“Cecily.” He set down his quill. “Come in. Sit down.”
She came in and sat. She set the notes on the arm of the chair, looked at him, and waited for a moment.
“I wanted to–” she began.
“I owe you an apology.” He folded his hands on the desk.
His eyes, that particular clear green she had spent two months not thinking about, met hers, giving her nothing.
She stopped.
“For last night,” he continued. “For the garden. It was…” A pause, small and precise, the pause of a man selecting a word with surgical care. “…ill-considered. I want to apologize.”
He held her eyes with the full composure that she had learned to read as a kind of armor.
“Ill-considered,” she repeated.
“I was not measured. The evening, the dancing, the–” He stopped and started again, from a cleaner position. “I behaved in a way that was not in keeping with the terms we agreed on. I am sorry for that.”
The terms we agreed on.
She had the odd sense of watching herself sit very still and breathing very carefully.
“You are apologizing,” she said flatly, “for the garden.”
“I apologize for what it may have implied,” he clarified. “Which was not… accurate. To our situation.”
Our situation?
Her whole body felt like fluid that could spill at any moment.
She looked at her hands. At the notes on the arm of the chair. Then she looked back at him.
She was aware of him on the other side of the desk, watching her with the careful composure of a man who had made a decision in private and arrived here already resolved.
She had been kissed in that garden. She had kissed him back with everything she had not been saying for weeks, and she had meant every word of it, and he was calling itinaccurate.
“It seemed quite accurate at the time,” she said lightly, because the lightness was something to hold onto. “You were there.”
“I know I was there.” A pause. “That is precisely the point. I should not have–” He stopped again.
He was choosing every word the way one chose footing on uncertain ground, and she recognized it because she had watched him do it before, in the early days, before she had learned his vocabulary well enough to read what the choosing meant.
He was frightened.
The recognition dawned quietly, without drama, and she held it carefully.
“Then what is the apology for? The inaccuracy, or your being there?” She couldn’t keep the plea out of her voice.
“We must be cautious,” he said. “Appearances, particularly here in London, require a certain care. What happened last night… if it were to become a pattern, if it were to be caught–”
“William.”
He stopped.
“I am not asking about appearances,” she said.
He looked at her.
