“I am glad to know I satisfy the necessary requirements of mirth.”
“You satisfy more than you know.”
Had he meant to say it? Had she imagined it? She had no time to decide, for in the next instant he disengaged her hand from his arm and, still walking, took her gloved fingers into his own.
It should not have been remarkable. Gentlemen had led ladies in and out of assemblies since assemblies began. Yet this was no ballroom courtesy, and no crush of dancers shielded the act with convention. The touch was deliberate. It made a declaration to any eye upon them.
Francesca looked down helplessly as he turned her hand, his gloved thumb resting lightly at her wrist where the glove ended and the skin above it began.
“Major Manners?—?”
“Hush,” he said gently, though not unkindly. “For once, let me lead.”
Then, before she understood that he intended anything further, he lifted her hand and bent over it. His face lowered, not to the glove, which would have been ordinary enough; not even to the knuckles… His lips touched the exposed skin at the inside of her wrist, just beyond the edge of her kid glove.
There was no sound in the garden; no frost, no rook, no gravel, no winter sky. There was only the astonishing warmth of that brief contact and the shock that passed through her so completely that she forgot every principle of deportment she had ever possessed. She had no notion of what she should do. Withdraw? Laugh? Rebuke him? Ought she to continue walking as though gentlemen kissed ladies’ wrists in the shrubbery every day before luncheon?
She did none of these things. She merely stood still, while her heart seemed to strike against every rib at once.
He straightened very slowly.
For the first time since he had entered the house—that she was aware—he looked less composed than she. Not by much, she suspected—another observer might not have seen it at all—but she saw the restraint in him, and something beneath it that made restraint necessary.
“That ought to answer any watcher,” he said, scarcely above a whisper,
Francesca found, at last, enough breath to speak. “You might have warned me.”
“I feared you would forbid it.”
The simplicity of the admission restored both her wits and her vexation, though neither in their proper order.
“Is this your notion of protection, sir?”
“In part, yes.”
She drew her hand back then, but not with the indignation she had intended, because the truth had come upon her with terrible clarity. The gesture had not only surprised her. It had also pleased her—not as a stratagem; not as theatre; not even as a clever expedient. It had touched some unguarded place inside her which no counterfeit ought ever to reach.
How deucedly unfair it was that the first gentleman with whom she had ever felt entirely comfortable should offer her tenderness only in pretence.
CHAPTER 19
The garden had the stillness of a place that believed itself unobserved. Arch knew better.
There was no single sign that convinced him—no movement at the wall, no glint of glass, no figure too carefully idle in the distance—but rather the accumulation of small instincts honed too long to be dismissed. The street beyond the boundary was quiet and the neighbouring houses showed no obvious stir, yet something in the arrangement of silence pressed upon him, as though the morning itself listened.
He therefore adjusted his conduct accordingly. Francesca stood beside him upon the narrow path, her breath faintly visible in the cold, her composure not so complete as she would have wished him to believe. He had felt the tremor in her hand a moment before; he had seen the quickening of her colour when he had been obliged to play his part with greater boldness than either of them had anticipated.
He had not meant to unsettle her so entirely… he had meant only to convince a watcher. Perhaps he had succeeded rather too well.
She turned away a little, fixing her eyes upon the row of bare trees—no doubt lest he see too much in her face. Archobserved the movement and, though he made no outward remark, understood it perfectly. It was not fear that prompted it but rather restraint.
“Very well,” she said, though her voice was not wholly steady, “if we are to act a part, you should at least acquaint me with the script.”
He inclined his head slightly, though he kept his attention divided between her and the wider circumference of the garden. “There is very little script,” he answered. “Do not go anywhere alone for the present. If you attend a salon, I shall escort you. If you visit the factories, I shall escort you. If you call upon acquaintances whose houses are in any degree public, I will escort you. If you wish to walk, you will walk where we have reason to think you safe—and preferably not without notifying me first.”
Even as he spoke, he was conscious of how it must sound: not protection, but constraint; not care, but command. He disliked it as much as she must, yet he could not soften the charge without rendering it useless.
She faced him again, her expression composed but her eyes bright with resistance. “That sounds suspiciously like imprisonment in a more flattering form.”
