Chapter Fifteen

in which sam confesses

I am half agony, half hope. —Jane Austen, Persuasion

I longed for just five minutes alone with Daisy, but Marigold seemed to have decided it was her personal freaking mission to get between us. On the ride back she squeezed in between me and her sister. Once we reached the house, Marigold swept Daisy away to the breakfast room for the cold luncheon that had been laid out for our return, even though Daisy protested that she wasn’t hungry yet, and boxed her in at the end of the table. After, Marigold pestered Daisy into a walk around the garden and they were out the door before I’d had the chance to finish my own lunch.

Right. I could take a hint.

Part of me couldn’t blame Marigold. She was used to having Daisy’s attention all to herself. It must have been terribly lonely to be stuck with their mother, unable to have the intimate, sisterly conversations that I was sure they were used to.

The rest of me hated her guts for being just so bloody inconvenient .

I retreated to our bedroom and busied myself with hanging up my new clothes, which had arrived in brown paper parcels while we’d been eating, and sending my borrowed clothes to the laundry. I distracted myself by reading the book Daisy had left on her nightstand: William Henry Ireland’s Gondez the Monk , a libidinous, lush, and vulgar tale about a perverted abbot, consort demons, and the people he trapped in his sex labyrinth with necromancy.

Yikes.

These Georgians were certainly a lot hornier than the staid romances of Austen and Goodenough had led me to believe.

Wait.

Except that I knew Margaret Goodenough. The work and the woman.

And I knew Daisy was enthralled by the grotesque, delighted by a good bon mot, and aware of the social issues and injustices of her time. That she read lurid novels, and was fascinated by true-crime news stories, if her exclamations over the morning papers were anything to go by. That she put on an air of dignified detachment in public but in private reveled in wine and gossip. That she was vital and present in a way that her mother and sister were not.

That she had been on the verge of letting me kiss her.

Beside the wardrobe, Daisy’s travel desk sang to me like a siren. I had very little idea what, if anything, from Margaret Goodenough’s life had survived to be displayed in museums in my time.

But this case had.

It would.

Dahlia had said so.

Feeling bold, and guilty, and a little foolish, I crept across the room and knelt beside the clever case. Reverently, I ran my fingertips across the scuffed corners, the honey-colored polished wood, the cracked leather handle.

Had anyone else touched the case since she’d received it?

Would I be the only other person to touch it until after her death?

I pressed one thumb into the wood beside the filigreed latch. I imagined my fingerprints sinking into the lacquer, somehow visible two hundred years from now, under blacklight, puzzled over by experts and literature lovers for the rest of time. Maybe, one day, Dahlia would stare at it in some overlit white-and-chrome exhibit while a curator explained the puzzle of the one incorrect and mysterious fingerprint to a gaggle of tourists.

When I lifted my thumb away, there was no mark.

I did not exist in Margaret Goodenough’s world.

Only Daisy’s.

I was desperate to open it and read the early draft of The Welshman’s Daughters . Was it really as subversive and subtextual as the introduction of the book had purported? Was something hidden under the hand kissing and yearning glances—which I now understood intimately could be just as lascivious as grinding on a strobe-riddled dance floor.

I would never violate Daisy’s privacy like that, of course. Especially after the dressing down she’d given me for just glancing over her pages that morning. But I wanted to.

As soon as I’d returned to the bed and picked up Gondez the Monk again, Daisy tumbled in the door. She was breathless with laughter and flushed from the cold. My intense desire to read her book was replaced whiplash fast with a desire to pounce on her.

Because here was the thing: Daisy was Margaret. And Margaret, according to history, was at least a little queer, if not all the way.

I knew, the way a bird knows how to fly south for winter, that Margaret Goodenough would welcome my attention. My kisses. My touch. My tongue in wonderful, secret places. But I also knew, with that same south-facing surety, that this was not the way to woo Daisy .

Daisy, who read about sex but wrote about romance. Daisy, who’d probably never met another woman who felt like she did in her life, at least not knowingly. Daisy, who liked to be thrilled but not grossed out or frightened.

Instead I made myself close the book.

“Good walk?” I asked.

“Yes!” Daisy enthused. “Though I am sorry we outpaced you. I did not see you following.”

“I decided to stay in,” I said. “Give you some sister time.”

“How kind,” Daisy said, and the best part was that she genuinely thought so.

Damn it, I had it bad.

“I think—” I stood. “I think we need to talk about what we nearly—”

“Sister!” Marigold called from the next room. “Do wear the silver dress tonight, and I shall wear my umber with the gold thread!”

“Oh Christ,” I muttered.

“Daisy! Do come help me with my hair!” Iris added.

I covered my face and laughed. “I’ve never been clam jammed by the universe so hard in my life.”

Daisy offered up one of those uncanny Margaret Is Paying Attention looks at the phrase.

“No, no, I’m not explaining that one,” I said. “Please, go dress with them, I’ll struggle along. I need to figure out how to do this by myself anyway.”

Daisy’s gaze softened. “You ought not need to.”

“Yeah, well, that’s me. Little Miss Hyperindependent as a Trauma Response.”

“What do you mean by—”

“Shoo,” I said gently.

Daisy fetched her silver evening dress and its accouterments and went next door. Biting my lip to keep from laughing, or crying, or any of the other of five thousand feelings that were tangling up under my lungs, I began the laborious process of dressing alone.

~

Eliza caught me halfway down to the dining room, declared me close but not quite, and relaced the back of my purple evening dress in the dark lee of the grand staircase. I’d left my hair loose in wavy tendrils brushing my shoulders, so she also pulled one of the ribbons from her own hair to fashion a quick headband for me. To keep my hair out of my soup, she said.

Dinner was served in the formal room. I found it hilarious that it was improper for me to walk in all by myself. Marigold, by virtue of her late husband’s position in society, and Sir Gale, as the two highest ranking folks, walked in together. They were followed by Fenton and Eliza, Iris, then me and Daisy, then the remaining gaggle of children, which was where the parade of precedence fell apart.

Sir Gale took the head seat, with Marigold to his right, Iris to his left, then Eliza and Fenton opposite one another. I assumed there was a rule about who sat where and waited until Daisy glanced pointedly at me, then at a chair, before sitting. We were among the daughters and yet another sibling—this time a young boy who was just edging toward being a pimply, sullen teenager. He clearly would much rather have been upstairs with whatever the equivalent of a video game was.

Over the meal—a dozen dishes served in courses of soup and game, jellies and salads, cheeses and yet more overboiled veg—Sir Gale and Fenton spoke animatedly about the capture of Buenos Aires, and how the Batavian Republic was now the Kingdom of Holland, and what that may mean for gin trade. Fenton’s manners were open and easy, his hair still a windblown mess and his cheeks red from sea salt and exposure. He really looked like a “Finch” now.

He looked unburdened.

Happy .

I had little to add to the general conversation of weddings, the war with France, or the growing abolitionist movement, save to strongly and heartily put forth that enslaving other human beings was hello, extremely ethically and morally wrong and maybe that issue should be a bigger concern than the economic hardship it would bring on the enslavers if they have to start paying for labor when it seemed everyone was being too polite to take a firm stance.

As for Marigold, she was flirting with Sir Gale so hard that even Fenton and Eliza were cringing from secondhand embarrassment. Where I might have laughed behind my sleeve at her before, by virtue of my recent education on how girls in this time and class were raised very specifically to be one thing, and one thing only, I now had sympathy for her.

She’d done her duty and married, and married up. But she’d lost him, and the entirety of her extended family, in what Daisy had called a horrid and unexpected sweep of cholera through the household while Marigold had been in Bath visiting Iris and Daisy. And if that wasn’t nightmarish enough, Marigold had then also lost her husband’s business to debts that she could not repay with all the funerals to cover. After which the house was given away to a distant male cousin of her late husband.

After a triumphant match and the realization of the girlhood ambition to secure her safety and future, she had been forced to return home childless, husbandless, positionless, and brokenhearted.

If it was me, I would be just as desperate as Marigold was to get back out of my mother’s house again, to be in charge of my own fate and my own finances. And as the youngest son of a landed baron, comfortable without being obnoxiously rich, with no need to pester his second wife for more children on top of the half dozen he already had, and no expectations to inherit his father’s title, Sir Gale was a big step up from a hardworking merchant provisioner to His Majesty’s navy.

That didn’t make it any easier to watch.

As for Sir Gale, he was far more patient and kind about it than I might have been in his position. It was obvious where Eliza got her compassionate and generous nature. He never rebuffed Marigold outright, but the more he failed to engage with her in the manner she desired, the more desperate for his attention she grew, until Iris finally murmured, “Marigold, dear, do please allow Sir Gale to take his turn in conversation with the rest of his guests.”

Marigold turned a mottled, mortified red and kept her head down for the rest of the meal. Shit, if my mom had called me out like that in front of my crush’s family, I would have lain down face-first on the carpet and expired on the spot.

After dinner, the good ole boys peeled off to their brandy, cigars, billiards, and whatever else they did in a cramped, overcrowded country house like this. We women retreated back to the parlor with sherry and cards, books and embroidery hoops, and, in Daisy’s case, her portable writing desk. It had been set up on the little table in the back corner, and I wondered how she planned to get any work done with everyone chattering. One of the Gale girls whisked the cover off the skinniest piano I’d ever seen—I hadn’t even known it was there—and began practicing a truly agonizing lullaby.

I found myself sitting at another tiny table with Marigold, who was pointedly laying out a game of solitaire. Fine. I didn’t want to play anyway.

She concentrated on her cards and I . . . okay, I was staring at Daisy.

Stop mooning , I scolded myself. Stop it , stop it , stop it .

Daisy, preoccupied by what was on the page and sipping her own digestif, set down her glass and then licked her bottom lip to chase a stray droplet. I felt my stomach get warm, my eyelids heavy, and Christ — no — bad idea . Now is not the time .

“Though my sister’s preoccupation with the written word may seem odd to you,” Marigold ventured at length, without looking up. I snapped my attention back to her, a blush rising on my face at being caught. “She has great aspirations. I am her sister and therefore inclined to tease, but even I admit that Daisy is also possessed of no small amount of talent.” She leveled a hard look at me, daring me to call her little sister a weirdo.

“I have great respect for any artist who works hard at their craft,” I said, because first, it was true, and second, if I was going to be employed by these folks in the near future, I wasn’t dumb enough to piss off my boss.

Marigold blinked at me, clearly not expecting that answer.

“Yes. Well. Good,” she said, and dealt out another round of cards for herself.

I forced my attention back to safer ground. When Marigold’s sherry glass was empty, I made a point of fetching the decanter and walking around the room refilling everyone’s glasses, with Daisy’s last.

“You are an abysmal spy, Samantha,” Daisy murmured as I paused beside her.

“Pardon?”

“One is not meant to look directly at the object one is attempting to study surreptitiously. It’s rather against the point of being surreptitious .”

“Ha-ha,” I said, deadpan. “So funny. Hilarious. I’m gonna bust a gut.”

Daisy squinted up at me. “Curious idiom, but I take your meaning.”

“I’ll just leave you to . . . ” I felt like a sweaty teenager bothering the cool high-school sportsball star.

“No, sit with me,” Daisy said, seizing an opportunity for us to talk without Marigold in the way. “This will keep.” She lifted the page so I could see what she’d written. “Although I’ll admit that some days it feels as if I never will finish it. As if the whole of the world conspires against my ability to simply take the time to . . . why do you look so perplexed?”

“Is this . . . this is dialogue. I remember this, Olive said it in the carriage this morning. And that’s what her governess replied.” I set down the decanter. “Is this why you record everything? You’re content mining for dialogue?”

“Yes, this is a record of some of the choicest things said today.”

“Ah, no, I mean that look in your eye, like you’re, um . . .” Taking a video . “Mentally transcribing it.”

“I did not realize I had a ‘look,’” Daisy said, shooting a guilty glance at Marigold.

Sometimes I despise your little trick , Marigold had said. Now I wondered if Daisy had even known she was doing it. Maybe she had perfect recall. Or an eidetic memory. I could imagine how helpful that would be as a writer.

I leaned forward, lowering my voice. “I’ve been trying to get some time with you all day. Can we go upstairs or—?”

“Miss Franklin, it’s uncouth to hoard the sherry,” Marigold said from the far side of the room, in a snotty enough tone that everyone else stopped what they were doing to stare at me.

“Sorry,” I said, at a matching volume, and rolled my eyes to the cruel heavens.

Marigold’s interruptions were starting to grate.

Or maybe it’s fate , I thought, all of a sudden. Margaret Goodenough had a lover. A wealthy widow. That’s not you, Sammie-bear. Maybe the universe is blocking us for a reason.

My stomach plummeted. I stood shakily to return the crystal decanter to the credenza. I was half afraid I would drop it, I was trembling so hard.

Margaret Goodenough was the staid and steady patron saint of closeted queer longing, as fine and unapproachable as a marble statue in a temple. I was a chipped dollar-store bowl of mismatched rainbow buttons and gremlin lusts masquerading as a functioning human being, a messy scholar, loud, brash, and more get-up-and-go than sit-down-and-think. There was no way history, or fate, or time, or whatever it was that was responsible for me being here was going to let me . . . let me . . .

There would be no cute little cottage-core happily ever after for me.

This wasn’t the first time I had thought this, but surrounded by the judgmental stares of the complete strangers I’d entrusted my life to, it felt substantial in a way it hadn’t before.

“Why, Miss Franklin, you look positively ghastly ,” Marigold said as I passed, with no little glee.

“Yup,” I agreed, not in the mood for a scrap anymore. “I’m just gonna hit the hay. Long day.”

“I imagine,” Marigold sneered. “All that intellectual conversation at dinner must have been quite taxing.”

“Not that intellectual,” I said, before my brains caught up with my mouth, “otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to follow it.”

The youngest Gale sisters hissed something that sounded like the Georgian version of oh snap . Marigold stood, hurt crossing her face before she quashed it. Eliza gestured sharply for the girls to stop giggling, and Iris set aside her glass and sat forward, going into mama-bear mode.

And Daisy . . .

Daisy flushed red with mortification. But not at Marigold.

It was me she turned her face away from, shamed.

Oh, no, totally, insult the older sister of the woman you’re crushing on, that’s a surefire way to convince the universe that you should be together. Idiot.

I, of course, immediately regretted it.

Crocodile tears dotted Marigold’s lower lashes, and I was at a loss for what the appropriate response would be. All the same, I stuttered, “Marigold, I’m sorry, that wasn’t kind of me.”

“I know what I am,” Marigold hissed. “I am not clever like Daisy or gregarious like Fenton, but you needn’t be cruel, Miss Franklin.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ever since you arrived I’ve been looked over and ignored, and I won’t be, not by you, not by the esteemed gentleman in there—”

I cut a quick glance at Eliza, who looked like she had something to say about that, and none of it pleasant.

“Listen, Marigold,” I said, dropping my voice and stepping closer so only she could hear. “You may not like me, but as an outsider, I have the privilege of perspective and, I dunno, maybe rethink throwing yourself at Sir Gale? It’s making things awkward with Eliza and Fenton, and I just don’t think he’s that into you.”

Marigold reared back, real hurt replacing the theatrical mask.

“Why must you ruin everything you touch?” Marigold blubbered, before fleeing the room. Iris was hot on her heels.

“Good question,” I said, hating myself.

~

“You have behaved abominably,” Daisy said shortly thereafter. We were standing opposite one another in our nightclothes, the bed between us, neither of us willing to be the first to broach the no-man’s-land of shared space. “My family has been nothing but generous to you. While my sister was being very silly tonight, what you said to Mary was unkind.”

“But it was true.”

“It matters not whether it was true or not, it was hurtful! And deliberately cruel,” Daisy snapped back, crossing her arms mulishly. “I was ashamed to call you my friend in that moment.”

You always have to be right! Dahlia’s voice rang through my head. One of the many times that we’d fought about my stupid inability to shut my damn mouth and let things slide. Just because it’s true doesn’t mean you have to say it!

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” I said.

Daisy scowled harder. “ That is not an apology.”

“I’m sorry I embarrassed you,” I amended. “And I’ll apologize to Marigold in the morning. I’ll do better.”

Daisy huffed, but dropped her combative posture. “I believe you will try .”

“This is hard for me, too, you see that right?” I bit my lower lip, trying hard not to make this about me. I was supposed to be making amends. “I can’t seem to keep from screwing up. I keep saying things I shouldn’t, doing things I shouldn’t. Being here is so—” I stopped myself.

“A-ha!” Daisy said, pointing at me in both irritation and elation. “There! You seem always on the verge of revelation, and then you bridle yourself. It is maddening, Samantha. Maddening . Do you have any idea how you fascinate and frustrate me by turns?”

“What?” I said dumbly, trying to play it. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Do not lie,” Daisy begged. She knelt on the bed, crawling halfway across to implore me from her knees.

“I haven’t lied to you,” I hedged.

“You omit truths, which is as much the same as a lie as to be indecipherable from one. Your obfuscate . Why?”

She wasn’t playing coy or being sweet for the sake of luring me into outing myself in a lie. She was desperate for an answer, and after how I’d behaved downstairs, I felt I owed her one.

No, that was unfair. I wanted to tell her because I wanted her to know. I wanted a connection to a degree that even Finch and I hadn’t shared. Something soft and intimate, for just us two.

Sap , I scolded myself. And selfish . If you tell her, she can never unknow it .

My head said to keep my secrets.

My heart screamed the opposite.

“Daisy—”

“Sam,” she replied, without the honorific, using my first name the way I was using hers. On purpose. With devotion. “We are here, now. Us two. The family is downstairs. The servants are elsewhere. We are utterly alone, finally. Do you not think that this is the opportune time? Shall we not be completely open with one another, at last?”

She reached out to me, and as helpless as an iron filing under command of a magnet, I let her draw me onto my knees before her.

I tangled her fingers harder in mine, tempted, so tempted . . .

“Why not tell me the truth?” Daisy swayed closer, warm and soft, and smelling enticingly of violets. “There is some secret that you keep from me. One that you have already shared with Finch. Why my brother, and not I? Am I not your friend, Samantha?”

“You are.”

“Then explain to me what you meant when you told Finch you had a beau named Dahlia, when he marveled at your timepiece and the small rectangle you asked him to retrieve from your stays, when he spoke of your being from the far-flung future and you did not take the statement as a jest.”

“Shit,” I gasped. “You heard all that?”

“I heard everything ,” Daisy said, thrusting her chin out mulishly. “Including that you and my brother had participated in intimacies while you were at sea.”

“It was in an alleyway,” I corrected with a sly smirk, just for the fun of watching her eyes widen and her face turn blotchy. “But, yeah.”

“You are attempting to redirect the conversation again, Samantha,” Daisy said with a frustrated swat to my shoulder.

“You’re the one who brought up intimacies .”

“I am not a fool, Samantha Franklin,” Daisy said softly, and it sounded like a confession in a church, low and serious. “I doubted at first, but I am a teller of stories and I know when someone is spinning them. You confess more than you think you do when you speak, and your conversations with Finch are quite unguarded when you presume privacy. So where—”

She paused, blinked rapidly, and licked her lips, breath heaving in her breast, and for a second I didn’t get it. She looked scared. What had she to be scared of?

Ah.

It was the question.

She didn’t know how to ask.

“Two thousand and twenty-four,” I said, so she wouldn’t have to. “I crashed on October fourth, 2024.”

“And were rescued on October fifth, 1805. You . . . you are . . . you have . . .”

“I traveled through time.”

There.

I’d said it.

“How? How could one possibly—”

“I don’t know,” I said. Her nose wrinkled, unimpressed. “Honestly, that’s the truth. One minute I was thirty-thousand feet up, soaring over the Atlantic on my way to Barcelona. The next, Fenton was fishing me out of the drink.”

“Soaring over the Atlantic?” Daisy asked, eyes glittering with wonder and fierce curiosity.

I explained planes. Then I told her about university, and celebratory graduation trips, and burning oxygen, and yellow life jackets, and PTSD. I explained that same-sex acts had been decriminalized, that we had laws enshrining the protection of rainbow folk, about marriages and divorces, because even queer relationships weren’t perfect. I told her about Dahlia leaving me on the sidewalk with my heart cracked in half, and about how maybe I had deserved it.

I talked until my voice was hoarse and the little clock on the mantle chimed midnight. The fire had burned down, and we had drunk our way through the pitcher of fresh water that had been left on the bedside table. For Daisy, I would do even that, because she had asked it of me.

“And this is why you are so free with your affections,” Daisy whispered into the warm space between us. We’d migrated onto our sides, facing one another across a shared pillow, the hems of our nightgowns overlapping across our feet. “Relations before marriage are common, and expected?”

“Only if you want to,” I said. “Some people don’t. Some people never want to, and that’s okay too.”

Daisy’s whole body jerked with surprise. “It is?”

“Why do you ask?” I propped my head up, leaning on one elbow, and decided to be bold. I ran the tips of my finger along her arm, stopping to pet them through the whisp of blond curls escaping her braid, below her ear. “Do you find intimacy repulsive? It’s fine if you do. Being asexual is very normal too.”

Daisy shivered and leaned into my touch instead of away from it. “I am not some priggish society miss, Sam,” Daisy said with warm fondness. “I have no illusions about the nature of marital relations, nor does the thought of them disgust me.”

“Okay.”

“Though,” she said softly, moonstone eyes dropping to my mouth briefly before she licked her own lips, leaving them pink and slick and tantalizing. She yanked her gaze back to safer territory, suddenly shy. “I will confess that I have had no experience . My knowledge is wholly theoretical.”

“No experiments for research?” I teased gently, trying to lighten the mood.

“I found the tutors on offer unappealing,” she admitted, pleased by her own wit. “And those I wanted, I could not approach. I wanted . . . dash it.” Her face grew pink. “How mortifying, to pride myself on my wordcraft and to now find myself with none of the correct ones.

“Use the incorrect ones then,” I said, brushing my fingers down her arm to her hip.

“I am wrong ,” she blurted, the mortified flush deepening.

I paused the sweep of my hand along her side and sat up. This felt like the kind of confession that deserved the whole of my attention. “How do you mean?”

Daisy turned her face away, hiding in the pillow even as her confession tumbled out. “I have vowed to myself that I shall not marry, for I refuse to do so without love. Though I have tried vainly to fall in love with a man, I am simply unable to do so. Whatever mechanism it is by which the gentler sex germinates an attachment to a man, it does not function in me. Perhaps our Creator made me with a fault, for I esteem women as a man ought. I thought it better to love not at all than to love wrong .” Her voice wobbled and she sniffed hard, pressing her face farther into the pillow.

“Hey, no, babe, you’re not broken, you’re fine,” I said, wrapping a comforting arm across her shoulders.

“Oh, Sam.” Daisy hiccupped. “And now you tell me that I may love as I like, only that I must worry about cultural offenses and homo-phobia , that I am both natural and reviled—”

“Fuck, no, Daisy, that’s not what I—”

“Please, Samantha,” she moaned. “I feel such an attachment to you. Yet I am conflicted. You understand me, and my wants in ways that I can barely fathom myself . You see something . . . and you look at me like . . . like I matter .”

She leaned forward, close enough to— Did she know? Was she doing this on purpose? She licked her lower lip again, and Jesus fucking Christ , no, she didn’t; she couldn’t possibly.

“You are. You’re meaningful,” I admitted, not able to tear my eyes off of that now-slick lip, its soft pink plumpness.

I swallowed hard. Tread carefully , I warned myself. This is important . Her eyes were iridescent with an unexpected sheen of tears, glittering like true moonstones in her determination. “Tell me, Samantha Franklin, am I at least as meaningful to you as Finch?”

Oh god .

“More,” I said, strangled.

“More?” she challenged, stubborn now, determined. Her breath smelled of sherry. Would her mouth taste of it?

“So much more,” I babbled. “Daisy, you—”

I didn’t have the chance to tell her what I thought of her; of how admirable I found her, how easy her friendship was, how warm our companionship. How I liked laughing and teasing with her, how I appreciated her glitteringly vicious observations of the people around us. How she had so easily offered me a place in her life. How Fenton had tried to push me into a mold that didn’t fit, tried to rectify his confusion about my past, my vocabulary, my life by making me into what he thought I should be: a simperingly grateful maid. But how Daisy took me at face value and evaluated each new part of me that she didn’t understand as it came, redefining her understanding of the whole instead of blindly forcing it into a predetermined space.

I didn’t say any of this.

I couldn’t.

Because Daisy was kissing me.

Guess I wasn’t the only one who had been preoccupied by what had nearly happened this morning.

And just as I realized it—her pretty little cupid’s bow mouth on mine, her hand gripping my forearm, everything pressing just a bit too hard, squeezing a bit too much—she pulled back. A shocked, worried expression scurried over her features.

“Holy shit.” I pressed my fingers to my tingling lips.

“Was that not correct?” Daisy asked. “Oh, I knew that I would be abominable at it.”

“Nobody’s perfect at anything on the first try.”

“I was not meant for this, I think, this sort of gentle courtship, I am created wrong—”

Before she could finish her self-recrimination, I had both of my hands on her face, tilting my own to slot our mouths together. I sucked her upper lip between my own, darted my tongue out for a taste, then repeated it on her lower lip. She gasped, and I took the opportunity to touch my tongue, very gently, to the tip of hers.

“My goodness!” Daisy said, pulling back, cheeks flaming. “Was that—?”

“I won’t do it again if you didn’t like it,” I said, but she paused, anylizing my own mouth like she was trying to figure out the best way to attack it.

“I should like to try,” Daisy said. She tilted her head, considered the angle of our noses, and licked my bottom lip like a kitten.

I couldn’t help the snort of laughter and she pulled back again, indignant.

I took the hand on my shoulder, scooted forward so we were pressed together from knee to nose, and placed it on the back of my head. “Go on. Dig in.”

She curled her fingers into my hair, pressing against my scalp.

“Tilt, like this, yeah,” I said, pressing light fingers to her jaw. “Just do what feels nice. If I do something to you, and you like it, do it back. We won’t do anything but kiss, I promise. I won’t move my hands below your shoulders, but you can put yours anywhere you want. Ready?”

Daisy took a deep breath. “Proceed.”

Swallowing a giggle at the ridiculousness of it all, I kissed her again. Small light pecks, then longer presses on her lips, in the corners, on her nose and chin and cheeks. Kissing her was ecstatic, simple and intimate. It was in the taste of her, the soft noises she made. The delicate way she panted against my mouth whenever we paused for air. She gasped and laughed when I kissed her neck, nipped at the tendon. When she was more relaxed, sagging against me and bold with her own kisses, I opened my mouth, teased and tempted her inside sweetly.

After a beautiful eternity, she pulled back, mouth wet and swollen, pupils blown and eyes glazed.

“My goodness,” she murmured again.

“Good?”

“Most definitely. Quite a skill you possess, Miss Franklin.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, Miss Goodenough,” I replied, cheeky in my delight.

“And this is how . . . how women love one another where you are from?” she asked gently, reaching up to push a piece of hair back off my face.

“This is how everyone kisses. Even here.”

“Does Finch kiss like this?” Daisy asked, jealousy and smug victory in her voice in equal parts.

I groaned, flopping onto my back. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

“Do what?”

“Compare yourself to him. I’m not sorry I slept with your brother,” I said. “I hadn’t met you yet. But I am sorry that it’s made you feel like an also-ran. I promise, you’re not second best to him. You’re not second best to anyone . To be honest, it was a desperation move. I do like Fenton, but I thought if I could lock him down, I’d be, you know, safe.”

“It is the way of the world for women to throw themselves into the power of menfolk for their own security,” Daisy said, both condemning said world and forgiving me. “That you did what you felt you had to does not lessen you in my esteem.”

“It won’t always be that way, though,” I said, with perhaps a bit more viciousness than the bedroom called for. “I’ve never had to. Before I ended up here, I’ve only ever made love to someone because I wanted to.”

Daisy wound herself around me, arms squeezing my waist, feet shyly tangled between mine. I turned my face to hers, watching intently as she settled her head on my shoulder. It was cute.

Smitten, that’s what I was.

Fucked too. Utterly fucked and totally fine with it.

I grinned and pushed a gentle kiss against her mouth. Oh yes. This is what I’d missed—the softness of her kiss with no beard prickles, the beautiful view down her cleavage, the press of breasts against mine. Perfect.

“You are refreshingly forthright for all of your secrecy, Sam. Qualities, along with your intoxicating kisses, that I suspect made my brother doubt his attachment to Miss Eliza Gale.”

“But he does love her,” I pressed. “He really does.”

“He really does,” Daisy agreed.

“He’s a good man,” I said, relieved. “You really don’t mind that he and I, er, rendezvoused?”

Daisy’s smile turned sly. “If that is what you’d care to call it.”

“Is it weird?” I groaned, hiding my face in her hair.

“It rather intrigued me more than I care to admit,” she said, kissing the shell of my ear. “Not because he is my brother, but because of the self-assured way he spoke of you taking your pleasure. And giving him his own.”

“Competence kink?”

“I do not know what that means,” Daisy admitted, twisting to meet my eyes. They were a bit sad, though, a bit hurt. “I don’t mind you dallying with him, so long as it brought you to me. But, Sam, why would you tell Finch but not me? Have I not earned your trust? Am I not your very good friend? Do you not . . . do you not feel for me as I am beginning to feel for you?”

“You have no idea.”

“I believe I have some,” Daisy said, smirking.

I sighed happily. “As much as I’d like to spend the rest of the night proving it to you, we should go to sleep.”

Daisy cupped my face, leaned in for a nearly chaste kiss before pulling back to sweep the pad of her thumb back and forth along my bottom lip.

She leveled the cutest, clumsiest attempt at bedroom eyes at me that I’d ever seen. It made her breasts push up against her arm, soft and unrestrained, the nipples sweetly dusky through the thin nightgown. I wanted, very, very much to suck one into my mouth, make the linen transparent with my saliva, see if she was one of those lucky women who could achieve orgasm from that stimulation alone.

Instead I prodded her until she was facing away from me so I could snug up behind her as the big spoon. She melted back, skinny bum warm against my thighs, hair floral and sweat musky against my nose.

“Just sleep tonight,” I said again.

“I’ve had no lover but you,” Daisy husked. “And I dare say, I have no desire to have another. I could spend my whole life with you and never grow bored, Samantha Jayne Franklin.”

“Because I’m an unwilling time traveler filled with weird social mores and bizarre juxtapositions to unpick, and you’ll never get sick of winkling out my secrets?” I asked. I was going for light, but the real worry that this might be the only reason Daisy wanted me around must have leaked into the question.

“Rather, because you are a kind person, and a learned one,” she said, lifting my hand from its splay over her belly to kiss the back of it. “Because you make me strive to be worthy of your attention and your admiration.” Here, she glanced meaningfully at the writing case. “Because you understand and accept my predilections and judge me not.” Daisy threw that wry smile over her shoulder at me, which I was beginning to really, really love. “And because I find you very handsome,” she finished, with the single most delectable blush I had ever seen.

“Damn,” I said, because what else can you do when a great classic literary mind basically calls you a smokeshow? I grasped her chin, leaned over her shoulder, and kissed her again, slow and lingering.

Screw the universe and its comedic timing. We’re doing this.

Please, just let me live , I had begged, when the air had felt too far above my head, when Lewis’s hand had been around my throat, when the society around me had felt stifling and choking.

Now, between sweet slow kisses, I prayed: please, let me just live forever like this .