Enola POV, Autumn 1889

The next morning at breakfast, Enola was far from her usual energetic self. Between the alcohol and the very late night, when a maid tried to rouse her from her sleep an hour earlier, she had actually hidden under the covers. Julia had now moved from glaring at her uncooperative student to eyeing her with suspicion. She kept mentioning to Enola how tired she looked and asking if her worries for Adelaide's safety had kept her awake.

So now they were sat in the brightly lit breakfast room with breakfast of toast, eggs, and tea, making polite conversation with The Earl, his children, and various guests. A difficult task when every few minutes Enola's mind interrupted her with images, memories, of why she was so tired. Just as she thought she had her thoughts and blushing cheeks under control, someone would say a seemingly innocuous word, or Tewkesbury would smile at her across the marmalade, and she was back in that fussily decorated retiring room.

She wondered if Tewkesbury too was struggling to keep his brain centred on the Earl's talk of renovations to a few of the tenant cottages on his estate; and whether he had laid awake, restless processing their actions as she had. He seemed too relaxed and attentive to the man's animated voice for that to be the case. In all honesty, were it not for the grey circles under his eyes, or the fact that her imagination was not that inventive, Enola would have sworn she had dreamt the whole scandalous escapade.

In her own space and time, she would be glad that it wasn't a dream, that the memories of the intimate moment they had shared were real and hidden away in the corners of their minds. But at the table of a high-ranking noble, with people she barely knew, between her now suspicious governess, and the Earl's far too chatty eldest daughter, she wished to forget it all together so she didn't feel quite so guarded and tense.

"Are you quite well, Miss Holmes? " Tewkesbury smiled at Enola, the Earl's attention now moved to asking his elder children about their plans for the day, "You haven't even touched your breakfast."

She knew that tone, it was one he used whenever he had the upper hand. Not only was the nincompoop happy to have distracted her from her standard routine, he was teasing her about it. Had she not been sat at the table, she would have flung something at him.

"Quite fine, Viscount Tewkesbury ," Enola sipped at her tea elegantly, "Lady Isla was just telling me about a wonderful dressmaker in the village." She hoped that was what she had been talking about, but honestly, between studying Tewkesbury's countenance and pushing the treacherous thoughts from her head, she wasn't entirely sure.

Slightly offended, the Earl's daughter turned away from her father to correct Enola, "The dressmaker is in Inverness, Ada- Viscount Tewkesbury," her voice was all sugar and fluttering eyelashes, and pointedly not toward Enola herself, "She is going to make the dress for my debut next year. Did you know I debut this coming season? That is only 5 months away!"

"What an exciting prospect," Tewkesbury agreed, polite and charming as ever, "If we attend any of the same balls, you will have to save a dance for me."

The young girl lit up with so much happiness that she couldn't speak, and in that moment Enola wanted to throw her cold toast at both of them. She understood why she wanted to hurl whatever was close by at Tewkesbury, he had been teasing her and now was encouraging a silly young girl he knew had a crush on him. Her feelings toward Lady Isla, however, were not quite as clear. Sure she had been rude to Enola, and was far too frivolous and flirtatious for her own good, but that didn't seem to be enough to warrant violence.

To stop herself from throwing the toast, she bit into it, thinking maliciously of telling the young girl every tiny memory of the night before. How her rosy cheeks would turn crimson at the mention of simply being alone with a man she wasn't married to. How her blonde eyebrows would draw together in anger when she told her how he had panted at the touch of her bared skin. How she would refuse to ever speak to him again at her verbal illustration of the way he had held her up by the forearm to stop her from sliding down the wall.

Not that she would ever act on the thoughts, she knew that even mentioning their night would kill any chance of keeping what little social standing she had, and be a complete fall from grace for Tewkey. Plus it sounded far too much like the actions of a jealous mistress from an overly dramatic novel.

Still, even in her angry daydream, she would not tell her the way ' I love you ' had slipped from her mouth in a moment of euphoria; that was only for them.