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“No,” she agreed, voice thick with regret. “They do not.”

For a long moment, they simply stood there, the fire crackling in the hearth the only sound in the stillness between them. Harriet felt raw, exposed, as if a small part of her burden had been lifted, but there were so many more parts to contend with.

And, in that moment, she did not feel entirely alone. Sebastian had carried his own burdens. Perhaps, just perhaps, they could find a way to set them down. Together.

Sebastian’s expression shifted as he watched her, the firelight casting golden flickers against his sharp cheekbones and firm mouth. He reached for her, his hands settling at her waist with a steadiness that told her this was not impulse. Whatever had brought him here tonight, he had arrived at it by deliberate degrees, the way a man arrives at a decision he has been avoiding for years.

He drew her close, and she did not resist. She had spent so long resisting the memory of him, the pull of what they had once been to each other, the evidence of her own heart whenever it had the impertinence to remind her what it was capable of feeling. She was very tired of resisting. And beneath the weariness, quiet as a creditor waiting in the hall, the truth she had not yet spoken waited too.

His scent of clean linen with a hint of sandalwood settled around her like a familiar room she had been locked out of for years and had only now been permitted to re-enter.

“You are playing with fire,” she whispered, though she did not move away.

“I have been burning for years,” he murmured in return.

She had no answer for that. So she did not offer one.

He kissed her then, and it was nothing like the careful, wondering kisses that had come before. This was the accumulated weight of years of waiting and loss, of longing that had never found another object worthy of it. Her fingers curled into the lapels of his coat, and for a long, suspended moment she allowed herself to simply feel the solidity of him, the terrible, magnificent relief of being loved by the one person whose loving had ever truly mattered.

It was Harriet who pulled back.

This was not the practiced withdrawal she had deployed so many times before, the bright smile and the graceful step away that said this meant nothing before anything could be said at all. This was different. Her hands pressed gently against his chest, her forehead dropping to rest there for just a moment while she steadied herself, while she found her breath and the words she needed.

“I cannot,” she said quietly. “Not like this.”

Sebastian was still. She could feel his heartbeat beneath her palms, the controlled evenness of his breathing.

“Explain,” he said, and the word held no accusation, only the patience she had come to expect from him.

She lifted her head and looked at him, and the firelight made it easier, somehow, to say the true thing. “It has meant nothing for so long. Every time. Years of it meaning nothing at all.” She pressed her lips together. “I am afraid that it will mean nothing with you, too. That I have lost the capacity for it to be otherwise.”

He drew breath to speak. She pressed her fingers gently against his chest to stop him.

“And I am more afraid,” she continued, her voice dropping further, “that it will mean everything. That I will be quite undone by it. I am not ready to be undone, Sebastian. Not with so much still between us that has not been said.”

A long silence. Then, very quietly: “That is the most honest thing you have ever said to me.”

She gave a small, unsteady laugh. “Do not grow accustomed to it. It cost me enormously.”

His expression shifted, softened in a way that was almost worse than his intensity. He reached up to brush a loose strand of hair from her cheek, his touch entirely unhurried, and said nothing at all for a moment.

“Tell me about Florence,” she said then. “Tell me what it would have been like. If I had come.”

The warmth in his face dimmed slightly, the old wound surfacing despite itself. She saw him decide, consciously, not to look away from it.

“You would have hated the crossing,” he said at last. “The Channel in February is miserable in every particular.”

She exhaled a soft laugh. “And after the crossing?”

He settled back against the arm of the settee. She drew her wrapper close and curled into the opposite corner. The fire crackled steadily, while Sebastian told her about Florence.

He told her about arriving in the rain, exhausted and furious and heartbroken, and how the city had met him anyway, indifferent to his misery. The city had seen too much history to be troubled by a single young Englishman’s suffering. He told her about the first morning the sun came out and he had walked to the Piazza della Signoria and stood before Perseus holding Medusa’s head.

He told her about the small apartment above a baker’s shop where the smell of bread woke him every morning, and the coffee he had grown to love. Lorenzo had arrived like a force of nature into his careful, grieving solitude and had simply refused to leave.

“He would like you,” Sebastian said. “He likes people who argue back.”

“I excel at that.”