The baby made a small sound and resettled, her fist opening and closing once before she stilled again. Both of them looked at her, then away.
“I should go,” Cecily sighed.
She stood, turned, and her foot caught in the edge of the rug. His hand found her waist mid-fall.
They were close, closer than they had been since the riding path and the library. Closer than any of the careful distances she had been maintaining with such deliberate effort for weeks. The warmth of him was real and immediate.
She could not make herself move.
She was upright. She had been upright for a full second. There was no practical reason for either of them to remain exactly as they were, which was her hand on his arm and his hand on her waist and approximately four inches between them in a quiet room with a sleeping child and a fire that had burned to its last good hour.
She did not step back.
Neither did he.
“You’re all right?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
He did not remove his hand.
“You always keep moving away from me,” he said.
She looked up at him. This close, in this light, his eyes were very dark.
“You’re the one who keeps stepping back,” she countered.
He held her gaze. Something in his face had changed. His composure was thinning, becoming insufficient, showing what was underneath it, not because he had chosen to show it but because there was less left to hide behind.
“Huh,” he muttered.
She did not know what to do with that. She did not think she was supposed to do anything with it.
His eyes dropped to her mouth. He leaned closer.
She should step back. She knew she should step back. She had a very clear understanding of all the reasons she should step back, and yet she looked at him in the low firelight with his hand still on her waist and his eyes on hers, and she did not step back.
She leaned in, just slightly. Her heartbeat was loud, and her breathing was not steady. His wasn’t either.
His hand tightened on her waist, and he tilted his head down by a degree close enough to see the tick in his jaw. She could feel the warmth of his breath, and she was not breathing at all.
The world had reduced itself entirely to the four inches that were becoming three, his eyes on hers, and the absolute, devastating certainty that she wanted this, had wanted this for longer than she could justify, and that in approximately one more second?—
The baby sighed.
Both of them turned toward her.
The spell—she could not think of another word for it—broke, and they were two people standing in a nursery again, close together, his hand on her waist and her hand on his arm, which she had gripped without realizing.
He released her slowly. They stood side by side at the appropriate distance, looking at the baby as though she were the most interesting thing in the room.
She was not the most interesting thing in the room.
“She’s peaceful,” Cecily noted.
“Yes,” William agreed.
A pause. She could feel his eyes on her.
