Some of the guests had staggered off back to their homes, but enough remained that they continued to dance, the last of the torches beginning to flicker more weakly.

“Can anybody waltz?” the fiddler called out from his position, somewhere beyond Adelaide’s sight in the thickening fog. “I ‘ave a tune for ee, if so. T’would be my pleasure to end the night w’it.”

“I can, sir,” one voice called out above a few others announcing their intention.

Adelaide froze at Basset’s voice, so deep and warm in the early morning chill. The last dance he had promised to dance with her. A waltz, did the man say? She had not waltzed with her husband yet, not at any time, and to do so now… here… like this…

Basset appeared before her then, the early light showing her things she had never before seen in him. The faint shadows of fatigue, the lines of his laughter, the mixed directions of his disheveled hair, the utter masculinity of him just as he was in a loosely buttoned weskit, unraveling cravat, and rolled linen sleeves.

Her mouth and throat dried at the sight of him, and her lips parted as though to drink in the very moisture of the air to salvage something. Anything.

“Will you waltz with me, Adelaide?” he murmured with a smile, holding out a hand to her.

“Yes,” she breathed, the word creating a faint cloud of its own on the air. She placed her hand in his and allowed him to pull her in.

Others joined them; she could hear their steps in the grass, their soft conversations, and the fiddler tuned in preparation, though his songs had been notes of purity for hours upon hours by now.

Basset’s eyes were locked on her, and she could not look away if she tried. She could feel every strand of hair upon her head, falling from the pins or still in place, and each whisper of tresses across her shoulders and neck awoke something in her skin until she was nearly alight with it.

And her hand…

Clasped in his, she could feel the faint calluses she knew so well by night, the pads of fingers that had caressed her skin and twisted in her hair. She felt the pulse at his wrist that thundered against her, a cadence that seemed to thrum into her as well. Pounding at five points within her, then seven, then a dozen, then scattering into a thousand pieces in a chorus that her own heart could not match.