They made a turn that skimmed the edge of the dance, and something crawled along the back of her neck—prickle, chill, attention. She glanced, quickly, to the gallery that ran along one wall, but the light broke the faces into soft, anonymous ovals. An odd certainty slid into her: someone was watching them with more interest than was friendly. She could not have said why she knew it. She only knew she did.
“Do you feel…” she began.
“Yes,” he said at once, not feigning ignorance. “Eyes. I cannot place them.”
“You see everything,” she murmured.
“Not tonight,” he said. His hand pressed once, reassuring. “Let them watch. They will learn nothing we do not mean them to.”
“If you keep rescuing me,” she said, returning to ground she could manage, “they will learn that I cannot rescue myself.”
He huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. “You rescued yourself from me quite handily in the carriage, if you recall.”
“I recall you refused to look at me,” she said, emboldened by the safety he was offering her now.
He winced. “Yes. I have apologized, privately and to myself. I will repeat it later to you, with humility.”
“Do,” she said gravely. “Humility becomes you.”
“You think everything becomes me when I am close enough to a compliment,” he said, sardonic. “I will attempt to earn this one.”
“You already did,” she said, surprising both of them. “When you said—what you said.”
He glanced down at her mouth, just for a second. “That I am your husband?”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
“Because I am,” he said, as if repeating the water table of a field to a farmer who has forgotten why his crops fail. “Not only in public. Not when it is polite. Always.”
“How improper,” she said, because if she did not smile, she would do something worse.
“I hope so,” he said, and the words went through her like heat through glass—no smoke, no ash, only a warm shift in the world.
They came together again, their joined hands a line across the chasm she had kept between sense and wanting. She dared to tease, because she needed to keep breathing.
“So this was jealousy,” she said airily. “I thought it was a fictional condition. Something novels invented to make plain men interesting.”
He raised a brow. “Do I strike you as plain?”
“I am informed you have a reputation for consequence,” she said serenely.
“I am informed my wife has a reputation for honesty,” he returned. “Answer the question.”
“You are not plain,” she conceded. “And yet jealousy does not suit you.”
“Agreed,” he said. “I wear it rarely. It pinches. But if a man reaches for your hand without asking you and without asking me, he will learn my measurements.”
She ducked her head to hide a smile that felt treacherous to the fear that had lived in her for so long. “You cannot police all hands,” she said softly.
“No,” he admitted. “And I do not, as a rule, wish to. I want you to choose freely—conversations, partners, everything. Only—” He hesitated, then said the truth and let it cost him. “Only it is new to me, the sensation of not wanting to share your attention.”
“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious. “You share willingly everywhere else.”
“Because with you it feels earned,” he said simply. “And I am a childish creature who wants to keep his prize.”
“I am not a prize,” she reminded him, gentle but firm.
“You are not,” he agreed. “You are a person who has chosen to stand with me for the space of a dance.” His eyes warmed, grew intent. “And for longer than a dance.”