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She looked down. She looked at Adam. He had stopped moving entirely. His hand was still outstretched from the last splash, his eyes on her chest with an expression she had no language for that could be safely deployed in her present company.

“Adam,” she said quietly, but he did not look up, so she took a step toward him and dropped her voice. “Adam. Eloise is three feet away.”

His eyes lifted to her face, his chest moving with a rhythm that had nothing to do with the exertion of splashing. “I’m aware,” he said, his voice going low and heavy.

“Then you might consider—” She folded her arms across herself, which she was very aware was considerably too late to accomplish anything, but which felt like the correct gesture nonetheless. “We cannot. Not here. She is right there.”

His gaze went to the front of her shirt before returning to her face with apparent reluctance. She could count the seconds it took for him to pull his eyes upward and, even then, he did not look the least bit reluctant.

“You were saying…” he said.

“I was saying that we—” She narrowed her eyes accusingly. “You are not listening to me at all.”

“I heard every word,” he said with a smirk.

“Papa!” Eloise abandoned floating and made her way back toward them with her arms out for balance, water up to her chest. “Teach me the kicking again! I think I’m almost getting it!”

Adam looked at Juliet for one moment longer in that way he had of making it clear the conversation was not finished. Then he turned and waded toward his daughter.

Juliet stood in the water with her arms folded and her face warm despite the cold, and watched him crouch to Eloise’s level and begin again from the kick.

She pressed her lips together. She counted backward from ten, managing to make it to only six before giving up.

They stayed until the light went amber and the geese came back to the far shore, and Eloise’s narration of her progress finally slowed, then stopped mid-sentence as she lay in the grass with her shoes back on and her eyes closed. She was asleep inside a minute, one arm thrown sideways, her hair drying across her face.

Adam looked down at her, staring at his daughter for a long time, even as his awareness of the other woman in his life battered against his consciousness.

Juliet sat on the bank with her wrapper pulled around her shoulders and her eyes on the water, which had gone silver as the sun dropped. She was very aware of him standing two feet away from her, and of the fact that neither of them had spoken since they’d come out of the water.

He picked Eloise up without waking her. He carried her up toward the house, the girl’s head on his shoulder, her arm trailing, entirely limp.

Juliet watched them go, a warmth spreading through her chest.

She gathered Eloise’s shoes, and she followed.

Chapter Eighteen

“Mrs. Priscilla has left cold fowl and bread,” Adam said when she came down the stairs. He was already at the table, his coat off, his shirt sleeves still rolled to the elbow from the lake. “And, for reasons I suspect have everything to do with Eloise and nothing to do with coincidence, a very small dish of syllabub.”

Juliet looked at the table, then at him. “She planned ahead.”

“She planned ahead before we left London.” He pulled out the chair across from him. “Sit down.”

She sat. She was still cold from the lake, the kind that takes an hour to fully go, her hair pinned back in the loose arrangement it had arrived at somewhere between the water and the bank, and the Hampshire sitting room had a fire going and the lamps burning low.

She reached for the bread. “Has she been with you long? Mrs. Priscilla.”

“Twelve years.” He poured her a glass of claret without asking. “She came when Eloise was born, and she has managed the London household since. She is exceptionally good at her work, and she is aware of this, and she charges accordingly.” He set the bottle down. “She left the syllabub because Eloise told her two weeks ago that syllabub was the best thing she had ever eaten and she intended to eat it every Thursday for the rest of her life.”

“Eloise mentions food with a great deal of specificity.”

“She mentions everything with a great deal of specificity.”

Juliet helped herself to the fowl, and he did the same. They ate without ceremony, which was something she had discovered early was the way he preferred to take meals when no one was watching. No performance. No arrangement of the occasion into an event. She had liked it when she first noticed it and liked it better now.

“When did you last come here?” she said. She had noticed, coming in, the quality of the air in the rooms: not the staleness of long disuse, but the careful freshness of a house that had been opened and prepared quickly, things set right in a hurry. It had a different character from Ravenlocke. Smaller. Older in a different way.

He set his glass down. He was quiet long enough that she glanced up.