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He rolled onto his back, trapped her hand against his breastbone. “For urging me to try, with Lucy. The estrangement had eaten away at me. In some ways, I’d begun to feel like a stranger.” He touched their conjoined hands to his mouth, which curved in a smile. “A handsome stranger, but a stranger nonetheless.”

His hot breath tickled.

Her heart cramped harder, and her words ghosted out. “It is such a beautiful thing, to know you.”

He guided their hands down, rose on an elbow, and kissed her, a soft, slow kiss.

Sometime later, they lay on their sides, facing each other.

“Do you think you’ll ever reform?” she asked, idly brushing the tousled locks back from his forehead.

His brows shifted, just a little.

“Me, a reformed rake?” He sounded playful, but his lower lip took on a brooding fullness, almost a pout. “My sweet, rakes don’t really reform. They marry when it’s expedient and give their wives the clap.”

“But you’re a good rake. You’ve followed a different rule book.”

“I’m an honest rake,” he said. “I know what I have to offer.” He flung an arm over her waist, drew her closer, and this time, when he kissed her, it was wickedly lascivious.

“No,” she said at last. “That’s a fraction of what you have to offer.”

“Perhaps,” he conceded. “But marriage isn’t in the cards.”

“Why?”

“Please.”

She flushed at his sardonic tone. “Marriage is in the stars, though. Jupiter is transiting your seventh house. And you have a Cancer moon.”

“First algology, now astrology.” He sounded sleepily amused. “I’m guessing this is Miranda’s doing.”

“She’s the one who told me about Jupiter and the moon.” She hesitated. “James told me about female husbands.”

He made a noncommittal noise in his throat.

“You could marry,” she insisted.

“Who?”

Her blood came to a complete stop in her veins, but it was a rhetorical question and he continued with hardly a pause.

“If they can, sapphists make their lives with each other. The ones who want me—well, as I’ve mentioned, I have difficulty trusting that they see who I am.”

“If you’re lumping all sapphists together, you’re not seeing who they are, individually. A sapphist might very well want you for you.” She drew a breath. “So might women who aren’t sapphists.”

He didn’t refute either possibility. He looked more awake, but his gaze had gone dark.

“Anyone I married would find as much danger as security in the arrangement. The courts would strip her married name from her if my past were discovered. The public would castigate and pity her. That’s not something I could rightly offer.”

“Marriage is dangerous.” Esmé’s face was there again, above her, then gone. “There are rewards, but risk is always part of the equation. It can seem like a cage in the best of circumstances. And husbands are so often violent or unfaithful or disinterested. And wives have so little recourse.”

“You’re hardly recommending the institution.”

“I’m not trying to recommend it.” What was she trying to do? In any event, her mouth was still moving. “The only thing I recommend is…growing roots with someone.”

“It’s always plants with you.” He was teasing, retreating into raillery. She shut her mouth, shut her eyes. The splinter in her chest reasserted itself, a little prick to the heart.

She willed herself to sleep, and as the silence extended, wondered if he’d drifted off himself.