“I am not staring. I am observing. There is a distinction.”
“Is there?” Dominic’s mouth curved against the rim of his teacup—a small, private smile Lorraine had long since catalogued underdangerous. “And what, precisely, are you observing?”
“The way you hold your cup.” She kept her expression serenely composed—governess discipline, long practised and now employed for purposes distinctly ungenteel. “You use both hands. Like a child with a bowl of broth.”
“It is December. The cup is warm.”
“The cup is an excuse. You hold it so that your hands are otherwise occupied.”
His smile deepened. “And what would you have me do with them?”
The question struck low and immediate. Lorraine took a measured sip of tea, grateful for the momentary concealment, for her thoughts had leapt somewhere entirely unsuitable for the breakfast table.
“More toast, Miss Weston?”
Graves. Impeccable. Unerring. Unavoidable.
“Thank you, Graves.”
Across the table, Dominic’s eyes held a glint he made no effort to disguise. He knew. Of course he knew. He set down his cup—deliberately, both hands—and reached for the marmalade with exaggerated composure.
“Thomas is expecting you in the nursery at nine,” he said conversationally. “Something to do with kestrels.”
“He intends to paint the female this time. He says the male receives too much admiration.”
“A sound judgment. The female is the better hunter.”
“I shall tell him you said so.”
“Tell him I will come after luncheon.”
Lorraine’s chest tightened with something unfamiliar. It had been happening with increasing frequency—this strange, unsteady warmth, this quiet, perilous expansion that felt less like falling and more like becoming, as though her very bones were reshaping themselves to accommodate a life she had never imagined.
He comes to the nursery now. Every day. He watches Thomas paint, asks after feather patterns, corrects his grip upon the brush. He is becoming a father—and does not yet know it.
And I am becoming something for which I have no name. Not a wife, not a mistress, not a mother—but some impossible thing that touches upon all three and belongs wholly to none.
And I want him so much it aches.
She excused herself before Graves could return with more toast and more judgment.
***
The day unfolded in an easy rhythm—lessons with Thomas, a walk about the grounds, and the quiet companionship of the library in the later hours, where Dominic attended to his correspondence and affected not to observe her across the room.
The pretence had become a private amusement between them. He would glance; she would catch him; he would withdraw at once with an air of exaggerated dignity that bordered upon the absurd; she would lower her gaze to her book and fail, entirely, to read a single word.
He has seen me entirely without clothing,she thought during one of these exchanges,and yet a glance across a library still unsettles me like a schoolgirl’s first infatuation. This is absurd. I am a rational woman of six-and-twenty. I have read Wollstonecraft. I ought not to be undone by a man looking at me over a letter concerning grain yields.
And yet she was undone. Thoroughly, comprehensively, disastrously undone.
And tonight, she meant to act upon it.
The notion had been gathering for days—a slow, insistent heat that owed nothing to the fires Dominic kept banked in every room and everything to the way he came apart beneath her hands. She had learned him as she learned all things: with care, with patience, with quiet determination. The scar at his ribs that made him flinch if touched too suddenly; the hollow at his throat where his pulse beat strongest; the sound he made—low, fractured—when her fingers traced the length of his spine.
She had mapped him.
And she wanted something very particular.
