Tied With a Bow

stared down at her, an arrested expression on his face.
    For a moment her words seemed to echo between them. My life. My choice.
    For no reason at all, her heart stood still.
    “Sometimes our choices have consquences beyond what we can imagine,” he said at last. His face was flat, unreadable. “Let me take you back.”
    He was rejecting her.
    Aimée recoiled as if she’d been slapped. She supposed she should be grateful to be rescued from a fate like poor Finch’s. Perhaps by tomorrow she would even appreciate Lucien’s restraint.
    Right now, though, she was mortified. Her face, her chest, her whole body burned with humiliation and frustrated desire.
    She bent to hide her face, retrieving the branch from the ground, ignoring the barbs that pricked through her gloves. “You go back if you want to,” she said coolly. “I have work to do.”
    Clutching her bouquet of holly, she left him there alone under the trees, leaving behind her a trail of berries like heart’s blood on the snow.

Chapter Seven
     
    The following afternoon was Christmas Eve. Julia sat in front of her mirror as Aimée coaxed another blond ringlet around the brush handle.
    Julia turned her head one way and another, critically regarding her reflection. “Mama offered to send her own maid to me. But she always leaves a frizz in the front.”
    Aimée pinned the curl on top of Julia’s head. “I don’t mind helping.”
    “As long as you have time,” Julia said.
    Aimée popped a hairpin in her mouth before she said something hasty in response. She had been kept running all day. Now that the greenery could be brought indoors, she needed to direct the decoration of the house and the arrangements for the ballroom. She had barely gotten started on the kissing bough when Julia’s summons came.
    “It’s very inconsiderate of Finch to disappear like this,” Julia continued. “Ouch, you’re poking. I wonder where she’s gone.”
    Aimée had a very good idea where Finch had gone. And with whom. Last night, long after the houseguests were in bed, Finch had come to Aimée’s attic room to ask if Mr. Hartfell’s manservant could be trusted. Aimée had assured the maid she would be in good hands, pressing money on Finch for the journey to London.
    Now Aimée wondered how Lucien was faring without his valet.
    Her throat tightened. Not that it was any of her business.
    She secured another curl, pleased that her hand did not tremble.
    “I don’t know how I am to get ready for the ball tomorrow without assistance,” Julia fretted. “Those blasted wings . I don’t know what Mrs. Pockley was thinking.”
    They both looked at the dressmaker’s form in the corner. Julia’s gown shimmered, high-waisted and graceful, with a low, square neckline and diaphanous skirt. But it was the wings that raised the costume to ethereal fantasy, extravagant wings of stiffened taffeta with silver ribbons that tied under and across the bodice, exquisite and ephemeral as the promise of youth or a dream of young love.
    It made Aimée want to spit. Or cry.
    “She was thinking how beautiful you will look.” Aimée forced enthusiasm into her voice. “Like a butterfly.”
    Assuming butterflies’ wings were sewn with hundreds of glittering crystals.
    “Psyche,” Julia said glumly.
    Aimée pinned the final curl. “What?”
    “Not a butterfly.” Julia frowned into the mirror. “I’m supposed to be Psyche. Mr. Hartfell is dressing as Eros.”
    Aimée swallowed the lump in her throat. They were still a couple, then. Psyche, the personification of the human soul, and Eros, god of love. Not the chubby cherub that infested ceiling corners, but the sculpted young god of the Greeks, naked, winged.
    Her heart stumbled. She found it shockingly easy to picture Lucien with a gleaming sweep of powerful wings. But . . .
    “Surely Mr. Hartfell is too”— masculine, hairy, large—“ old to play Eros?”
    Julia shrugged, oddly indifferent. But then, Aimée reminded herself, Julia had never seen Lucien rising naked from his bath, water streaming from his chest and down his thighs. Her face grew hot.
    “Tom says costumes are silly, anyway,” Julia said.
    Aimée regarded her cousin’s drooping mouth in concern. Yesterday she’d thought Julia and Tom had made up their differences. But perhaps their understanding had not survived the return from the woods.
    “You shouldn’t let what Tom says ruin your pleasure,” Aimée said gently. Swallowing her own pain, she added,