The heat in her face announced itself with considerable conviction. She said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would improve the situation, and she had recently learned that silence was occasionally more useful than speech.
He stepped closer. Not far—a foot, perhaps, the distance between a person consulting a book and a person returning it to a shelf—but the space where she stood was already not large, and he was already not far, and the combined effect of it was that he was standing quite close to her and showing no particular inclination to address this.
She took one step back. Her shoulders found the bookcase.
Not again.
He was close enough now that she could see the faint crease in his collar where his cravat had been, the slight disorder of his dark hair, the firelight doing something warm and unfair to the line of his jaw, and his eyes, which were looking at her with the kind of attention that made heat climb the sides of her face.
Her pulse made itself known. Not just with the quick heat of embarrassment—that had already come and gone—but something slower and more inconvenient, a warmth that started in her chest and worked outward with the unhurried persistence of something that had decided to happen regardless of her feelings on the matter.
He reached past her.
His arm came level with her shoulder as he held the book up to the shelf beside her head, reading the gap where it had come from, and for one breath, she was entirely enclosed by him. Not touched, not quite, but near enough that the warmth of him was real and present, and the smell of his shirt was clean and close, and the shelf at her back was solid in the way that stationary objects were reassuringly solid when everything else was slightly unsteady.
She did not breathe.
He did not put the book back.
He lowered it, looked at the cover once more, and then at her face, and whatever he saw there made something shift in his expression—something that was not the amusement from before and was not the composure he wore in daylight. But something quieter and more unguarded, there and then not there.
“You have no reason to be embarrassed,” he murmured.
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“You are pressed against a bookshelf.”
“I was making room.”
“For what?”
She had no answer for that.
“You have absolutely no reason to be embarrassed,” he said more quietly. “It is your house. Your library. Every book in it is yours.”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t bring it. It was already hidden there.”
“I know where it was.” The corner of his mouth curved. “I know this library rather well.”
“Then you know I wasn’t–”
“Looking for it on purpose.” He held her gaze. “I know.” He glanced at the cover one last time. “It was my mother’s. She kept certain books behind the sermons. I found them when I reorganized the collection.” A pause. “I left them where they were.”
She looked at the book in his hand and thought about that. About what it meant to find something hidden and choose to leave it hidden, to preserve the privacy of a person who was no longer there to keep it themselves.
“You are a married woman, and I am…” The slight wryness returned, settled at the corner of his mouth. “…genuinely the last man in England who would judge someone’s reading. Whatever is in this library, you are welcome to all of it.”
He set the book on the shelf beside her. Not in her hands, but simply within reach. Then he looked at her with the directness that she could not yet decide whether it was comfortable or not.
“I ask only one thing.”
She waited.
“Certain books,” he said, with the precision of a man identifying a specific concern, “should remain well beyond the reach of my sisters.” He glanced at the spine beside her shoulder. “This one in particular. And the two others on the shelf above the manual of Latin grammar.”
Despite everything—his proximity, the warmth in her face, the pulse that was still conducting itself with excessive enthusiasm—she felt laughter bubble up in her chest, unexpected and entirely genuine.
“I had no intention of giving this to Letitia.”
