Philippa gives her instructions quietly, and in the tack room they are impossible to ignore. She tells me to take off my wet outer layer and I do.

My fingers find the fastenings before I can question why. Her orders reach straight through my fear of being dismissed from this place, as if I were nothing without her approval.

She rules the estate and now she rules the space between us with a precision that turns duty into something I ache to fulfill, even as the scandal of a noblewoman claiming such control over another woman threatens to expose what we are building in shadowed corners of the manor. The discipline she promises with each command would bind me to her in ways that leave me exposed, but admitting how much I need it risks everything I have left to hold onto.