He latched the door, pulled off his gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of his coat, then removed the coat as well, and hung it on the usual peg. She memorized that, too.

He approached her slowly, stopped a few feet away, and executed the grandest bow Evangeline had ever seen. No man had ever bowed to her that way, in point of fact, but she’d seen soldiers do it at socials, during the early and optimistic part of the war, when they asked a young lady to dance.

Evangeline’s throat thickened again, until she could barely breathe. Scully put out his hand and she took it, not because it was the smart thing to do—it surely wasn’t—but because she could not resist the chance to touch him, however briefly. However innocently.

He held her right hand in his, and placed his left very lightly on the small of her back. As simple as the contact was, fire shot through Evangeline the moment he touched her. She felt a crackling sensation along her spine, as though it were not bone and tissue at all, but a copper rod in the very heart of a lightning storm.

“Just let me lead you,” he said, and began to hum a slow and dearly familiar tune.

Evangeline was awkward at first, and not entirely because she’d never danced before. Scully was holding her, and close; her breasts were pressed against his chest, and their thighs brushed together as they moved. Evangeline felt like some wicked courtesan, but she couldn’t make herself pull away.

“Sh-should we be quite this—should we be—well—touching?” She asked, at one point. A lack of conscience had never been one of Evangeline’s shortcomings, numerous as they were.

He smiled. “No,” he answered. “We shouldn’t.”

“Then why are we d-dancing?”

“I told you before, Eve. Because this is probably going to be the only chance we ever get.”

Evangeline’s eyes filled with tears; she couldn’t help it. She let her forehead rest against Scully’s shoulder, committing the clean scent of him to memory, as she had so many of his other qualities. He cupped her chin in his hand and raised her face.

“Don’t,” he said. That single word was a command, a plea, uttered softly, but echoing through Evangeline’s heart long after it had faded in her ears.

They danced on and on, round and round, for so long that Evangeline lost track of the time. She knew a bittersweet happiness during that interval that she would always treasure, no matter what the future might bring.

It was Scully who had begun the dance, and Scully who ended it. He moved back, in midstep, and held Evangeline at arm’s length, his hands grasping her shoulders, his eyes searching her very soul.

“We’d best stop now,” he said. Then he got his coat and went outside and was gone so long that Evangeline, retiring fitful to bed, tossing and turning and stewing, didn’t even hear him come in.

The next morning, he was his remote self again. A mere acquaintance, the business partner of her future husband, the stalwart guardian of her unsullied virtue.