Page 61

“When she visited, she would descend on Clarkston Hall like a very small, very well-dressed storm, and for the duration of her stay, I was allowed to breathe.” She shifted slightly against his side. “She told me once that a woman taught to take up as little space as possible is a woman being prepared to disappear. She said I was not to disappear.”

He turned his head toward her.

“I tried very hard not to,” she said. “I did not always succeed. But I tried.”

He thought about the girl who had stood in his parlor at midnight with mud on her hem and not given one inch of ground.

“You succeeded,” he said.

She was quiet for a moment. Then, “You were also very handsome, which made everything considerably more difficult.”

He looked at the ceiling. “You mentioned that. In the carriage.”

She lifted her head off his chest. “You were paying attention.”

“I am always paying attention,” he said.

She lay back down and pulled the coverlet up with a pointed motion. “I find that extremely inconvenient,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You could say it back. It would only be fair.”

He looked at her. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips pressed together in the expression he had seen her use when she was suppressing something she found amusing. Her hair was spread across the pillow and across his chest.

“You are beautiful. Exquisite,” he said. “You know that.”

She did not look away, so he didn’t either.

“Go to sleep,” he said again, quieter this time, and she turned her face into his chest.

Her breathing changed within the quarter hour, long and even, her weight settling into him, and he lay still for a long while after that.

When he finally rose, the fire had burned to a handful of coals. He dressed in the dark and stood at the edge of the bed for a moment, looking at her. He watched the slow rise of her shoulder beneath the coverlet, her hair spread across the pillow, her hand curled open at her side.

Oh, but she was beautiful. And she was his.

He knew he probably did not have any right to think the things he was thinking, about possessing her, about filling her, until there was no space left where he did not exist for her.

And yet…he could not help himself. It had no doubt been a visit from Lady Fortune that she’d shown up at his door, seeking his hand in marriage. He saw now that he would have been a fool to turn down her offer when she’d made it. Because now…

Shaking his head, he went to her writing table, took a sheet from the stack she kept there, and found her pen.

Juliet, make sure to sleep some more. Mrs. Priscilla has instructions to bring your breakfast at nine, and orders from me not to knock before then. I wish I could laze in bed with you. Let us do something together; just the three of us. Me, you, and Eloise. I would like that. — A.

He set the note against the candlestick on the night table where she would see it first thing, adjusted the coverlet at her shoulder once, and left without a sound.

Three days later, they took Eloise to the fair.

It ran along the south bank of the Thames, a line of bright canvas awnings stretching from the bridge road to the boatyards, and the smell of warm sugar and river water came through the carriage window before they had fully stopped.

October had been generous, the sky clear and the air mild, and Eloise had kept a very creditable silence about acrobats for the entire journey across the bridge, by which Adam meant she had mentioned them only eleven times.

“Twelve,” Juliet said, from across the carriage.

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“You missed one in the bridge traffic,” she said. “She asked whether acrobats could perform on moving boats.”