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“Yes, I hadn’t thought to use the word ‘transgression,’ but we spoke about how taking the waters feels like falling off a cliff.” He stood. “Let us do it.”

“Fall off a cliff?” she teased, though she knew what he meant, and she knew she was going to agree.

“No. Go in the pool.” He held out his hand. “I won’t look at you. It shall all be very proper.”

“Proper!” That was a stretch.

“Well, as proper as any of this”—he waved a hand back and forth between them—“has been.”

“I take the point.” She stood. “I shall have to take my dress off and go in in my shift. I have two of each on this trip, and experience has taught me that while a dress takes days to dry, tonight’s wet shift will be dry enough to wear two days from now.”

Part of her couldn’t believe she was talking about her shift in front of him. Another part of her felt completely at ease doing so.

He cleared his throat. “All right. I shall turn my back. You go in, call to me when you are settled, and I shall join you. Unless you’d prefer I go first.”

“I should prefer that we go together,” she said, before she could think better of it. But really, getting into the pool was like jumping off a cliff, and she suspected it would be a great deal more satisfying with a … friend. “We can … not look at each other while we do it.”

“All right,” he said again. “I shall step away to make myself ready and meet you at the edge of the pool in a bit. I will keep my eyes on the sky. After all, we can’t forget that we’re meant to be watching for our comet.” He winked again.

Who was this version of Simon, so playful and knowing?

“I shall hold my hand out. When you are ready, take it and we shall immerse ourselves together.”

It occurred to Diantha that his plan would preserve her modesty but not his. His eyes would be on the sky, but in order to find and take his hand, she would have to look at him.

She said nothing to that end, merely agreed and stepped away from the fire to remove her dress and stays.

When she turned back around, her breath caught. He was wearing breeches and nothing else. The pool was close enough to the fire that he was limned in golden light, and he was standing, as he had said he would be, with his face tilted toward the sky and his arm out, waiting for her.

He looked like a living statue, a man beautiful enough to be in a museum but clever enough to have escaped its confines.

It occurred to her that this was not the first time she had likened Simon to a statue, to a work of art in the form of a man.

As she drew closer, she could see the planes of his body—the curve of his shoulders, the long, lean muscles in the arm held at attention at a right angle to his torso. He almost looked like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

She took the hand waiting for her, and the statue came to life. He was still looking at the sky, but he smiled. He lowered their joined hands and swung them back and forth as if they were great friends about to set off on an adventure.

A laugh escaped. She hadn’t known it was there until it was there—out in the world, echoing in the dark.

He laughed, too, and she loved to hear it.

“I am going to shift my gaze from the sky to the ground, else I shan’t be able to see my way into the water. But I won’t look at you.”

Look at me, she wanted to say.

It felt suddenly as if he were the only one who ever had. He had looked at her, and he had seen her. The person she was underneath her position as companion to Lady Harcourt.

He had seen her with her armor off, and now she wanted him to see her with everything off. Well, nearly everything. She glanced down at her shift, which was fluttering around her legs, as it was a breezy night.

“I am looking at you,” she said.

He only smiled, and she watched him shift his gaze to the ground as he said he would. He tightened his grip on her hand. “Are you ready?”

“I am ready.”

They entered the water in perfect unison, down to the bench, down to the pool’s floor. Wordlessly, they sat.

He kept her hand.