“Yes.”
He looked at her for a moment in a way that was slightly difficult to interpret—dazed still, but aware, and something else that she couldn’t immediately name.
“You have…” He paused, as though selecting his words with more care than his current condition warranted. “…a very determined expression for someone who came here for a walk.”
Cecily blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“It’s not a complaint.” The ghost of something moved across his mouth. “I only mean, you knelt in wet sand to take my pulse without hesitating. Most people would have called for someone.”
“There was no one to call.”
“No.” He seemed to find this quietly amusing, or perhaps he was simply still concussed. “No, I suppose there wasn’t.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow. The movement cost him; she could see it in the tightening of his jaw. But he got there, then attempted to sit up. And that was where the plan encountered difficulty.
He reached for balance that wasn’t there, his hand found her arm, and then, somehow, in the specific graceless mechanics of a large man attempting to sit up on unstable ground, he had pulled her in, and she had gone.
Quite suddenly, they were very close, his hand gripping her arm, her own braced against his shoulder, their faces not six inches apart. And he was breathing… very hard.
She froze.
He stilled.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Cecily was aware of several things simultaneously: the sound of the water, the cold of the sand beneath her knees, the warmth of his hand through the thin wool of her shawl, and the fact that she had never in her twenty-three years been this close to a man’s face. Not like this. Not with his eyes on hers, no polite distance between them, and nothing at all to do with propriety or performance.
She could see the damp curl of hair at his temple, the faint scrape along his jaw where he had not shaved, the unevenness of his breathing.
Her heart was doing something completely unreasonable.
His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth and then came back to hers, and something in his expression changed—steadier now, and quieter, and much more present than a man with a head injury had any right to be. For a breath—no more than that—she thought he might kiss her.
The possibility was so startling that it left her dizzy.
She should move. She was going to move.
“Oh,” a voice gasped.
Both of them turned.
Two women stood perhaps thirty feet away on the upper part of the beach, bonnets already in place, clearly on an early morning walk, clearly frozen in place by the tableau in front of them. One had her hand cupped over her mouth. The other was simply staring with the focused attention of someone committing every detail to memory.
The blood drained from Cecily’s face. She was on her feet before she had decided to stand, her skirts twisted from kneeling, her pulse loud in her ears.
“I–” She stepped back. The sand shifted beneath her boots. “He was—I only–”
The women said nothing, only exchanged looks that saideverything.
“I must go,” Cecily said breathlessly, not daring to look at the man again. “You should seek help. There are houses along the promenade.”
“Wait–” he began, pushing himself upright with difficulty.
But she was already stepping back.
Cecily turned and walked away from the water. Quickly. Not quite running. Her heart was loud in her ears, and her face was burning. The voice in her head—the one that sounded distressingly like her mother’s—was already saying, with great precision and zero comfort,I told you so.
She did not look back.
