Then Ryan came to his senses.
He had walked, without invitation, into the room of a sleeping woman. There was no version of this that reflected well on him. When Eloise woke properly and found him standing over her, she was going to scream, and he would have absolutely nothing to say for himself.
He was already bracing for it when—
"Ryan?..."
A sleepy murmur. Blurred at the edges, his name half-dissolved in drowsiness.
He stood there, struck dumb by it.
*What is wrong with me,* he thought, *that this one small sound—*
Another thought pressed in behind it, quieter and somehow worse: *How many people has she spoken to in that voice? If you set aside her family, her maid—if you set aside anyone who couldn't reasonably be counted—was I the first?*
He pressed his hand over his mouth and made himself stop.
He was losing his mind. He needed to explain himself, apologize, and leave, in that order, before any of this became worse.
He expected her to startle. To sit up, suddenly awake, eyes wide.
Instead, she blinked at him—slow, unhurried, her lashes rising and falling with the patient rhythm of someone surfacing from very deep water. Her green eyes found him and simply rested there. No alarm. No confusion. As though finding him in her room in the middle of the night was an entirely unremarkable event.
Her eyes curved softly at the corners.
Then they closed again.
Her head tipped sideways. Her breathing evened out, deeper and slower than before.
Ryan stared at her.
She had gone back to sleep. She had seen him, registered him, smiled faintly, and gone straight back to sleep.
A baffled laugh escaped him before he could stop it. He looked around the empty room, as though someone else might be there to confirm what had just happened, then sat down in the chair opposite and rested his chin in his hand.
She slept the way she did most things—fully, without reservation. Her face, expressionless at first, shifted through something—a small crease appeared between her brows, some difficulty in the dream—then smoothed entirely, and the corners of her mouth turned upward.
Something pleasant, now.
He watched her, and tried to remember when he had last looked at a sleeping face. He couldn't. He didn't think he ever had, not like this, not with any particular attention.
He let himself think about her honestly, in the quiet.
She was remarkable, and he had understood this gradually, the way you understood things that crept up on you sideways. The way she moved through Blissbury as though it were an extension of herself—not managing it so much as inhabiting it. The way her eyes lit up the moment he mentioned anything military, and she leaned forward without knowing she was doing it.
Their conversations about tactics had, more than once, made him forget where he was. She would pull out an argument from the older texts and he would counter it with what had actually happened in the field, and she would think in silence for a moment and then come back at him from an entirely different angle. Most of her conclusions matched what the army's own analysts had eventually determined, working from complete information she'd never had access to.
He had taken to pulling out maps during dinner. Showing her the actual terrain of the battles he'd fought, the decisions made in real time, the failures that had never made it into the newspapers. She absorbed all of it without apparent effort and asked questions that occasionally stopped him cold.
And then there was Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave.
Ryan's mouth curved.
Whenever he voiced a criticism of Wilgrave's conduct—and he had made a particular habit of it, finding his own mistakes surprisingly easy to catalog—Eloise's expression would shift into something that, had Mr. Palmer not been present, might have resulted in him being physically pushed down a staircase. She would gather herself and begin to argue, precisely and without mercy, and she was usually right.
*"Even in defeat, the fifty-seventh's withdrawal preserved enough strength to decide the next engagement. You know that battle was decisive for the entire ground campaign."*
She'd had no idea who she was defending.
Her eyes, when she spoke of Wilgrave, went to the horizon—toward the capital—and softened in a way they didn't soften for Sergeant Ryan Thornton standing directly in front of her.
He had wondered, more than once, what would happen if he simply told her. She wouldn't believe him immediately. But Baron Stanford could confirm it. Eventually she would have to.
He always stopped himself.
Autumn would come. He would return to the capital, face the Disciplinary Council, and whatever remained of Ryan Wilgrave's reputation would be argued over by people with their own interests in the outcome. His father was still waiting for an opportunity. The Council was still waiting for a mistake.
He wanted her to remember Sergeant Thornton—irritating, persistent, occasionally useful to argue with over dinner. That version of him, she could keep without complication. That version wouldn't cost her anything.
He looked at her, curled small against the sofa cushions.
The summer night had cooled, and she'd drawn in on herself. He reached for the shawl folded beside her and spread it carefully over her shoulders. She pulled it close in her sleep and shifted into a more comfortable position, but she was still tucked too tightly, still cold.
He looked around the room. Everything available was too heavy—winter blankets, thick throws. And he didn't want to be seen carrying them down the corridor at this hour.
He took off his summer coat instead. He'd been wearing it all evening; it held warmth. He laid it over her.
Her shoulders finally dropped. The tension went out of her all at once, and she settled.
Ryan straightened and looked at the papers she'd left on the table. He would write a note—*you fell asleep, I've gone, go to bed properly*—and leave before he could do anything else inadvisable.
He found a pen and reached for a blank sheet, and then stopped.
His name was on the paper already.
*Ryan Wilgrave.*
Written in the careful decorative script used for formal invitations.
He almost smiled—even here, even alone, thinking about military history—and was about to set it aside when he noticed what was written beneath, in handwriting so uneven it might have been done with the wrong hand.
*Ryan Thornton*
And below that, in the same crooked letters:
*I hate you to death!*
Ryan looked at the paper for a long moment.
Then, very quietly, so as not to wake her, he laughed.