“I should go,” she managed, though she did not move. The kitchen pressed in close, the gaslight making shadows grow thick around the edges of the room. The heat of Amélie’s hand lingered on her skin, a ghostly imprint.
Amélie did not release her fingers. Her thumb pressed gently into the soft flesh of Emma’s own. There was a question in the way she held on, no more than that. Emma could have drawn away, could have slammed the vault on this moment and buried it alive with all her other secrets.
Instead, she let herself stay.
“You needn’t be afraid,” Amélie said quietly, as if reading the tremor in Emma’s frame like a book left open on the table. “Of me, or of this.”
Emma laughed, brittle and too loud for the sleeping house. “I fear nothing,” she lied, and the words tasted like old ha’pennies.
Amélie’s lips curved, half amused, half sad. “Bravery is not always the absence of fear,” she said. “In my experience, it is simply doing things regardless of your uncertainty.”
Emma pulled her hand free, but gently, not as a rejection—more to test the strength of her own will. She found it lacking. Her palm tingled where the duchesse’s lips had touched it. “I came down for tea and a biscuit,” she said, and the absurdity of it made her want to weep or shout.
Amélie refilled her cup, with more wine instead of willow bark, and slid the plate of fruit closer.
“Not biscuits, but these berries would have been ripe enough to tempt Persephone.”
Emma took a blackberry, biting it in half. The juice bled darkly down her thumb. She remembered the story about the duchesse’s wedding dress—how she had set it alight in the Place Vendôme, left it in ashes and walked away. Emma tasted the tang of the wild fruit, sweet and faintly bitter on her tongue.
“Tell me why you dread parties so much?”
Emma shrugged, the movement tugging at her wounded shoulder. “I dread being seen,” she said. “Not by guests. By the family. They have a talent for hitting every wrong note. Every time I say what I mean instead of what I ought.”
“Perhaps it is time they heard you,” Amélie said, her gaze steady, her tone as if this was the simplest problem in the world.
Emma shook her head. “That’s not how it works. In my family, you are either the mender or the wound. Never both.”
Amélie nodded as if this, too, was familiar. She was silent for a while, swirling her wine. “Would you let me sketch you?” she said, after a time. “Not tonight. Not even tomorrow. But once the wedding madness is over. I would like to capture the way you look when you are thinking of anything but yourself.”
Emma nearly choked on the last of her berry. “Why? I’m neither beautiful nor interesting.”
Amélie smiled, but it was not a smile meant to persuade; it was an unshakable certainty, as if Amélie was simply stating a law of gravity. “You are both,” she said.
Emma looked away, unable to hold that gaze. She reached for the bottle, pouring herself a splash of wine more than she intended, and drank it off in a bracing swallow. The heat of it seared her throat, but it did nothing to slow her racing pulse.
Amélie’s hand was still on the table, palm up in invitation, a small dare. Emma stared at it, at the slender strength of the fingers, the faint tan line where a ring had been. She found herself wondering what it would feel like to have those hands pressed to her jaw, her neck, her bare skin. The thought set off a trembling low in her belly, a fear so sharp it felt like hunger.
“Will you walk with me?” Amélie said, rising to her feet in a slow, deliberate movement that made the silk robe whisper against her body. “The garden will not judge, I promise.”
Emma hesitated, but the urge to flee was now matched by the urge to see what would happen if she did not. She nodded once, and together they stepped out into the black and silver world beyond the kitchen.
The air was cold enough to bite, the dew dampening the flagstones beneath their bare feet. Emma shivered, but Amélie showed no sign of discomfort. The moon was a pale coin, punched through with drifting scraps of cloud. They walked in silence, the night pressing close around them, until they reached the shelter of a yew hedge. Amélie stopped, turning to look at Emma, her expression unreadable in the half-light.
Emma felt her body strung tight as a wire. She did not know what was expected of her, only that she wanted—desperately wanted—something she had no words for.
Amélie reached out, her hand grazing Emma’s cheek, her touch featherlight and unhurried. Emma’s breath caught. She could smell the wine and the berries and the faintest trace of orange blossom, and it made something inside her unravel.
Amélie’s thumb traced the line of Emma’s jaw, then her lower lip, slow and deliberate. “I have wanted to do this since the first moment I saw you,” she said, her voice low and rough.
Emma’s heart hammered so hard she feared it would burst through her ribs. “Why me?”
Amélie smiled, and for once it was not sad. “Because you want, and you do not know how to say it. I find that very beautiful and very sad.”
Emma opened her mouth to reply, and found her words stopped by a kiss.
It was not a gentle, chaste thing. It was hungry, unashamed, the kind of kiss that demanded response. It was a kiss she’d expected of a man…
And it set her aflame the way no masculine touch ever had.
