Five days gone, and the house remained altered by his absence. Not emptier, but changed. Charged. As though his departure had swept away the last barrier between herself and Dominic, and now the very air seemed to hum with everything they hadn’t done.
Five days since the night in the library. Five days since she had held him while he broke, since her fingers had moved through his hair while he spoke of unsent letters and dreams that would not release him. Five days since they had watched the dawn arrive together, side by side upon the settee, breathing in the fragile quiet of something new.
They had not spoken of it.
Not directly. Not in words. But in every other language—in glances that lingered too long, in the charged space between them in narrow corridors, in the way his voice lowered when he spoke her name—the conversation continued, relentless and inescapable.
Lorraine was losing her composure.
For several years, she had trained herself in the discipline of wanting nothing. She had perfected the art of lowered eyes, measured steps, and thoughts confined within strict and sensible bounds. She had been so very good at it—soaccomplished in the practice of denial—that she had nearly persuaded herself the wanting had died.
It had not died. It had only slept. And now it was awake, ravenous, filling every quiet moment with thoughts of grey eyes, scarred hands, and the rough cadence of her name spoken in the dark.
She was humming.
She had not hummed since before Lydia’s scandal—before the disgrace, before she had locked away every light and frivolous part of herself behind a careful façade of competence and composure.
This is what he does to me, she thought.He makes me hum.
It was, she reflected, a singularly inadequate description for the undoing of one’s entire emotional architecture.
***
Dominic was in a very particular kind of hell.
A refined, exquisite torment reserved for men who had held the woman they desired in their arms through the night—and had been too shattered to act upon it.
He sat at his desk, staring at estate correspondence that might as well have been written in cypher, and replayed the same three memories in a relentless loop: the press of her lips against his knuckles; the steady rhythm of her heartbeat beneath his ear; the gentle passage of her fingers through his hair—so tender it had nearly undone him for reasons altogether separate from grief.
He had wept in her arms. Had broken utterly, in a manner he had denied himself since Spain. And she had not recoiled. Had not withdrawn. Had not regarded him with the pity he had dreaded for four years.
She had remained.
Had spoken words he could scarcely recall, yet still felt—imprinted somewhere beneath his skin.
And now he wanted her with a force that rendered his former loneliness almost trivial.
It was not merely physical—though the physical alone threatened to unmake him. It was everything. The slight lift of her chin before she spoke something quietly defiant. The faint scatter of freckles across her nose. The ink upon her fingers. The sound of her laughter—not the polite, social version, but the true one, unguarded and bright.
He wanted to hear that laughter daily. Wanted to be its cause. Wanted to sit across from her at breakfast for the remainder of his days and watch the morning light catch in her hair, and know—simply know—that she had chosen him.
That he was not dreaming.
He shoved back from his desk and stood, pacing the study with the restless energy of a caged animal. His hands clenched and flexed at his sides. His jaw ached from the effort of keeping it locked.
‘When,’ she said. ‘Not if.’
***
The days that followed were a study in controlled torment.
They circled one another—drawn together and held apart by the opposing forces of desire and decorum. Rovewood Hall, once vast, seemed now to contract, every passage leading, inevitably, to the same conclusion: each other.
Lorraine caught him watching her during Thomas’s morning lesson. She had been guiding the boy’s hand across the slate, demonstrating the careful strokes of penmanship, when she looked up to find Dominic in the doorway—not concealed, not hesitant, but entirely still, his gaze fixed upon her hands.
Not her face. Her hands.
The way her fingers curved about the chalk. The precision of their movement.
