Chapter 2 #2
“Cecily, you cannot walk to the shore alone.”
“I’ve walked to the shore alone before.”
“In London, in a park, with a maid twenty feet behind you. Not in Brighton at five in the morning.” Beatrice’s voice had taken on the tone of someone who was already tired and could feel an argument assembling itself against her will.
“Wait until he’s settled, and I’ll come with you. Twenty minutes.”
“You should sleep.”
“And you should have a chaperone.”
“Bea.” Cecily softened it, reached out, and touched her sister’s arm briefly.
“There will be no one on the shore at this hour. Absolutely no one. I’ll walk to the water and back, get some air, and be home before you’ve finished your tea.
” She grabbed her shawl from the back of the chair.
“I am twenty-three years old, I think I can manage a beach.”
Beatrice looked at her with the expression of a woman who knew she was losing and resented it. “If anything happens–”
“Nothing will happen.”
“If it does–”
“It won’t.” Cecily bent and kissed her sister’s cheek, the baby warm and solid between them. “Go back to bed. I’ll be an hour at most.”
She didn’t wait for the next objection.
Brighton at dawn was an entirely different city.
Cecily had been staying with Edward and Beatrice for only a few days—long enough to borrow their habits, but not long enough to belong to them—and already she could feel the difference between this quiet hour and the bright performance the town would demand by noon.
The version that existed by daylight—all promenades and parasols and calculated social performance—had not yet assembled itself.
She walked with her shawl pulled close and her half-boots already damp at the toes from the wet sand, and she felt, for the first time in several days, that she could breathe properly.
That was what the sea did to her. It made everything—the conversations, the expectations, the careful architecture of what she should want and when she should want it—feel slightly less urgent.
The water didn’t care that she was twenty-three and unmarried.
The tide had no opinions about Mr. Alderton.
She walked further than she’d intended, which was its own small rebellion, before she spotted a huge figure. At first, she thought the dark shape ahead was nothing more than a discarded coat or a fisherman’s bundle left too near the tide. Brighton’s shore collected such things overnight.
It was the color of his coat that she noticed first.
Dark against the pale sand. Wrong, somehow, in the way that things were wrong before one had understood why.
She slowed down. Looked again. The figure was lying on the waterline, half on his side, the waves reaching him and retreating and reaching again with complete disregard, his coat dark with water, one arm stretched at an angle that no sleeping man would choose.
She stood still for one full second. Then she walked toward him quickly, her boots catching in the wet sand.
He was prone when she reached him. She dropped to her knees and turned him slightly. His shirt was half-untucked, the collar pulled open as though someone had gripped it.
For a moment, she simply kneeled there, the sound of the surf suddenly louder in her ears.
He might be dead.
The thought came calmly, almost absurdly so.
Without thinking, she pressed two fingers to the side of his throat—found a pulse, strong and steady—and released the breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
“Hello,” she said, feeling slightly foolish. “Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
She tried again, louder. “Sir, can you hear me?”
A sound. Not words. Something between a groan and an objection.
“I need you to wake up,” she said firmly. “You’re on the beach. You’re—you’ve been in the water, I think, and you need to–”
He moved slowly, effortfully, with the particular determination of someone whose body was arguing against the whole enterprise. He rolled onto his back and then immediately pressed one hand to the back of his head with a sharp, quiet sound that was not quite a word.
Cecily sat back on her boot heels and looked at him. He was—she registered this with the detached clarity of shock—extraordinarily handsome.
Even wet, even with sand across his jaw and his shirt open at the collar and his expression currently arranged in the specific lines of a man in considerable pain, he was the sort of face that would have stopped conversation in any room he entered.
Dark hair. A jaw that looked like it had been designed with some architectural intention. He opened his eyes; they were green, vivid, and slightly unfocused.
For a moment, he simply looked at the sky. Then he looked at her.
“Where–” His voice faltered. He tried again. “What happened?”
It wasn’t quite a question, more like a man taking inventory.
“I found you,” Cecily said. “You were unconscious. Here, on the shore.” She kept her voice steady, practical, the voice of someone who was not in the least affected by the green eyes or the open collar or the proximity. “Do you know your name?”
He frowned faintly, as though the question required more effort than it should. “Yes.”
A pause. He touched the back of his head again, more carefully this time, and something moved across his face—not just pain, but something sharper. Recognition, or the edge of it.
“You’re… real,” he said slowly. “That’s fortunate.”
Her breath caught. “Sir–”
“I was afraid,” he cut her off, squinting at her face, “that you might be an invention. Which would be a terrible waste.”
Her cheeks warmed at once. She could not tell whether he meant to be charming or simply had not yet learned caution.
“You have had too much to drink,” she said firmly.
“That, too, is possible.”
“Do you remember how you came to be here?”
“There was–” He stopped. Seemed to decide against finishing. His gaze returned to her face and stayed there, with more focus now, the confusion beginning to clear at the edges. “You found me.”
“Yes.”
“You were just… walking.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her for a moment in a way that was slightly difficult to interpret—dazed still, but aware, and something else that she couldn’t immediately name.
“You have…” He paused, as though selecting his words with more care than his current condition warranted. “…a very determined expression for someone who came here for a walk.”
Cecily blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“It’s not a complaint.” The ghost of something moved across his mouth. “I only mean, you knelt in wet sand to take my pulse without hesitating. Most people would have called for someone.”
“There was no one to call.”
“No.” He seemed to find this quietly amusing, or perhaps he was simply still concussed. “No, I suppose there wasn’t.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow. The movement cost him; she could see it in the tightening of his jaw. But he got there, then attempted to sit up. And that was where the plan encountered difficulty.
He reached for balance that wasn’t there, his hand found her arm, and then, somehow, in the specific graceless mechanics of a large man attempting to sit up on unstable ground, he had pulled her in, and she had gone.
Quite suddenly, they were very close, his hand gripping her arm, her own braced against his shoulder, their faces not six inches apart. And he was breathing… very hard.
She froze.
He stilled.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Cecily was aware of several things simultaneously: the sound of the water, the cold of the sand beneath her knees, the warmth of his hand through the thin wool of her shawl, and the fact that she had never in her twenty-three years been this close to a man’s face.
Not like this. Not with his eyes on hers, no polite distance between them, and nothing at all to do with propriety or performance.
She could see the damp curl of hair at his temple, the faint scrape along his jaw where he had not shaved, the unevenness of his breathing.
Her heart was doing something completely unreasonable.
His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth and then came back to hers, and something in his expression changed—steadier now, and quieter, and much more present than a man with a head injury had any right to be. For a breath—no more than that—she thought he might kiss her.
The possibility was so startling that it left her dizzy.
She should move. She was going to move.
“Oh,” a voice gasped.
Both of them turned.
Two women stood perhaps thirty feet away on the upper part of the beach, bonnets already in place, clearly on an early morning walk, clearly frozen in place by the tableau in front of them.
One had her hand cupped over her mouth. The other was simply staring with the focused attention of someone committing every detail to memory.
The blood drained from Cecily’s face. She was on her feet before she had decided to stand, her skirts twisted from kneeling, her pulse loud in her ears.
“I–” She stepped back. The sand shifted beneath her boots. “He was—I only–”
The women said nothing, only exchanged looks that said everything.
“I must go,” Cecily said breathlessly, not daring to look at the man again. “You should seek help. There are houses along the promenade.”
“Wait–” he began, pushing himself upright with difficulty.
But she was already stepping back.
Cecily turned and walked away from the water. Quickly. Not quite running. Her heart was loud in her ears, and her face was burning. The voice in her head—the one that sounded distressingly like her mother’s—was already saying, with great precision and zero comfort, I told you so.
She did not look back.