Chapter Ten #2
She had to say something. She should deflect or make some light remark that would restore the proper distance between governess and employer. That was what a sensible woman would do.
But she had never felt less sensible in her life.
"Alistair…"
"I know." He closed his eyes, as if the sight of her was too much to bear.
"I know I shouldn't say such things. I know it's inappropriate.
But I look at you, and I…" A breath shuddered out of him, ragged and unsteady.
"I can't seem to help myself. I've spent years controlling every word, every impulse, every feeling that threatened to break through.
And then you arrived with your hair like fire and your heart like sunlight, and I don't know how to be controlled around you anymore. "
"You don't have to be controlled." The words escaped before she could stop them. "Not with me."
His eyes opened and met hers. And in them she saw everything he wasn't saying—the longing, the fear, the desperate hope that maybe, somehow, what he felt wasn't madness.
"If I stop being controlled," he said softly, "I don't know what I'll do."
The air between them crackled with tension. Eliza was acutely aware of how close they were standing. One step forward, and she could touch him. One step forward and everything would change.
She wanted to take that step. She wanted it so badly her whole body ached with it.
"I found another one!"
Henry's triumphant shout shattered the moment. They sprang apart, though they hadn't actually been touching, as the boy came running over with a pin held aloft like a trophy.
"It was hiding under a leaf. Very smart."
"Excellent work, Lord Henry." Alistair's voice was steady, though Eliza could see the rapid pulse in his throat. "That should be all of them."
He handed her the pins reluctantly, but his fingers brushed hers in the transfer. The touch made her shiver.
"I should…I should fix this," she said, gesturing vaguely at the disaster of her hair. "If you'll excuse me…"
"Of course."
But neither of them moved. They just stood there, looking at each other.
"Miss Harrow! Can we look for more beetles?"
Henry's voice broke through her dangerous imaginings. She blinked, suddenly aware of how long they had been standing there, staring at each other like people who had forgotten how to speak.
"Of course, darling. Just let me…Let me fix my hair first. I'll be right back."
She turned to go, her heart pounding, and her skin still flushed from the intensity of his gaze. She had made it three steps before his voice stopped her.
"Miss Harrow?"
She looked back.
"I meant what I said. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." A pause, weighted with everything they weren't saying. "You are the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."
The words hung between them, honest, raw and terrifying in their simplicity. She opened her mouth to respond, but before she could find words, he turned and walked away, leaving her standing in the garden with her hair streaming wild and her heart pounding.
She watched him go until he disappeared around the corner of the house. Then she pressed her hand to her chest, where her heart was threatening to beat its way out, and tried to remember how to breathe.
She fixed her hair in her room, fingers trembling as she wound the copper strands back into their proper configuration.
But the face that looked back at her from the mirror was flushed and bright-eyed, utterly failing to project respectable professionalism. She looked like a woman who had just been told she was beautiful by a man she was desperately trying not to fall in love with.
Which was, of course, exactly what she was.
She sat down on her bed, pressing her hands to her burning cheeks, and tried to make sense of what had just happened.
Lady Pufferton's offer was still on her mind, a potential escape route from this impossible situation. She could go to London and build a sensible life.
But even as she thought it, she knew she wasn't going to take it.
She wasn't going anywhere. Not until she knew, one way or another, whether this feeling between them was real.
Not until she had her answer.
***
Alistair did not return to his study after the incident in the garden.
He couldn't because he was entirely and completely lost to a woman whose hair looked like autumn fire and whose eyes held secrets that he would spend a lifetime trying to understand.
He went instead to the stables. To Sovereign, who was the only creature in the world that might possibly understand what it felt like to be wild and wanting and utterly unable to articulate either.
The great black stallion nickered as Alistair entered his stall, bumping his shoulder with a familiarity that would have astonished anyone who remembered the horse's reputation as a brute.
"I told her she was beautiful," he informed the horse, leaning against the wooden partition. "I told her she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen."
Sovereign snorted, which Alistair chose to interpret as sympathy.
"I've spent all those years not saying things, not feeling things and building walls so thick I couldn't see over them anymore.
And then she comes along with her copper hair, her green eyes, and her complete inability to be impressed by me, and suddenly I'm spouting poetry in the garden like a lovesick fool. "
He pressed his forehead against the horse's neck, breathing in the familiar scent of horse, hay and leather. It grounded him, somehow. It reminded him that the world was still turning, even if everything inside him felt upside down.
"Her hair," he said quietly. "You should have seen it, Sovereign. I've imagined it…I've imagined it every night for weeks, but the reality was that it was beyond anything I could have pictured. Like fire, like something magical. Like something that shouldn't exist in the real world."
The horse bumped his shoulder again, more insistently this time.
"I know. I know it's ridiculous. She's my governess. She's been offered a perfectly respectable position in London. She has no reason to stay here, no reason to…"
He stopped and pressed his hand against his eyes.
She's going to leave. And I can't even blame her.
Court her, Lady Pufferton had said. Show her what she would be leaving behind.
He had tried. The books, the attention, the small gestures that felt enormous to him but probably meant nothing to her. What did he know of courtship? What did he know of romance?
"I don't know what to do," he told Sovereign. "I don't know how to make her stay. I don't even know if I have the right to ask."
The horse had no answers. Just warm breath and dark eyes and the steady patience of a creature who had spent his life waiting for someone to see past the teeth and the temper.
She saw past yours, Alistair thought. She looked at you and saw loneliness instead of viciousness. Maybe she can do the same for me.
Maybe.
It was a thin thread to cling to.
But it was all he had.
***
That evening, Eliza found a book on her nightstand.
She had come upstairs after dinner, which was a quiet affair.
Henry was drowsy from his afternoon of beetle-hunting, and Alistair was conspicuously absent, having claimed pressing estate business that needed his attention.
The absence had been a relief and a disappointment in equal measure; she wasn't sure she could have looked at him across a dinner table without blushing furiously, but she also found she missed his presence with an intensity that alarmed her.
The book caught her eye the moment she entered her room. It was a volume of poetry, handsomely bound in leather, clearly expensive, with a silk ribbon marking a particular page. She approached it cautiously, as if it might be a trap.
It hadn't been there this morning. Someone had placed it on her nightstand while she was at dinner.
She picked it up, feeling the weight of it in her hands. The leather was soft and well-worn, as if this book had been read many times before. She opened it to the marked page, curious, and found a poem about a woman with autumn hair and eyes like forests in summer.
Her breath caught as she read:
Her tresses, bright as autumn's fire,
Like copper spun on heaven's loom,
Do set my heart and soul alight
And chase away the winter's gloom.
And in her eyes, I see the spring,
The promise of the warming sun,
Of flowers waking, birds that sing—
Of days when frost and ice are done.
There was no note. No signature. Nothing to indicate who had left it there or why.
But she knew.