“Two people, unchaperoned—and yet nothing at all untoward.”
Gideon’s words teased the back of her mind.
Not every private moment between a gentleman and a lady meant danger. She knew that. She had always known that.
Her mouth tightened.
But that did not make such moments safe.
Even without ill intent, a lady observed in the wrong place, with the wrong gentleman, at the wrong time, was likely to suffer for it. If not her person, then her reputation.
Beatrice exhaled softly.
And yet, reputations were not what drove her.
No, in fact, her mission had never been about preventing gossip. It was about preventing worse things.
Private things.
Terrible things.
Things that happened when a lady’s refusal went unheard, when something could be taken without consent and then after, kept silent out of shame.
Her fingers stilled in her hair.
Better, she thought, to act too soon than too late. Better to be mistaken than to leave some poor girl to go through what?—
Beatrice drew in a quiet breath and let it go.
No. She was not that girl any longer.
“Do you believe me harmless, Beatrice?”
Beatrice’s gaze lowered to the fire, the words turning over slowly in her mind.
He had not been teasing her. Or talking down to her. He had asked as though…
As though he did not think he was harmless at all.
Her fingers tightened around the towel.
The rest of the day returned to her in fragments—not in order, but in feeling. The carriage ride back from Mrs. Shaw’s estate. The ices at Gunter’s. His voice beside her, unchanged in tone and yet altered entirely to her ear.
He had not touched her improperly.
And yet she remembered every accidental brush. Every offered hand. Every moment his attention seemed to linger and she could not be certain whether it had—or whether she had simply wished it so.
Had he meant to? Had she?
The question unsettled her more than it ought.
It felt as though some invisible silken thread had wound itself around the two of them, delicate as breath and impossible to ignore.
And at the end of the day, when the carriage came to a halt before Beckman House, Gideon had stepped down first, of course. Offered his hand.
She had thanked him. Properly. Though perhaps not quite as composedly as she might have wished.
And Gideon—he had bowed. But he had not stepped away.
