Chapter Twenty #2
“I’m sure you’re quite right,” I say, forcing myself to remember the world as it is, not as I once dreamed it could be.
“But I imagine your fiancé wouldn’t want you flying too far away from your gilded cage.
” That word still tastes bitter on my tongue, but I’ve had a day to practice swallowing it down.
“Then he shouldn’t leave my cage … so often unattended.
” She pauses and rolls her weight onto one hip, and the movement does something to the line of her body that makes my mouth go dry.
She’s made a gorgeous seduction of the sentence, and I try to ignore the invitation threaded through every syllable.
Her implication lands, but she presses the point home for good measure.
“I’m supposed to sit alone and embroider until my fingers bleed, mind my manners, and wait upon a man who calls only when it’s convenient for him. But I am no mere convenience.”
There’s real frustration there, as well as loneliness—I hear it beneath the bravado. She’s caged indeed, and the bars aren’t gilded at all; they’re made of neglected, rusted iron.
“More like a catalyst,” I mumble under my breath, musing on all the ways this damsel could get me into trouble. And all the ways I would let her.
Her delicate fingers run over the anvil between us, tracing the scarred surface with an intimacy that makes me acutely aware of every point of contact. She makes no indication whether she heard me or not.
“I rather enjoy this place,” she says instead.
I rub my brow with my thumb, trying to ground myself in the reality of this moment. She cannot mean what she seems to mean. She can’t be here, in my forge, running her fingers over my tools, looking at me like—
“You enjoy this place?” I force a laugh while trying to ignore my thoughts. “Isn’t there a garden party you should be attending right now?”
“I prefer the company here.” Her eyes find mine and hold. “Muscles over marigolds any day.”
Before I can process the words, she runs those same dainty fingers from the anvil along the sweat-soaked skin of my bicep.
Her touch scorches.
Every part of my body lights up like the forge at full blaze.
Heat floods through me, not from the fire behind us, but from the five points of contact where her fingertips rest against my bare skin.
My breath catches, and my heart hammers so hard that I’m certain she can feel my pulse beneath her palm.
My instincts want me to lean into the contact, to turn and close the space between us and to find out if her lips are as soft as I remember. But my sense of self-preservation—battered and barely functional as it is—knows better than that.
I shrug her off, stepping back even though it feels like tearing away from a flame I’ve been cold without.
“Mind your tone, milady,” I warn, though the threat is half-hearted, and we both know it. My voice has gone rough, betraying me. “You’re a kept woman and not of this world, besides. Run along to your charmed life. There’s nothing for you here.”
There was, perhaps, once upon a time. The thought is acid in my mind. There was everything here. A boy who would have given you the world if he’d had anything to give. But station and circumstance did not see fit for that story to be told.
“With due deference, I must respectfully disagree.”
The sultry tone of her voice pulls me from my reflection.
She does not seem to remember who I was in her past, but she does seem interested in me in this present.
She continues to rake her eyes over me, and I feel the weight of her gaze.
Her eager, ocean blue stare and the undercurrent of restlessness that pours from her draw me further in.
I’ve never known a person to contain such a mix of confidence and carnality.
My pulse quickens with the beat of trouble thrumming through me at each passing moment.
This is dangerous and impossible. It can only end in heartache and ruin. Yet I can’t seem to step away.
“You shouldn’t be here. People will talk.”
She shrugs, the movement small, careless. “People always talk. I have made the conscious decision to stop listening.”
The simple rebellion in those words, the quiet revolution of a woman deciding her own mind, matters more than the collective gossip of London, makes me want things I have no right to want.
Silence falls for a moment before she continues, “What’s your name?”
The question is simple. The answer is not.
If I tell her, everything changes; there’s no taking it back, no pretending. The door I’ve kept carefully closed will swing wide open, and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to shut it again.
“Perhaps it would be best if I shared that information with your fiancé first,” I offer, grasping for the social protocols that might protect us both. Reminding this woman—and myself—of the proper order of things in Victorian society.
“He’s not been so forthcoming with the throngs of young girls he fraternizes with.”
The bitterness in her voice makes my hands curl into fists.
“He’s a fool if he’s been stepping out on you.”
“If he wasn’t an earl, he’d be the court jester.”
I smirk dryly despite myself, allowing my gaze to linger over her body a moment longer than what is considered decent. Fitting that this woman has an hourglass figure since I know I could devote countless time to uncovering all there is to know about her.
That thought catches me up short.
I already know her. Or I did. I know she hates the taste of parsnips and loves thunderstorms, but only during the day.
At night, they would terrify her. I know she can climb a tree faster than a cat, and that she broke her arm falling out of one while trying to help an injured dove.
I know the exact pitch of her laughter when she’s truly delighted, and the way her nose scrunches when she’s concentrating.
I know how much she knows about me, too, though she doesn’t seem to have connected those dots yet.
But she’s asked me now. Point-blank.
I could lie. Give her a false name. Keep the past buried, where it belongs.
I redirect the question instead, fighting off this inevitable timeline a few breaths longer. “What’s yours?”
“I asked you first.”
“And I know there’s no going back once I tell you, so I’m giving you another opportunity to live the life that happens for you if you don’t find out the answer to that question. Though I suspect you already do.”
It’s a warning, a last chance to walk away. She doesn’t take it.
“I don’t want my story to be one of regret or doubt. Speak it, and let’s see where the story goes from here.”
“Chance can be a mercurial storyteller. Never sure what the next chapter holds.”
“Keeps you turning the pages though.”
“It does at that,” I agree reluctantly, though not reluctantly enough to wish this to end any other way than the one it seems to be headed toward. I’m going to tell her, and whatever happens next—ruin, heartbreak, the impossible chance of something more—I’ll have set it in motion.
“I’m Madeleine. Your turn.”
My heart is pounding so hard that I can barely hear my own voice. This is it. The moment. The precipice.
I clear my throat and step off the edge. “Thomas Bennett Asher.”
A spark of recognition lights behind her eyes. It is almost as though I can see our childhood memories playing behind her blue irises—the fields, the laughter, the promises.
“Tommy,” she whispers reverently, and the sound of that name in her voice undoes me.
Time stops.
The forge disappears, along with the city. The six years between then and now collapse into nothing, and we’re young again, hiding in the stalls to avoid answering the expectant dinner bell, clothes dirtied from a day in the sun as we confessed feelings and whispered promises we couldn’t keep.
My chest tightens until I can’t breathe.
“It’s Thomas now,” I manage, my voice rough.
“So, it is you.” Her voice remains quiet and breathy, wonder threading through every word.
“Indeed.”
“You’ll be Tommy to me. Always,” she says with a deliciously crooked smile, and the word always hits me like a physical blow.
The irony is too much, too perfect, too painful.
“And I thought I would be yours too. Always.” The words are out before I can stop them, raw and true and far too honest. They hang in the air between us, an accusation and a question that can’t be unasked.
Her smile falters. Something crosses her face, maybe pain or regret … possibly longing, and I immediately wish I could take it back. I wish I could be the kind of man who kept his wounds to himself.
But it’s too late.
I said it. She heard it.
And now we both have to live with what comes next.