She had been reorganizing for two hours.
“Your Grace.” Mary, the maid who had taken to appearing whenever Isadora was doing something she could theoretically help with, stood in the doorway. “Mrs. Holt asks whether you want tea in here or the drawing room.”
“Here,” Isadora replied. “Thank you.”
By three, she was standing in the kitchen, having a conversation with Mrs. Farrow about the week’s menu that she had initiatedand then lost track of the thread halfway through, which Mrs. Farrow was too professional to remark upon and too observant not to notice.
“Will that do, Your Grace?” Mrs. Farrow asked, having apparently just outlined something.
“Yes,” Isadora said. “Thank you. That sounds—Yes, that’s perfect.”
She went upstairs.
She took Violet from Mrs. Plum, wrapped her in the warmest thing available, put on her coat, and went outside.
The terrace was cool in the August afternoon, the sun present but not particularly committed to its work. She sat in the stone chair at the far end with Violet in her lap. The grounds spread out below her, the lake flat and silver at the bottom of the slope, the season’s light doing its best across the gardens.
Violet was in excellent humor. She had Sebastian in one hand and Archibald in the other and was conducting a silent arbitration between them with the serious focus of a very small judge.
She made no demands. She required no entertainment. She was simply present, warm and solid in Isadora’s lap, and the weight of her at this particular moment was the most grounding thing available.
Isadora looked at the rosevine. Deep pink, heavy-headed, exactly as they had been on the night James had reached out and touched one almost without knowing he was doing it.
“The color is the same as the pink gown you wore to dinner two nights ago.”
She thought about it—him saying it, his startled expression immediately afterward, as though the words had come out without his permission.
She thought about the kiss.
She had been thinking about it with varying degrees of directness since it happened, but she had been doing it in pieces, in controlled intervals, the way one looked at something bright—quickly, then away, then back.
Here, in the cold afternoon with the baby in her lap and no one to see her flaming cheeks, she thought about it properly.
He had kissed her with both hands—one on her jaw, deliberate and warm, the other on her waist, drawing her closer—and there had been nothing tentative about it. Nothing experimental or impulsive or easily explained by the charged atmosphere.
It was the kiss of a man who had made a decision, not a man who had acted on a moment.
Hadn’t it?
The problem with this line of thinking, she was discovering, was that it had a shadow side. The same certainty she had felt in the moment could, from a sufficient distance, be read differently.
A man with James’s history was not unfamiliar with charged moments. A man with his history knew exactly how to kiss a woman as though it were the only thing that had ever mattered to him.
She pressed her lips together.
Violet chose this moment to offer her Archibald. “Take.”
“Thank you,” Isadora said.
Violet took him back immediately.
“Of course,” Isadora snorted.
She looked at the rosevine, then at the lake, then at the sky, which was doing nothing useful.
“You know, he went to London,” she murmured.
Violet looked up at her.
