was quiet but firm. "I said what I needed to say. You can do with it what you will."
"That's very generous of you."
"It's not generosity. It's self-preservation." A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "I've spent seven years wanting to tell you the truth. Now that I have, I'm not entirely sure what to do next."
"Perhaps we simply... proceed. As we were."
"As we were? Enemies? Strangers?"
"We were never strangers." Harriet took a breath. "And I'm not sure we were ever really enemies, either. Not in any meaningful sense."
"What were we, then?"
"I cannot really say.” She met his eyes. "But perhaps it's time to find out."
Something shifted in Sebastian's expression, a softening, warming expression, which made Harriet's breath catch despite herself.
"I'd like that," he said. "Finding out."
"Then let's begin." Harriet turned toward the door, then glanced back over her shoulder. "But first, breakfast. I have a feeling we're going to need our strength."
Sebastian laughed a real laugh, surprised and warm and utterly unlike the sardonic chuckle she had grown accustomed to.
"Lead the way, Lady Harriet."
"Harriet," she corrected. "You said it yourself, we’re past formality now."
"Harriet, then." He said her name like a discovery. "Lead the way."
And so she did.
***
The day that followed was long and tedious and punctuated by small moments that Harriet would remember long afterward.
There was the moment in the study, when Mr. Thornton was droning on about depreciation and Sebastian caught her eye with an expression of such exaggerated suffering that she had to disguise her laugh as a cough. There was yet another moment was the moment in the garden, when they walked together between meetings and Sebastian pointed out a bird's nest hidden in the hedge, his voice soft with something like wonder.There was the moment at lunch, when their hands brushed reaching for the same dish, and both of them pulled back too quickly, too obviously.
Nothing had changed, and everything had changed. They were still in crisis, still facing impossible odds, still dancing around the question of what to do about debts and estates and futures uncertain. But beneath all of it, something new was growing. Something tentative and fragile and precious.
Harriet wrote her letter to Lord Davies. She reviewed accounts with Mr. Thornton. She walked the estate with the head gardener, learning about timber values and water rights and all the sordid realities of land ownership that she had never bothered to understand before.
