Chapter 18 #2
They weren’t a family. They were a viscount, his nephew, and his brother’s widow. Anything else was fantasy—dangerous, impossible fantasy that would only lead to scandal and heartbreak.
Henry gave up on the butterfly and discovered a patch of clover instead, immediately setting about the serious business of picking every blossom in reach. Tobias moved to Amelia’s side, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him despite the space between them.
“He’s grown so much,” Tobias said quietly, watching Henry with an expression she couldn’t quite decipher. “Every time I look at him, I see changes I missed.”
“Children grow quickly at this age. By the time he’s three, he’ll be an entirely different creature.”
Henry toddled over, his small hands overflowing with clover blossoms. He deposited the entire collection into Amelia’s lap with great ceremony, then immediately returned for more.
“He’s making you a garden,” Tobias observed, amusement colouring his voice.
“So it seems.” She gathered the flowers carefully, touched by her son’s simple generosity. “Though I suspect the garden itself might object to being relocated piecemeal.”
They lapsed into comfortable silence, both watching Henry’s determined harvesting. The morning sun had grown warm, painting everything in shades of honey and gold. Somewhere nearby, birds sang. The breeze carried the scent of roses and freshly turned earth.
It was, Amelia realized with dawning wonder, perfect.
Not the rigid, controlled perfection Edward had demanded—every flower in its place, every moment scheduled and appropriate. But it was what she’d wanted it to be—wild and natural in its beauty.
She glanced at Tobias and found him already watching her. Their eyes met, and the world seemed to pause—the way it had last night in the drawing room, when they’d stood so close she could count his heartbeats.
“Amelia—” he began, his voice rough.
But Henry chose that moment to discover a particularly ambitious bee and shrieked with mingled delight and alarm. The spell shattered. They both moved instinctively toward the boy—protective, immediate—and Tobias reached him first, scooping him up and away from the industrious insect.
“It’s all right, lad. See? The bee is far more interested in the flowers than in you.”
“Big bee!” Henry announced, his fear forgotten in favour of scientific observation. “Very big bee, Papa!”
“Indeed it is. Quite possibly the largest bee in all of Kent.”
“All of England!”
“All the world,” Amelia added, because apparently hyperbole was contagious.
Henry giggled at their escalating absurdity, and the moment of tension dissolved into something lighter. Safer.
But as Tobias set Henry back on the grass and the boy resumed gathering flowers, their hands brushed against each other.
It was nothing. The merest contact—skin against skin for perhaps a heartbeat, maybe less. Fingers grazing in the space between them.
It was everything.
Electricity arced through Amelia’s veins, sharp and immediate and utterly devastating. She jerked her hand back as though burned, her pulse suddenly wild, her skin tingling where they’d touched.
When she dared glance at him, Tobias was staring at his own hand with an expression of almost comical surprise. As though he, too, had felt that jolt. That impossible connection.
Their eyes met again, and this time there was no Henry-induced interruption to save them. No convenient distraction. Just the two of them and the truth written plainly across both their faces:
This attraction—this whatever-it-was burning between them—was mutual. Undeniable. Growing stronger despite every effort to contain it.
And absolutely, categorically forbidden.
“Henry adores you,” Amelia said abruptly, desperately, her voice emerging too loud in the quiet garden. She looked away, fixing her gaze on her son rather than the man beside her who’d become entirely too dangerous. “He’ll miss you when… when things change.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say it explicitly. When you leave again. When I remarry. When this impossible interlude ends, and we return to being what we’re supposed to be—cordial relations bound by duty rather than… than whatever this was.
Tobias was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone rough, as though the words cost him something.
“So will I.”
The confession hung in the sun-warmed air between them, weighted with meanings she didn’t dare examine. She opened her mouth—to say what, she had no idea. To retreat into propriety’s safety, perhaps. To build back the walls they’d somehow demolished without meaning to.
“We should go inside,” she said instead, the words gentle but firm. A retreat masked as practicality. “It’s growing rather warm, and Henry will need his nap soon.”
“Of course.” Tobias’s tone matched hers—polite, careful, giving nothing away. “I have estate matters requiring attention, in any case.”
They gathered Henry together, working in careful synchronization to avoid further contact. The boy protested being taken inside, naturally, but relented once promised biscuits and stories.
As they walked back toward the house—Henry between them, chattering about butterflies and bees—Amelia was acutely aware of Tobias’s presence beside her. The way his shadow fell across the path. The sound of his breathing. The ghost-feeling of where his hand had brushed hers.
She glanced at him once, unable to help herself.
And found him watching not his nephew, but her.
A sudden realisation coursed through her, and she averted her gaze, unable to look at him any longer. He hadn’t changed. She had—the way she saw him. No longer was he merely Edward’s rebellious younger brother, the rake as Edward had called him—the stain on the family name.
She saw him now as simply Tobias. The man who made her son laugh. The man who looked at her as though she were something precious. The man whose touch made her skin burn and whose absence made the house feel empty.
It was best, she decided firmly, that she focus on the Season and her re-entry into society. The longer she stayed here, with him… The more she would see him as a man. And that was simply something she could not afford to do.