“Do not pity them. Not everyone seeks a fluttering heart. Some wish only for a steady rhythm to live by. Something they can rely on.”
His heart fluttered. It had grown wings at the first sight of her, and now it lifted his hand, setting it atop hers. No glove. Cold satin skin stretched over the hills and valleys of her knuckles. Without searching, without seeing, he was able to slip his fingers between hers and curl them, his fingertips trapped between the top of her palm and the grass. Her hand froze. She stopped breathing. Then her fingers curled around his, and her breath warmed the night once more.
“And what do you seek?” he asked.
“That which I cannot have.” The pain in her voice, the longing…
It shattered him.
He looked away. “You are cold. You should return inside.” His hand clenched around hers, revealing the lie. He did not want her to leave.
“I should.”
Yet she did not move. The night air shivered, seeming to perk up to spy on them. The moon peeked out of the clouds, bathing them in light once more. It, too, curious as he about the woman, about himself, about what kind of mischief two bodies could create in a garden alone.
Not alone. They had each other.
“I should go,” she said again.
And when she did not yet move to leave, he wondered what he might do if she didn’t.
Chapter Three
Emma should leave, that was for certain. A dark garden, a strange man, no chaperone to speak of.He held her hand. But he held it with such gentle warmth, she knew he would release her if she even flinched at his touch.
She held a man’s hand in a dark garden, and she should leave because he begged her to stay.
But the moon had stepped out from behind the clouds, and for the first time, she saw him fully. Well, as fully as one could see a man beneath a moon at night. When she’d tripped over him, the clouds and her own body had cast him in darkness. Then as he’d stood, she’d been given only a flash of a look at him before the clouds had hidden him once more.
He'd been like the figures she stitched at the cuffs of her sleeves, made of the same color as that which surrounded him. Like her fingers brushing over those shapes, she’d had only impressions to make sense of him—tall and broad, dark of hair and pale of face, full of sighs and chuckles and with a voice like wine. Rich and complex and stirring warmth in her belly. If she were to stitch him, it would be as a wine-red geometric pattern on wine-red silk. You could not see the sharp angles andintricate shapes unless you looked closely, but you felt it, a series of raised welts on the smooth fabric.
But now she saw him. Thick dark brows slashed above dark eyes. A wide, generous mouth, bottom lip fuller and top lip a wide set M. A sliver of a shadow gathered in the middle of his chin where there must be a cleft. His hair—thick, dark as night, with a bit of grass stuck in it above his ear.
Those details, the strands that created the whole shape, meaningless on their own. Taken altogether, though, finally revealed all at once beneath the silver light of the moon.
They transfixed her. Shoulders wide to carry the worries he spoke of but curved slightly beneath them. He moved with silent precision in every way, big and small, to sit or stand or cock a brow or lift a corner of a lip. Or hold a hand. His body shifted in and out of positions like water pouring into a cup, filling the edges and corners in fluid ease. Confident. Capable.
Yet the way he waited for her answer, with a tilted head, rigid spine, and slightly parted lips… He owned hesitation, too. Or it owned him this very moment.
She inhaled deeply, the air a bit wobbly in her chest. A mistake, this. But she’d been cornered by a man she knew, and she’d known herself in danger, then.
This? Her gentle garden gentleman? A danger she didn’t mind facing for a night. For a few moments more at least.
You should return inside, he’d said.
“Not yet.” She scooted closer. No space between them now. Decimated entirely. “I might as well enjoy… whatever this is.”
“Danger most likely.”
She could not disagree. “This”—she lifted their interconnected hands—“means nothing. I still do not agree tosprawling.”
“Of course you do not. We are merely taking succor in one another. Two eldest siblings commiserating.”
“It feels good to be seen, acknowledged. Odd it’s happening in the dark. Have you ever done anything quite so unconventional before? Holding a stranger’s hand in a garden at night?” Stranger. He didn’t feel like one. Their hands together did not feel like danger. It felt like… an unexpected gift, a moment of pure whimsy before she stepped back into battle.
“Never. Tell me something about you. That no one knows.”
“Why?”
