Page 45 of A Shadow Amongst the Roses

Eliza’s breath eased. “I wasn’t alone.”

“No,” he agreed. “But you shouldn’t have had to carry it without choice.”

The room seemed to draw in around them.

“I don’t regret what I did,” she said.

“Nor should you.”

“But I regret that you believed absence was the answer.”

Thomas nodded once. “So do I.”

They stood close now, closer than they had ever had indoors, with no work to occupy their hands, no distance imposed by work or terrain. The awareness between them sharpened, no longer diffuse. Nothing between them felt uncertain anymore except the shape their honesty would ultimately require them to claim before the world beyond this room.

“Eliza,” he said, her name quiet but unguarded. “I won’t remove myself again without speaking to you first.”

Her pulse shifted. “Nor will I speak for you without telling you why.”

A faint curve touched his mouth. “That seems fair.”

Silence followed, neither empty nor strained.

Full.

Eliza became aware of how close he stood. Of the warmth at her shoulder, the steadiness that did not intrude but did not retreat either. She lifted her gaze to his, and for the first time did not step back from what she found there.

“I don’t want us to be careful in ways that divide us,” she said.

Thomas’s breath caught, just imperceptibly. “Nor do I.”

The space between them narrowed, not by movement, but by decision.

For a moment, it seemed one of them might speak again, might break the stillness into something else entirely.

Instead, Thomas reached out, slowly, deliberately, and rested his hand at her elbow. Not a claim. Not a pull.

An anchor.

Eliza’s fingers curled lightly against his sleeve. The contact was simple. And charged.

Neither of them moved. Not yet.

Outside, Hartleigh continued its morning rhythms, unaware that something had shifted, not loudly, not visibly, but irrevocably all the same.

They did not kiss.

But the restraint that held them now was no longer automatic.

It was chosen.

And choice, Eliza knew, would not remain untested for long.

Chapter Twenty-One

They did not separate at once.

Eliza became aware of it gradually, the way neither of them stepped back, the way Thomas’s hand remained at her elbow as though it had always belonged there. The room seemed to hold its breath, the quiet thick with what had not been said.