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“No.” The dryness went out of his face by a degree, and the still attention she had learned to know rose up beneath it. “What do you do with your hands, when nothing in a room needs you? I have never once seen it, for you have always found a glove, or a candle, or a footman’s elbow.”

“I am finding none of those just now.” Her hands lay folded one over the other, and she was aware of the folding, and aware of him being aware of it. “You have caught me with them empty, my lord, which is more than most people manage.”

“James,” he said.

He gave the name low, and it landed beneath her ribs with a sweet, sharp ache, the name she had spoken in the green room come back to her in his keeping.

“James,” she answered.

Saying it came easier than the first time and harder as well, for now she knew what it cost, and she said it anyway. He stood very close, the correct distance gone somewhere while she was minding other things.

Then she saw where they stood. Above them, where she had been so careful all evening never to stand, hung a kissing-bough thick with white berries.

Her breath caught hard in her throat. How had she come to stand here? She had walked herself clear of every green thing in the house with a housekeeper’s care, and her care had brought her here.

“Rosalind.” It was a question, however quietly it came. He had seen the bough, she was certain, though he kept his eyes from it just as she kept hers. “You marked where it hung, did you not? I watched you keep clear of it, and you have been clear of every bough in this house all night.”

“I have.” Her voice wavered, and she could find no means of mending it, for there was no box to square, no glove, no candle, nothing for her hands but each other. “I am not clear of it now.”

“No.”

He left the last inch between them. Even as the floor seemed to tilt beneath her, she understood that the inch was hers to close, just as the conservatory had been hers to leave, and his hand lifted halfway between them, touching nothing, only asking. All she had to do was be still.

And her whole body wanted to move. That was the thing she discovered only in this moment, that beneath eleven years of stillness lived something that leaned toward him with all its strength. If she did not move, he would kiss her. Her heart slammed against her ribs. And she wanted him to. Heaven help her, she wanted him to.

Her breath went out of her, warm and unsteady, across the small bright space between them.

“Lady Holt! There you are. No, do not get up, I shall come to you!”

The voice carried across the room, bright as a bell, as a lady of the Thornes’ acquaintance bore down upon the card-table with both hands out and a quantity of good news to deliver. Behind her came two more guests, arriving late from another engagement and shedding the cold from their cloaks, and the quiet end of the room was quiet no longer. Augusta rose from the dummy hand with her company smile already in place, and her recall came beneath it, dry and pitched precisely far enough.

“Rosalind. Come and be admired, before Mrs. Selwyn admires me to death in your stead.”

Disappointment went through Rosalind like cold water. The bough hung over her head, the room was full of people, and James stepped back to the correct distance with the public look coming down over his face.

“I am coming, Aunt,” she answered.

Her voice came out level, for she owned years of practice at a level voice. She crossed toward the card-table with her hands folded and her chin at the height Augusta had taught her, and a warmth still stood on her skin where his breath had touched it.

“Lady Rosalind.” James bowed, the public form, though the still look held beneath it, and his glance told her plainly that he remembered the bough quite as well as she did. “I shall hope to finish a conversation with you before the evening is out.”

“Lord Dover,” she murmured, and made her curtsy very correctly, and went.

Finish it soon, her heart begged, shameless, as she walked away. Oh, finish it soon.

* * *

Near midnight, old Mrs. Tarrant discovered the loss of her fan and wanted it for the cold drive home.

“I cannot for my life think where I set it down,” the old lady fretted, patting at her sleeves as though the fan might be hiding in one. “Where can it have got to? I had it at supper, did I not? I am sure I did!”

“You laid it on the library table, ma’am, when Mrs. Thorne showed you the atlas,” Rosalind replied, rising. “Pray do not trouble yourself. I shall fetch it sooner than send a footman hunting.”

Augusta, twenty feet off and within call through the open drawing-room door, gave her the small nod that meant go, I am here. The library lay just off the long drawing room, a small square book-lined chamber with the fire kept low and a branch of candles on the table, and the party noise came muffled through the wall. The fan lay exactly where Rosalind remembered it.

She had it in her hand when James came in.

He shut the door to the width of a hand and no further, so that propriety was kept and Augusta’s voice still reached them through the gap. Then he stood with his back near the door and looked at her across the low warm room, and every one of the easy things went unsaid.