By you,he thought.By the words you wrote that were never meant for my eyes. By the knowledge that you want me as I have wanted you, and the impossibility of doing anything about it.
"That," he said, "I am not at liberty to say."
He released her ankle and sat back on his heels, putting distance between them. The spell was broken or at least fractured, though something of it lingered in the charged air between them. His hand still tingled where he had touched her. He wondered if she felt it too.
"Can you stand?" he asked, his voice rough.
"I believe so…with some assistance."
He rose and offered her his hands. She took them, her fingers small and warm in his grasp, and he pulled her carefully to her feet. She wobbled, her weight shifting to her injured ankle, and without thinking he caught her around the waist to steady her.
She was in his arms.
Not an embrace,nothing so deliberate,but close enough that he could feel the heat of her body through the layers of fabric between them. Close enough that he could count the faint freckles scattered across her nose. Close enough that if he lowered his head, his lips would brush hers.
He did not lower his head.
"Steady?" he asked.
"Yes." But she did not pull away, and neither did he. "Thank you."
"You should not ride back. The jostling will worsen the injury."
"Then how am I to return home?"
"I shall send your groom for a carriage. In the meantime, there is a bench nearby. You can rest there while we wait."
It was a sensible plan. A practical plan. The sort of plan that any gentleman would devise for a lady in distress.
It was also, Martin realised, a plan that would keep her in his company for at least another half hour.
He told himself this was a coincidence.
***
The bench was situated beneath a spreading oak, its wooden slats worn smooth by years of use. Martin helped Vanessa to it, keeping one arm around her waist as she hobbled along, acutely aware of every point of contact between them.
Her weight against his side. The brush of her skirts against his legs. The warmth of her body through the layers of fabric. He had danced with her dozens of times, held her in the proper positions of the waltz and the cotillion, and none of it had ever felt like this this enforced intimacy, this necessity of closeness.
"There." He eased her down onto the seat. "Is that better?"
"Much. Thank you." She arranged her skirts around her, her movements careful and precise. When she looked up at him, there was something in her expression he could not quite read something cautious and questioning and perhaps a little afraid. "You are being very kind."
"Anyone would do the same."
"No. They would not." She held his gaze steadily. "Most gentlemen would have sent for help immediately. They would not have…" She stopped, colour rising in her cheeks.
"Would not have what?"
"Examined my ankle themselves." The words came out in a rush, as though she were confessing to something shameful. "Touched me as you did."
"I was concerned for your welfare."
"Were you?"
The question hung between them, weighted with implications neither of them was prepared to voice. Martin knew he should deflect, should make some witty remark that would restore the comfortable distance between them. It was what he had always done. What he had trained himself to do.
But the words would not come.
