“Go to her,” Ivy whispered in my ear. “Before Hugh does.”

It wasn’t very gallant to end my dance with Ivy early, but it was unthinkable not to go to Molly, and so I led Ivy off the floor as graciously as I could, and since Hugh was occupied in a dance with another woman, I strode over to Molly and took her hand without asking, tugging her onto the floor.

“Silas,” she said, her eyes darting around, looking for Hugh. “We can’t—”

“Even the strictest etiquettes allow for an engaged woman to dance, Molly, and this is hardly a house of etiquette. And besides, how can Hugh complain about us dancing while we are both in plain sight of him? We could hardly get away with anything with him so close.” I cinched an arm around her waist, pulling her body flush against mine while I leaned down to murmur in her ear. “Although, I’d like to try.”

“Silas…” her voice wavered, and there was that flush of red on her chest, like she was burning up from the inside. Blood went straight to my groin as I fantasized about pressing my body against her flaming skin, as I remembered how hot her ass was, hot and tighter than the tightest fist.

We moved to the music, stepping easily around each other, moving in perfect time to the music. Molly was a fantastic dancer and I liked to think I was not so bad myself, and I could feel the eyes of the room following us as we moved. I knew we must cut a captivating picture—Molly and her gleaming gold skirts and her red curls piled high and spilling over one shoulder, me and my perfectly tailored tuxedo and my wide hands guiding Molly expertly through the steps.

Molly wouldn’t look at me, however, keeping her face turned to the side, exposing the delicate line of her jaw to me. I wanted to bite it.

“Silas,” she said as we danced. “Hugh has…he is…he’s threatened to take the company away from me.”

I kept perfect, easy rhythm and I didn’t let my face betray the sudden flare of fury I felt, but I let my voice carry my displeasure with this revelation. “Explain. Please.”

And she did—telling me about the contract, about Hugh’s ultimatum, his demand that her fidelity start now. It explained so much about her behavior tonight, so much more timid and passive than I was used to from her, and it also explained why Hugh seemed to be so singularly possessive at dinner.

“You can’t be thinking of signing this contract, Molly,” I told her. We spun and came back to center, my hand finding the small of her waist again. I heroically resisted the urge to play with the laces and buttons there.

“What choice do I have?” she asked impatiently. “If I refuse, I get nothing.”

“Legally, you would technically get nothing either way. What if you marry Hugh and he reneges on his verbal agreement with you to allow you access to the company? What if you end up with nothing and married to him?”

A small line appeared between her eyebrows. I wanted to bite that too. “Hugh wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She didn’t answer right away, but when she did, her voice was so heartbreakingly tired. “What’s my alternative, Silas? Walk away from it all? This company that my father built, that I built?”

“Is it worth your future? Your happiness?”

“I don’t need to be happy,” she said firmly. “I just need O’Flaherty Shipping to keep running.”

I spoke with my lips close to her cheek, and she shivered as my breath skated over the delicate skin there. “Ask me for help, Mary Margaret. Ask me.”

“There’s nothing to be done.”

“There’s always something.”

She looked up at me, her blue eyes glittering in the light of the chandeliers. “Not this time.”

I hoped she was wrong. I hoped that my crazy plan would work, and I almost told her about it, right then and there. But it depended completely on secrecy, and I didn’t want Hugh to get even an inkling of what I was doing, and a change in Molly’s attitude towards everything might signal to him that something was off. Not to mention that I couldn’t bear to let her down—what if I told her and then I ended up failing?

No, silence was better for now. But I hated that defeated look on her face, the rigid way she held her body, as if already preparing for the onslaught of misery her choices would unleash upon her. I couldn’t comfort her the way I wanted, with my lips and my hands and my cock, not with Hugh here. But maybe I could comfort her with my words and say all the things I needed her to hear right now.

“Do you want to know why I fucked Mercy?” I asked.

Her already tense body stiffened and she tried to pull away, but I didn’t let her. My hand tightened around hers, and the other tightened against her waist. “Don’t do this,” she said, angry and frail all at once.

“Yes, Mary Margaret, we are doing this and you are going to listen to me.” My voice left no room for question, and her lips parted ever so slightly.

She liked that voice.

We whirled past another couple and then I started talking again. “That day,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t have to clarify which day I meant. It would always be That Day for us, that defining and pivotal moment where everything had shifted from almost unbearable joy to unbearable pain. “That day, we woke up in bed together, and I looked at you…your body tangled in the sheets, your hair still knotted from the night before, and then you woke up and do you remember what happened?”

“You took me on a picnic,” she said quietly.

“We didn’t fuck, we didn’t fool around. I took you out in the sunshine, and I kissed you on that blanket for hours. Just kissed. Do you remember?”

“Yes, Silas,” she said, and she looked up to me. Her pulse pounded in her throat, her pupils wide and dilated. “I remember.”

“Kissing you is heaven,” I told her. “Your mouth is perfect, you know that? And Christ, I could have kept kissing you until the stars came out. But we were coming here, to the Baron’s for a party, and you needed to change into an evening dress and I needed to change into my tuxedo. So we went our separate ways. And it was on my lonely ride to the Baron’s that I panicked. Was I arriving at Castor’s a single man? Or was I now attached to you? And if so, it was the first time I had been anything other than unattached, and that was terrifying. That’s not who we were, Molly, not who we are. We fuck people. Lots of people. We don’t go into the sunshine and kiss for hours, we fuck and we move on, and what was happening to me? Who was I, if I wasn’t acting like the man I’d always been?”

We spun again, and she swallowed, but she didn’t say anything, her rapt expression encouraging me to continue.

“And so I got to the Baron’s already panicked, panicked but still desperately in love, and then I saw you and Gideon dancing already, and he leaned down and kissed you. Kissed that mouth like it wasn’t the same mouth I’d spent hours laying claim to just that afternoon, and you let him. You let him kiss you.”

Her face went white. “Silas…”

I gave a curt shake of my head to let her know she wasn’t allowed to speak yet. “You pushed him away, I know. I saw. But you hesitated before you did, and I thought to myself, what if she’s right to hesitate? What if we were making a mistake trying to bring this new thing between us into our old world? What if we were denying who we really were? And then Mercy was there, beckoning me upstairs, and I had to prove to myself that I didn’t care that you kissed Gideon. That I wouldn’t care if you went to bed with him. I had to prove that this meant nothing, because if it didn’t mean nothing then that meant that it would mean everything, and God, Molly, I was terrified of that. Terrified like a sinner about to convert. Terrified like a man about die and go to heaven, because the reward was paradise but the price…the price was me. My life. My soul. It would no longer belong to me alone.”