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Only then did she go to the rock where her boots waited, cool now in the shade. The sand had been kind to her; the thought of stone again made her ankle flinch in anticipation. She sat and dabbed her feet dry with a handkerchief from her pocket, brushing away the last stubborn grains, then drew on her stockings. She bent to lace her boots, fingers clumsy for once. He watched her in silence, the act so precise, so quiet, it held him still.

When she straightened, basket on her arm and Papa’s recipe tucked within her stays rustling faintly against her ribs, he was still looking at her. Not at her limp. Not at the awkwardness of trading sand for boots. At her.

“Don’t forget,” he said quietly. “Your whole self. I see all of it.”

Dangerous words. They felt like fingers on the knots that held Barbara and Pepper apart.

“I remember,” she said, and wasn’t entirely sure whether she meant it as a promise or a warning.

She turned toward the low path back to the promenade. The sand cradled her steps—left sure, right almost jaunty now—as she crossed the strip of beach.

At the top of the slope, where the sand gave way to pebbles and then to the hard sting of the path, she paused.

She turned back.

He stood exactly where she had left him: coat still sacrificed to the sun-warmed rock, breeches rolled, bare feet in the damp sand. The wind tugged at his hair, ruffling the careful aristocratic smoothness out of it. From here he looked less like a man weighted with obligations and more like a secret she had just discovered, something bright and improbable the rest of the world hadn’t quite noticed yet.

And she knew, with a sudden, terrifying clarity, that she loved him.

For a heartbeat that felt like a held breath, their eyes met across the distance. No words, just the echo of their bargain—your whole self, and mine—hanging quietly between them.

She lifted her free hand. The tiniest, foolish little wave.

He answered with a dip of his head—something between a bow and a vow.

Then she turned and walked over the rise.

The path to the house felt longer than the way down had done. Once she left the forgiving give of the sand, every stone remembered its grievance with her right ankle. The old ache woke and began to complain in earnest. By the time she reached the gravel above the shore, she had to shorten her steps again—left sure, right careful. As always.

It made the contrast cruel. On the sand with Chester, she had felt careless, free, and seen. She had shrieked for the sheer joy of moving without thinking of every inch beneath her feet. For a little while she had not been a girl with a limp or a lady with a problem; she had just been a person. Laughing. Alive.

I’d rather be back down there, she thought, a little wildly. Barefoot with him. Whole.

But her hour was up. She had work to do, and a life to hold together as best she could.

The town thickened around her—the clop of hooves, the cry of gulls, the distant clatter of crockery from inn kitchens. With every step closer to Marine Parade, Lady Barbara tried to climb back into place. The correct spine. The correct stride. The correct distance from men who kissed your hand and asked to see everything she’d spent years hiding.

Her mind did the sums she knew by heart.

As Pepper, the baker’s daughter, she could never be Lady Barbara in public. No drawing room, no duke, no respectable engagement supper to tempt her parents into the same air.

As Lady Barbara, limping and with doctors murmuring about uncertainty and childbearing, she would always be measured like livestock. If Wyndale—or any man like him—ever learned what Dr. Fernando had hinted, she knew precisely the sort of life they would consider she deserved: tucked away, pitied at best, tolerated at worst.

She needed to marry because it was the only way to bring her parents together, and the Royal Warrant was the way they could, hopefully, stay together. She needed to appear pliable to Mother. She needed a husband respectable enough to bring her parents into the same room without scandal—and mild enough not to notice whether his wife’s heart stayed in the kitchen of a pâtisserie on Harley Street.

That had been the plan.

Except when she thought of her husband now, no parade of dull, careful faces rose in her mind. Only one.

A man who had seen her behind a counter and in a drawing room and somehow added the two together instead of subtracting. A man who had watched her walk and admired persistence instead of pitying imperfection.

Chester.

He had looked at her on the beach as though she were not half-and-half at all, but whole.

This is what Papa meant, she realized, fingers tightening on the basket handle. A recipe for one person who can cherish it.

Her eyes pricked. She blinked hard.