Anyone he was hoping to marry, she'd asked, not anyone he loved, so he could answer with conviction and without hesitation. "No." Once upon a time he and Tycho had talked about running away together. It can't be as easy as Italy, Ford had said, nestled under the bend of Tycho's arm and their free hands entwined. But that had not been a hope so much as a flight of fancy, and even if the fantasy they had not reached so far as marriage. Being left alone together unmolested by society was the most they'd dared to dream about.

He could turn the question around to her, he recognized. This would have been the moment to ask, and he had credible reasons for asking. Lestrange had said she was engaged in January. She'd gotten to the coat room and half-undressed somehow. There was a gap in her story with a distinctive shape; it wasn't difficult to imagine what fit into it. But if he asked, and she admitted, then he would know — with no chance of going back to pretending he didn't, no hope of willfully overlooking the narrative holes.

He'd thought about this, after the conversation in the break room with Kristoffer Lestrange: thought about the probability that she was pregnant before they married. He'd tracked back through the meeting with Ikenna Farley in his parlor where the engagement had been agreed to, looking for evidence that her father knew or suspected in either direction. But after he'd come to call on her and she had apologized so sincerely for the marriage — after letting her guide him through the Farley house and show him the sunroom and talk about the flowers that would eventually bloom in the garden — he had decided he didn't want to know. They were making the best of it, and the willful ignorance here was a part of it. He didn't want to know.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked.

---

Jemima felt ridiculous to need or want such assurances from him, when they had not intended to marry each other either, and she still hardly knew him – but, in spite of all logic, his no quieted her worries a little, all the same. She felt a bright relief blooming in her chest. His answer had come with no hesitation – there had been no one else he had wanted to marry more – so that was already more than she might have hoped for.

She gave him an apologetic smile, for the asking. Should she tell him about Jack, though? It seemed almost too late for that (before the wedding would have been better, even if he had thence refused to marry her because of it), but now was surely the time if there was still any... but she didn’t know how to begin confessing it. She had already interrupted them once, dampened the mood with her questions and her worries: she didn’t want to do it again. And she had spent enough time in her few days of living here, trapped in her own head. Ford’s visit to her bedroom had been the first chance she had had to feel better again.

So she let any other intentions she had slip away without stopping them, and ducked her chin in answer, yes. “You don’t need to ask,” Jemima said, a small smile toying at her lips as she tilted her face up towards him again. She was his wife, and she wouldn’t waylay him any longer – and they had already come a long way since their wedding night, if she wasn’t even worried about where the kissing might lead.

---