They were shown to a box large enough for their small party to share, the velvet chairs arranged in a shallow half circle overlooking the stage below. Benjamin and Emma took the seats farthest to the left, Georgina beside Emma, Martin beside Georgina, which left Diana and Alexander side by side nearest the center.
Alexander noted the arrangement with private satisfaction.
He helped Diana into her seat and sat beside her a heartbeat later, close enough that the silk of her gown brushed the black line of his coat whenever she shifted. Beneath them, the orchestra tuned in uneven fragments.
Diana turned her head slightly toward him, her voice soft enough not to carry. “You look much too pleased with yourself.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
He leaned back in his chair, one hand resting on the carved wooden arm, the other still loosely gloved in his lap. “Perhaps I am merely relieved that Pentbury talks enough for all six of us.”
That won another small laugh from her. God help him, he liked making her laugh far too much.
Before she faced the stage again, her gaze slid toward Martin and Georgina for a fleeting moment. Alexander followed the look. Martin had settled back in his seat with perfect propriety, his attention apparently fixed upon the orchestra below, yet the unease in Alexander sharpened rather than eased.
What is wrong with him?
If memory was the mind’s domain, instinct belonged to bone and blood, and he had formed his opinion early. It did not like Martin Hyatt.
The curtain rose.
The play was a serious one, the sort of domestic tragedy fashionable enough to flatter itself with moral purpose. A devoted husband and wife struggled against circumstance, politics, and separation while trying to secure a future for their child.
Alexander watched the stage, yes, yet part of him remained permanently aware of Diana at his side—of the faint perfume at her throat, of the rise and fall of her breathing, of the way her gloved hands rested in her lap in stillness when she was absorbed by something and tightened when emotion reached her.
Tonight, she was moved.
He sensed the change in her before he fully saw it. Something in her posture shifted during a scene in which the mother, with heartbreaking tenderness, prepared to leave her child in safer hands rather than risk his destruction with them. The father knelt before the boy and spoke of love in the language of farewell, and when Alexander glanced toward Diana at the same instant, he saw the sheen in her eyes.
She blinked once, slowly, trying to master whatever memory the scene had called up, and something in Alexander gave a hard, painful twist.
Her parents.He knew it at once.The look on her face now was too private and too old to belong to the play alone.
Without speaking, he moved his hand across the narrow divide between their seats until it rested lightly atop hers.
Diana flinched and turned her face toward him in the dimness of the box. The stage light cast soft, shifting patterns over her features. For one suspended second, she only looked at him, and he saw the effort she was making not to let her emotion spill past the decorum the theatre demanded.
His thumb brushed once across the back of her hand. Her fingers turned beneath his and closed around his hand instead.
The response was small and immediate, and it went through him with startling force. She leaned the barest fraction closer. The effect of that trust upon him was so profound that for a moment the stage vanished entirely.
He became aware only of her hand in his and the quiet plea hidden in the way she held it.
Comfort me. Stay. Do not make me bear this alone.
His chest tightened. It was absurd, perhaps, how fiercely he wanted to answer that unspoken plea, how instinctively his entire being moved toward her pain.
She turned toward him, composed, though there was a softness in her expression he had not seen earlier in the evening.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“For what?”
Her glance flickered toward the stage below. “For noticing.”
Alexander held her gaze. “I always notice.”
