“Good morning.” She touched his cheek, feeling the rasp of stubble beneath her fingertips. “How do you feel?”
He considered.
“Terrified,” he admitted. A pause. “And hopeful. I had forgotten what hope felt like.”
“I shall remind you,” she said lightly. “As often as required.”
He captured her mouth in a slow, searching kiss—unhurried, thorough, and impossibly sweet. She melted into it,her fingers gathering the linen at his shoulder, and thought that if this was what love felt like, she would not survive it intact.
When they parted, his forehead rested against hers.
“What happens now?” he asked quietly.
“Now,” she replied, “we rise. We take tea in the yellow parlour. We behave with decorum for Mrs Blackley’s peace of mind.”
“And after that?”
She smiled.
“After that, we discover the rest—together.”
He exhaled, as though the word itself steadied him.
“Together.”
“Together.”
Outside, the storm had passed. The sky remained grey, but gentler now. The air smelled washed and new.
It felt, Fiona thought, very much like the beginning of something.
And she intended to hold fast to it.
Chapter Eight
The days that followed the storm proved, paradoxically, the most exquisite and the most exasperating of Fiona’s life.
Exquisite, because something fundamental had shifted between her and Christian. The walls he had so painstakingly erected had not vanished—he was still prone to silences, to sudden inward turns of thought, to fleeting shadows of self-doubt—but fissures had appeared. Cracks through which warmth might enter. And Fiona, resolute as ever, intended to widen them.
Exasperating, because wanting him had become a physical ache.
They took tea together each afternoon. They walked the grounds when the weather permitted, her arm resting lightly in his, their conversation meandering from philosophy to farming to the merits of oatcake versus shortbread. In the evenings, they sat in the library in companionable quiet, books open, firelight low. Sometimes she would glance up and find him watching her—not idly, but intently—and the look in his eyes would send heat rushing to her cheeks.
But he did not kiss her again.
Oh, there were moments.
Glances that lingered too long across the breakfast table. Fingers that lingered too long when passing a book. Thatafternoon in the garden, when he had steadied her over uneven ground and his hands had remained at her waist for several suspended heartbeats before he stepped back, breath unsteady.
But the fierce urgency of the training hall, the reckless press of bodies against bookshelves, the molten hunger of that first unravelling—those seemed to have been carefully folded away, as though winter garments no longer suited the season.
He was being honourable. She understood that.
He was courting her as a gentleman ought. Proving that what he felt was not merely desire. Offering patience where once there had been fire.
She admired the intention.
She also wished, at intervals, to overturn the nearest piece of furniture.
