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“Caroline,” Henry was saying, “look.”

She blinked, the image of him at eighteen dissolving into the face she saw now. Henry at thirty, marred, different. But the eyes—the eye—it was the same; a few more wrinkles at its edge, but the darkening interest, the heat was still there.

“Look!” he said.

“What? Where— Oh.
Oh
,” she breathed, her gaze following his outstretched arm. There, spread out before them in a misty copse, was a field of bluebells in egregious bloom. Again thunder rumbled; the sky was darkening, and in the copse the light was low and gray. The air was potently still. She could smell the approaching rain.

Blue-violet blooms dusted the copse like snow, silent. Caroline was aware, suddenly, that she and Henry were very much alone.

“It’s lovely,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “How lucky we are, to catch them while they are in bloom.”

They were whispering, as if their voices might cause the blooms to shrivel, the breathless quiet to shatter.

She untangled her arm from his and walked into the copse; the bluebells brushed her skirts as she trailed her palms over their bent heads. Their freshly sweet scent filled the air.

Henry followed her out into the copse, his footfalls soft on the wet ground. She felt his eyes on her back; the skin on the nape of her neck grew warm.

“Robert Dudley lived at Kew,” she said. “Queen Elizabeth’s Robert. She gave him a palace here.”

“Perhaps Good Queen Bess and her paramour visited this very wood together. I wonder what they talked about.”

Caroline grinned down at the bluebells. “Or if they talked at all.”

“Feisty one, wasn’t she, Gloriana?”

“I’d like to think so.” She drew to a stop in the middle of the field, hands on her hips as she surveyed the trees about them. “The palace she gave him is gone now, but I imagine it was a lovely
place, full of intrigue and art and all these beautiful people. The two of them, Robert and Elizabeth, at the center of it all.”

“But she would never have him for a husband,” Henry said.

“She
couldn’t
have him,” Caroline replied. Her throat felt inexplicably tight. She watched as Henry tickled the bell of a nearby bloom. His fingers were enormous, and strong, but he handled the flower carefully, his touch soft as he coaxed the bell between his thumb and forefinger. He could rip it to shreds, the flower. But he didn’t.

“There’s an old rumor,” she said, “that Dudley and Elizabeth’s secret name for one another was ‘Eyes.’ His must’ve been irresistible.”

Henry smiled. “Dark.”

Caroline smiled back. “Dangerous.”

“Deadly. Didn’t he plot against her? Betray her by marrying someone else?”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “But heavens, she was Queen of England! She knew better.”

“Maybe she knew better,” Henry said, his gaze intent, “but it couldn’t be helped.”

“She should’ve known a man with eyes like that was trouble.”

Henry’s voice was quiet. “And him. He should’ve handled her heart with more care.”

Caroline looked away. To hear him talking like that made
her
heart clench. She knew—God, she knew—how Elizabeth felt for Dudley.

And no, it couldn’t be helped.

A beat of silence stretched between Henry and Caroline.

“You come here often? To Kew?” he said at last.

“Not as often as I’d like,” she replied. “I’ve missed it. Quite a lot, actually. Osbourne preferred to keep to his house in Oxfordshire. London was a bit much for him, I think.”

Henry looked down at his boots. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t know about . . . everything. What had happened. He was always a good friend, Osbourne. Better even than I knew, I suppose.”

“He was good to both of us.”

“He was.” A pause. They drew to a slow halt. Henry was looking at her now, his one eye clouded as it searched her face.
The pause lengthened, and became something else altogether. An entreaty. A well of feeling.

“I’m sorry about what I said last night,” he began. “I know you probably didn’t want to talk about the past, and I forced you. I’ve been so jealous of Osbourne all these years. Angry. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I was the one who left. And the child . . .”

Slowly, carefully, she touched her fingers to the kerseymere sleeve of his coat. She fought against the tightness in her throat.

“I would’ve written if I could,” she said.

“I would’ve left something if I could.” He covered her fingers with one of his own. “I thought I understood your grief. I thought I understood
you
.” He scoffed, looked down. “I was wrong.”

“You left because you had to, Henry,” she said. “And I did what I had to do.”

A pause. He looked up and met her eyes. “Do you ever think about what she would be like? Our daughter?”

Her vision blurred with tears, and she felt them hot on her face; then Henry was gathering her in his arms, and she let him absorb the sounds of her grief in his chest. He was shaking. Still he held her, tightly, her arms to his breast, his arms wrapped about her body, holding her yet closer.

Our
daughter. The daughter they had created together.

“All the time,” she said.

The release wasn’t violent; for both of them it was quiet, and thorough, and whole. She remembered how safe she’d felt in his arms at seventeen, how his strength had thrilled her.

And now that she was witness to his grief, to the tenderness that lurked just beneath his hardened surface, she felt safer still. Because he was the only person in the world who felt this grief as she felt it. She wasn’t afraid to bare it here, in the circle of his arms.

A different kind of safe. Less thrilling. But perhaps better.

*   *   *

H
enry wiped her eyes with his neatly folded handkerchief, and then he wiped his own.

He took a long breath through his nose; he looked up. “Let’s walk. The rain isn’t far off now.”

Without waiting for her reply, he looped her arm through his and led her out of the copse. Neither of them spoke until they were back inside the gardens, and strolling across a wide lawn, on the far side of which rose the famed Great Pagoda.

“Ah, the pagoda,” Henry said. “It’s . . .”

“Rather phallic, I know,” Caroline said with a small smile. “But it’s an attractive phallus, don’t you think?”

“Please.” A flush rose, swiftly, from Henry’s neck to his cheeks. “Please don’t ever—just. Those words, together. I can’t.”

She blushed, too, even as she grinned. “Since when do you have a prudish bone in your body?”

“Since I turned thirty.”

He smiled. She smiled. They smiled at each other.

*   *   *

C
aroline blinked at the fat raindrop that hit her forehead and rolled to rest on her eyelash. She brushed it away with the knuckle of her first finger.

Henry tilted his head. “Looks like—”

Rain, great sheets of it, released from the swollen sky like a long, low breath. It plodded on the leaves of the trees above; it pummeled the ground with muted thuds.

Henry rolled back his shoulders and shrugged out of his coat; holding it above his head, he wrapped an arm about Caroline’s shoulders and pulled her against him.

“Quickly!” he said over the rising tumult of the rain.

“The Orangery,” she replied. “This way!”

Beneath the shelter of his coat, they scurried across the lawn.

“Your leg,” she panted as they ran, “is it all right?”

“My leg?” Henry looked down, as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh, yes. Er. It’s quite well, thank you.”

They were an ungainly pair, to say the least; they tripped and skipped and mauled one another as they attempted to remain side by side under his coat. The tightness in Caroline’s throat loosened, and was replaced by laughter.

Henry, too, was laughing, poking her with the jutting edge of his hip. She poked back. He laughed harder.

By the time they reached the Orangery, Henry’s coat was soaked through, and so were Caroline’s skirts. They lurched
through the glass doors in a muddy, untidy mess; several patrons stared as Henry shook out his coat. Caroline tried very hard not to keep laughing.

He turned to her, mouth stretching into a half grin. His hair, usually combed back into a ribboned queue, stuck to his forehead; his cravat was hopelessly mussed.

She decided she liked seeing him like this, soaked, disheveled, his clothes plastered to his body. It suited him. Him, the Viking-pirate in the horned hat.

Mostly it suited the daringly cut muscles that arched on either side of his torso.

“You look a fright,” she said, eyes sweeping appreciatively over said muscles. “I do, too, don’t I?”

“Yes,” he said. “Here, let me help.”

Placing his one good coat over his arm, he tugged Caroline behind a sickly looking potted lemon tree.

“I can—”

“No,” he said, “I will—”

“Let me—”

“Let
me
—”

She fought off his hands, giggling as he made one last swipe for the strings of her bonnet. The giggling seemed to ease the soreness in her eyes and throat after all that crying, although now that soreness reappeared in her ribs as she laughed yet harder.

“Really?” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, his grin deepening into laughter, “really.”

Henry was looming over her, his face alive with amusement as he reached for her, teasing. “Now hold still.”

*   *   *

“W
hat’s this?” Henry asked. He lifted a squab from the bench, revealing a velvet-lined compartment beneath.

Caroline leaned forward in her seat, swaying in time to the carriage. They were on their way back to London; rain pattered pleasantly on the roof. “I’m not sure. Perhaps William hides his lady friends in there.”

Henry lifted a bottle from the compartment. “Brandy,” he said, peering at the label. He took the cork in his teeth. “Want some?”

He held out the bottle.

She grasped it. “It would be rude, and most unkind, to let you drink alone.”

Caroline sipped tidily, then winced, coughing as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “The bottle,” she sputtered. “It’s half empty. Wonder where William was going when he drank all that brandy?”

Henry grinned as he took the bottle and drank. “I’d venture he didn’t drink it all by himself.”

She arched a brow. “Lady Violet?”

“Girl does like her liquor.”

“Those two.” Caroline sighed with a shake of her head. Already the brandy was at work, warming her body against the chill damp of her clothes. She felt giddy, and exhausted, after spending the day in Henry’s company.

The subject of Woodstock’s threat, of the missing diamond, hung heavy, unspoken, between them.

But Caroline didn’t wish to discuss it now. This afternoon. There would be time enough for the heavy things later.

The afternoon was theirs. Her sides hurt from laughing so hard, and so often. Her spirit felt lighter, having shared the burden of her secret with Henry at last.

Henry held out the bottle. “More?”

She waved him away. “Go ahead.”

He twisted the cork back into place and set the bottle down into its hiding place; he covered the compartment with the squab. And then he turned back to Caroline.

“Thank you,” he said. “For today. I’m glad you came. After everything that’s happened these past days, I didn’t want to leave you alone. To your thoughts and fears, I mean. I’ve been doing this for a while now, but the violence—it stays with you, no matter how hard you try to forget it.”

She swallowed. “I’ll be all right.”

“I shall make sure of that,” he said firmly. And even though everything was decidedly
not
all right, and probably never would be again, the conviction in his words made Caroline feel the tiniest bit better.

Just a few short days ago, she wouldn’t have thought it possible—not after he’d left her to fend for herself a decade before—that Henry would make her feel safe.

But wasn’t that what he’d always tried to do, no matter the cost to himself?

The thought caused a flutter to rise in her chest, a pleasant, ticklish feeling.

She looked at the knot of her folded hands in her lap. “I’m glad you asked me to come. Though it was hardly difficult to say yes—the Botanic Gardens are to me what that sordid tavern is to you. Heaven.”

Henry smiled. “A sordid tavern is hardly heaven. Though if the ale is decent . . .”

Caroline bit her lip.

“Don’t you remember,” he asked, “when we were in the garden at your parents’ house, how you’d talk about Kew? You wanted to visit, badly, but no one would go with you.”

“I remember.” She blinked. “And so do you.”

“I remember everything,” he said softly. “It’s all I had, when I left—what I remembered. I’ve been remembering for twelve years.”

Caroline felt her cheeks flush with heat. She’d like to blame the brandy.

She knew better. There was no mistaking that feeling, the flutter that became a full-on rush of blood to her heart.

“What have you been remembering?”

“You, mostly.”

She met his eye. “Henry—”

It was a warning. A plea.

“I regret many things, Caroline,” he said. “But I will never regret you.”

Her gaze moved over his shirt, still stuck to his skin in a most revealing fashion. Did she regret
him
? Having to let him go, perhaps.

But there were some things about which she felt less certain. Namely, the passion they shared. And his criminally handsome person.

Henry’s broad chest rose and fell, straining against the transparent fabric of his shirt. She took her bottom lip in her teeth.

“What?” he asked innocently. And then, looking down upon that
shirt
: “Oh, dear, look how
wet
my shirt is. I shall just
have
to remove it . . .”

With deft fingers he coaxed one button free, then the next, and the next, the revealed skin a vibrant foil to the white of his shirt. A smattering of pale, wiry hair covered his chest. She was tempted—
so tempted!
—to reach out and touch it.

The side of his mouth quirked up in that saucy half smile of his as he watched her watching him. He held out his arms, baring his chest to her.