He was sitting in the window seat, a book open on his lap, though she strongly suspected he had not turned a page in some time.
The room was lit by a single lamp, casting long shadows across the shelves of leather-bound volumes that had probably cost more than the Leightons’ entire cottage.
“You’re lurking,” she observed, closing the door behind her.
“I’m reading.”
“Poorly. That book has been open to the same page for at least twenty minutes. I’ve been watching from the hallway.”
He looked up at her, and whatever he saw—the loose hair, the bare feet, the robe tied hastily over her nightgown—softened his expression into something that made her stomach perform a maneuver that would have impressed the Royal Navy.
“Come here.”
She went.
The window seat was narrow. They ended up pressed together from shoulder to knee, his arm wrapped around her, her head fitting into the crook of his neck as though it had been designed for precisely that purpose.
“Tell me about the book,” she requested, leaning into his warmth.
“It’s calledMediations, by Marcus Aurelius,” he muttered, his chest vibrating as he spoke. “Control what you can control.” His hand slid up and down her arm slowly. “Do not allow challenging people to disturb your peace.” His hand moved to her shoulder, kneading it gently. “Life is short.”
Next, his hand found the nape of her neck beneath her hair. His fingers traced the line of her spine through the thin fabric of her robe, and she shivered. Hudson moved to stand between her knees, and she slid her hands into his hair.
They had developed a vocabulary of stops and pauses, a language of restraint that was becoming as familiar as the desire that preceded it. His hand slid beneath her robe, his fingers finding the hem of her nightgown and pushing it up past her hips. She gasped as his mouth followed, and her hand fisted in his hair, holding him there as her hips rose to meet him.
The window seat creaked beneath them, and she muffled the sounds of her pleasure with her sleeve, her whole body shaking with the effort of containing something that did not want to be contained.
It continued as such, and these were the only moments when Augusta was not plagued by the other thing that she could not rid herself of.
She had written to her sister. The letter had been sent. There had been no reply.
She tried not to think about what that might mean. Tried instead to focus fully on the present, to be here, in this house, with this unlikely configuration of people who had somehow become the closest thing to family she had known in years.
It was not perfect. It was not even entirely secure. But it was something. Something warm and real and hers in a way that nothing in her life had been for a very long time.
And if Hudson’s hand found hers under the dinner table when Cassie wasn’t looking, or if she caught him watching her across the schoolroom with an expression she could not interpret…
Some questions, she had decided, were better lived than answered.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Augusta was halfway through explaining the finer points of long division to a visibly skeptical Cassie when Hudson appeared in the doorway of the morning room, a furrow between his eyebrows.
She set down her teacup.
Cassie, who had been using the pause to surreptitiously slide a piece of toast to Pippin beneath the table, froze mid-reach.
“Miss Norton,” Hudson said. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
The someone was not at all what Augusta had expected.
She was small. Smaller than Augusta by several inches, with mahogany brown hair pulled into a neat chignon beneath a plain traveling bonnet and eyes of a startling, vivid amber brown.
Augusta stood so quickly that her chair scraped loudly across the floor. The numbers on Cassie’s slate blurred before her eyes. The toast, abandoned, landed on the carpet with a soft thud that neither woman noticed.
“Olivia?” The name was barely above a breath.
The young woman stood in the doorway with her gloved hands clasped before her, and Augusta’s chest cracked open.
