hard to believe a creature like her existed. That she moved about on this earth. In the house in which he lived.
That she was three years his senior at seventeen years of age was irrelevant, as was the fact that she stood three inches above him, more in her lace boots with the delicate heels. It mattered not that there existed no reality in which he could even approach her. That he could dare address her.
The idea of being with her in any capacity was so far beyond comprehension, it didn’t bear consideration. He was the household boy-of-all-work for her father, Clarence Goode, the Baron of Cresthaven. Lower, even, than the chambermaid. He swept chimneys and fetched things, mucked stables and cleaned up after dogs that ate better than he did.
When he and Honoria shared a room, he was beneath her feet, sometimes quite literally.
One of his favorite memories was perhaps a year prior when she’d scheduled to ride her horse in the country paddock and no mounting block could be found. Titus had been called to lace his hands together so Honoria might use them as a step up into her saddle.
He’d seen the top of her boot that day, and a flash of the lily-white stocking over her calf as he’d presumed to help slide her foot into the stirrup.
It was the first time she’d truly looked at him. The first time their eyes locked, as the sun had haloed around her midnight curls like one of those chipped, expensive paintings of the Madonna that hung in the Baron’s gallery.
In that moment, her features had been just as full of grace.
“You’re bleeding,” she’d remarked, flicking her gaze to a shallow wound on the flesh of his palm where a splinter on a shovel handle had gouged deep enough to draw blood. Her boot had ground a bit of dirt into the wound.
And he’d barely felt the pain.
Titus had balled his fist and hid it behind his back, lowering his gaze. “Inn’t nothing, miss.”
Reaching into her pocket, she’d drawn out a pressed white handkerchief and dangled it in front of him. “I didn’t see it, or I’d not have—”
“Honoria!” her mother had reprimanded, eyeing him reprovingly as she trotted her own mare between them, obliging him to leap back lest he be trampled. “To dawdle with them is an unkindness, as you oblige them to interaction they are not trained for. Really, you know better.”
Honoria hadn’t said a word, nor did she look back as she’d obediently cantered away at her mother’s side.
But he’d retrieved her handkerchief from where it’d floated to the ground in her wake.
From that day on, it was her image painted on the backs of his eyelids when he closed them at night. Even when the scent of rose water had faded from his treasure.
Today, two of the three maids in the household had been too ill to work, and so the harried housekeeper tasked Titus with hauling the kindling into the east wing of the Mayfair manse to lay and light the fires before the family roused.
He’d done the master’s first, then the mistress’s, and had skipped Honoria’s room for the nursery where the seven-year-old twins, Mercy and Felicity, slept.
Felicity had been huddled in bed, her golden head bent over a book as she squinted in the early morning gloom. The sweet-natured girl had given him a shy little wave as he tiptoed in and lit her a warm fire.
Against the mores of propriety, she’d thanked him in a whisper, and blushed when he’d given her a two-fingered salute before shutting the door behind him with a barely audible click. After tending to the hearths of the governess and the second-eldest Goode sister, Prudence, Titus finally found himself at Honoria’s door.
He peered about the hall guiltily before admonishing himself for being ridiculous.
He was supposed to be here. It wouldn’t do to squander this stroke of luck and not take any opportunity he could to be near her.
Alone.
Balancing the burden of kindling against his side with one arm, he reached for the latch of her doorway, then paused, examining his hands with disgust. He flexed knuckles stained black from shoveling and hauling coal into the burner of the huge stove that heated steam for the first two floors of the estate. Filth from the stables and the gardens embedded beneath his fingernails and settled in the creases and calluses of his palm.
A familiar mortification welled within his chest as he smoothed the hand over his