Tied With a Bow

into the house one summer afternoon, hair wet, shifts bundled under their arms.
    Aimée’s smile faded. She had been whipped and confined to her room for her bad influence on her younger cousin. And Julia and Tom’s childhood friendship had been quashed by chaperoned visits and calculated courtships and the success of Julia’s London season.
    “And then . . .” Aimée shrugged. “We could not play together as children anymore.”
    Julia stooped suddenly for a handful of snow and smashed it against Tom’s waistcoat.
    “They seem to have no trouble taking up where they left off,” Lucien observed dryly.
    She snuck a look at his face. He did not sound jealous.
    “It is the woods,” she offered, to appease any pang he might be feeling. They had all strayed away from their customary roles and paths this morning, into the woods, into a dream, into a fairy tale. “We played here.”
    Tom lobbed a snowball, spattering the bright blue of Julia’s pelisse with white. She shrieked and returned fire.
    “Shall we leave them to make up for lost time?” Lucien inquired.
    He looked at her, an indefinable glint in his green eyes, an expectant curve to his mouth.
    Anticipation quickened Aimée’s heartbeat. She observed the snow battle now raging between Tom and Julia. Would her cousin even notice if they slipped away? Would she care?
    That was the risk of the woods. Once you had left the accustomed paths behind, could you ever go back?
    “You wanted to speak with me,” Lucien reminded her. “Alone.”
    She flushed deeply. “Yes, of course.”
    But once they were strolling among the trees, she was at a loss how to begin. Lucien adjusted his long stride to hers, apparently in no hurry to break the silence between them. Mist wreathed the trunks. Above the bare black branches, the sky was cloudless, hazy, tinged with blue. The only sounds were their footsteps and Julia’s fading laughter. The hush, the solitude, the stark beauty of the snowy forest wrapped them in intimacy.
    Aimée cleared her throat. “Did you play in the woods when you were a child?”
    “No.” His tone did not invite further questions.
    He was the illegitimate son of an English nobleman, she reminded herself. She had no notion who his mother might have been. Perhaps his memories of childhood were not happy ones. “How old were you when you went to live with . . .” Your father. “The Earl of Amherst?”
    “Seventeen.” A pause. “I think.”
    He did not even know his age? Poor boy.
    “And before that?” she persisted.
    He turned his head, his eyes hooded. “I don’t remember.”
    Or else, she thought, his memories were too painful to recall.
    She squeezed his arm. They both had been forced to start over. And at almost the same time, it seemed. “I was thirteen when I came to Moulton.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    She blinked. How could he know? But of course he had been talking with Julia. “I did not want to be here,” she confessed. “For a long time, I resented the . . . the circumstances that brought me. I missed my life in France. My home. My family.”
    For weeks and months, the gray wet English weather had seemed to overshadow her very soul. She had succumbed to clouds of grief, storms of tears, and homesickness.
    “You escaped the Terror,” Lucien said, his voice flat. “If you hadn’t, you would have died.”
    “Bien sûr.” The French slipped out, as it did sometimes when she talked about her childhood. She smiled up at him in apology. “At thirteen I did not always think very clearly, you understand. Now I am wiser. And grateful.”
    “Grateful.” His face was unreadable, as it often was, with the marble austerity of a disillusioned saint.
    She wished she could make him smile.
    “To be alive,” she explained. She gestured around them at the winter wood, the dormant trees, the wisps of frost, the forest floor sleeping under a blanket of bracken, leaves and snow. “All this—life—is a gift. What you make of it is up to you.”
     
     
    His words.
    Lucien stared down at Aimée’s bright face.
    His words, wrested from the dark prison of memory on what must have been the worst night of her life, offered to comfort and encourage him. The irony cut him like a knife.
    He had saved her life and ruined it, and she was bloody grateful .
    She smiled at him, her eyes shining with sympathy, her fingers light and warm upon his arm. Their gazes locked.
    He felt it. The snap of connection, like a key in a lock, like a piece in