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It would have to be enough.

For tonight, it was more than enough. It was everything.

CHAPTER 11

As morning light doth chase the night away,

Your love dispels the darkness from my day;

With every dawn, my heart anew doth sing,

For you, my love, are life's eternal spring.

The New Ladies’ Valentine Writer (1821)

* * *

December 19, 1821

Harriet awakened as the pale light of morning filtered through the curtains, casting a soft glow over her bedchamber. A deep warmth curled through her limbs, the lingering tenderness of the night before wrapping around her like the heavy coverlet.

Blinking, she propped herself up on one elbow, pushing her tousled hair from her face.

The tenderness of memory moved through her. Sebastian’s voice in the firelight, unhurried and unguarded. She had been given, for one evening, the life she had not chosen, and she had held it as carefully as she knew how.

She had left him sleeping on the settee downstairs.

The thought arrived with a small, domestic warmth that she did not quite know what to do with. Sebastian was asleep in her painted room, his long frame ill-suited to the furniture, her blanket drawn over him. She wondered if he had woken yet. Whether Mrs. Finch had found him first and what that conversation might have looked like. The thought very nearly made her smile.

But the warmth of recollection faded the moment she saw him. Sebastian stood near the fireplace of her antechamber, fully dressed save for his coat, his arms crossed over his chest, his expression carved from stone. His piercing gray eyes were fixed not on her but on the wall above the writing desk.

On the painting.

A slow, dreadful realization curled in her gut.

No.

She did not need to follow his gaze to know what he had found. She had known, lying awake in the small hours, that this moment existed somewhere in the future, patient and inevitable. She had simply not expected it to arrive before breakfast.

His eyes moved to hers at last, and what she saw there was worse than anger.

“You lied to me.”

The words struck her deeper than she thought possible. Harriet’s lips parted, but no sound came.

“I came upstairs to tell you I was heading home,” he continued, his voice controlled in a way that frightened her more than anger would have done. His gaze returned to the wall above her writing desk. “Instead, I found that.”

Matteo di Bianchi’s lost work, the one she had sworn to him she no longer possessed, hung in plain sight upon her wall. A cruel revelation framed in gilt and shadow.

Her breath caught. “I—I could not let it go.”

Sebastian let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head as if the sight of it was too much to bear.

“No,” he said, his voice quieter now, but no less cutting. “I suppose you could not.”

She drew her wrapper close about her shoulders, shame pooling in her stomach like lead.

“Sebastian, please, let me explain⁠—”