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A low chuckle broke from him. "I would not go so far as to demand love. But affection, at the least — that I would not do without."

"I think you very wise," Harriet said, without much considering it, for his openness had unlocked her own. "I was happy enough with Edward. I will never call myself ungrateful. He gave me a great deal I had need of, and he was the dearest friend I ever had. But it was not what my heart had longed for. I had wanted — " She hesitated, feeling the old, gentle guilt rise, and let it come, and spoke through it. "I had wanted more than companionship. More than a comfortable friendship, easy though ours was. It seems an ungracious thing to say of a good man in his grave, and I would not have you think I loved him the less for wanting it. I only wanted the thing itself, and never had it, and made my peace with the not-having. Or thought I had."

"But it was not what you truly desired," the Duke finished for her, very low.

Harriet lifted her eyes to his, and held them, and felt the whole world go quiet and narrow to the single arm's length of gravel between them. They had stopped walking. She could not have said when. His gaze had gone dark and grave upon her face, and it came to her, with a slow heat that was nothing like gratitude and had never for one moment been gratitude, that this was the thing she had come to London and never once expected to find. Not the endowment. Not the answers. This.

For it was not a pretty afternoon that had brought them here. She knew that, standing so close she could see the fair lashes lowered over his eyes. It was the weight they now carried between them: Edward's paper, and the fear pressed into it, and the secret it hinted her husband had died holding it — the paper she had put into this man's hands some nights past because there was no other living soul she could give it to.

They were bound now by a thing no one else in the world knew. And it was that — the bare, aching intimacy of carrying a secret together in the dark — that had drawn her, by degrees she had not marked, to within a breath of him.

"Harriet." Her name came from him low and rough, thickened by something he had not put into words. He shifted, and the small movement closed the last of the distance, and she felt the warmth of his breath against her lips, soft as the breeze in the leaves. Her own breath would not come evenly, and her lashes lowered of their own accord. She knew, distantly, as one knows a thing that belongs to another world, that she should draw back — a widow, in a public park, with the whole ton at leisure to walk past — and she found she could not so much as want to. He had not mastered it this time. She could see it in his face: whatever iron he had held between them at the ball, and in her ruined study, and every careful moment since, he had set it down at last, and was bending to her, and she was lifting to meet him, her eyes falling closed, the world thinning to the single hair's breadth of warm air that was all that remained between his mouth and hers —

And across the road, where the park railings gave onto the street, something that had been perfectly still began, at the very edge of her sight, to be still in a way that was wrong.

Her eyes opened.

It was not movement that caught her, for there was no movement. It was the absence of it. The whole street beyond the railings ran and flowed — a dray heaving past, a knot of servants at a crossing, two ladies with a footman between them, all of it moving as a street moves — and in the midst of it one man stood planted and unmoving as a post driven into a riverbed, the traffic parting round him, his face turned full toward the two of them beneath the trees.

He was not tucked away. That was the thing that turned the warm blood in her to water. He stood square in the open sun on the far pavement, hat pushed back, making no show of waiting for anyone, as though he no longer cared whether he was seen, and had come only to look his fill of her, and did not mean to be hurried in the looking. She could not have named a single feature of him at that distance. She did not need to. She knew the set of him as surely as she would have known a familiar step upon the stair. It was the same weight that had settled on her outside Braithwaite's door her first day in London. It was him.

"Blackwood." Her hand had found his sleeve and closed hard upon it, all thought of the near-kiss gone from her like a candle pinched out. "There. Across the road, by the railings — the man who does not move. Do you see him?"

The Duke's head came round, and she felt the change go through his whole frame, felt him gather beneath her hand, ready to be off across the road in a stride —

A heavy brewer's dray came grinding up the street between them and the railings, blotting out the far pavement for the length of a slow breath — the great flanks of the horses, the stacked casks, a boy at the leader's head — and when it had lumbered past, and the pavement showed clear again, the man was no longer square in the open where he had stood.

But he had not melted cleanly away, as he had every time before, and that was worse. He had drawn back only a pace or two, to the mouth of a passage between the houses, and stood there yet — half turned now, in no haste to be gone and no fear of them in him at all — and let a hackney and then a barrow come between them. By the little he gave them of his back Harriet understood, with a cold that went to the bone, that he was not fleeing. He was simply finished, for today, with looking at her, and would go when it suited him and not before. He had come nearer than he had ever come. He had watched them at the very edge of a kiss, and he had not troubled to hide.

"Stay here." The Duke’s voice had gone hard and low. His hand covered hers upon his sleeve, one brief press, and then he was moving toward the road, quick and purposeful, his eyes fixed on the passage-mouth across the way.

But the afternoon had thickened with people, and a carriage blocked the crossing, waiting to turn. By the time the Duke had won past it to the far pavement and reached the passage, there was nothing in it but a costermonger and a cat and the long shadow of the houses. Harriet watched him stand a moment at its head, his shoulders squared, looking down its length. She watched him put a sharp question to the costermonger and get a shrug for his answer, and watched him come back to her across the road with a grim set to his mouth and the fear plain in his eyes, though he was schooling it hard.

"Gone," he said shortly. "Into the mews, or through to the next street. There was no catching him." He drew her hand firmly through his arm, and she felt the tension singing in him. "You were not mistaken. That was no idle stranger who wandered into your sight. He stood in the open on purpose — wished to be seen, and near, and unafraid. I like that a great deal less than I liked him skulking in shadows."

Harriet was glad of his arm, and of the ground beneath her feet, and of anything at all that was solid. The warmth of the last half-hour had gone out of the day as though a cloud had crossed the sun. "He was at my window the other night," she said, very low. "And now here — from the solicitor's, to my window in the dark, to the very railings of the park in daylight. He grows bolder, Blackwood. Each time, he comes a little nearer."

"He does." The Duke's jaw was tight. "Which is why there will be two men at your house before nightfall, and you will not stir from it without one of them, or without me. I should have set them there a week ago." His hand tightened over hers. "I will not have him nearer than this. Not by a single step."

She had no chance to answer, for the shadow of the watcher had scarcely lifted before the ordinary world came flooding back into its place, bright and heedless, closing over the dark thing as the traffic had closed over the man.

"Harriet!"

The voice was warm and familiar and came from somewhere to their left, and Harriet turned to find Sara making toward them across the grass with both hands outstretched, all sunshine and gladness, and no notion whatever of what she had walked into the aftermath of.

"Sara." Harriet summoned her own smile from somewhere, and felt the Duke take a small, correct step back from her side. "What a fine afternoon it is to be walking in the park."

"Is it not?" Sara's greeting turned graciously to the Duke. "And the two of you out walking together on such a day. How very pleasant." If she marked the pallor in her friend's face, or the grimness the Duke had not quite smoothed from his own, she was too kind, or too discreet, to say so.

Before Harriet could gather herself to answer, two gentlemen hailed the Duke from the path, and came up with the ease of long acquaintance. Lord Woodley and Lord Ashcroft made their bows to Harriet and to Sara both, and then turned the greater part of their attention to the Duke.

"You are aware, I take it," said Lord Woodley, with a lift of one brow, "that there are certain — whispers?" His bluntness brought the heat back into Harriet's cheeks. "I speak plainly, as you find. There is no good reason, to my mind, to keep such a thing from the two of you when the whole room already has it."

Sara let out a light laugh, which drew Lord Woodley's eye sharply to her. "Come, Lord Woodley — the ton will always find some morsel to gossip over. My dear friend, being widowed and quite alone in the world, will always be some manner of subject for them, I am afraid. It signifies nothing."

"That much is true," Lord Ashcroft agreed, with a look at Lord Woodley that had a mild reproof in it. "You must forgive Lord Woodley, Lady Colbourne. He often speaks without thinking."

Harriet returned no more than a quiet courtesy, and saw Sara send her a glance of warm sympathy before taking the conversation up herself and steering it, with a friend's practiced kindness, well away from Harriet and the Duke.