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Theo Sharpe should know better.
Should know not to respond to that spitfire of a lady under the baffled gaze of her footman. Not to engage with her talks of carriages and serviceable writing, with her observations penned on the edges of his printed page. Not to ask for her name.
"Eloise Bridgerton", she spells out, and he'd bet on his poor soul that her last name alone is a big enough achievement to last through generations.
He should know better.
He doesn't.
He didn't think she'd come back. Honestly, he doesn't believe it even as she stands before him, the fine silk of her dress only partially hidden under her maid's cloak. There's something she wants from him — his discernment, she clarifies, whatever that means when coming from a polite society debutante to a print shop boy during the most ungodly hours of a day.
He teases her, pokes around the lines he can practically see drawn between them. There's a treacherous desire simmering somewhere deep within him, to test her, to see how far she can go for this leisure of curiosity.
She teases him right back, props herself on the dirty old wagon, blurs all the lines, if only for a moment.
He questions her wits and "fragile mind", and she questions him, genuinely reflects on every sentence he dared to write and print.
Maybe this is the moment when he starts to believe it.
It's when he guesses it may have been just a passing feeling, when he thinks he's grown accustomed to being in her gravity, it's when he bets he might walk away from this (from her) unscathed, that she comes to him, breathtaking, dressed like she should be standing before the goddamn Queen instead of him, and Theo has to busy himself with his hands and his work to hide the fact that he can't, for the life of him, keep his eyes away.
Lonesome strands of hair frame the delicate lines of her cheeks, as her soft lips close around the words that spell "I am wondering if you might also have thoughts of me".
When he thinks his chest might just burst on the floor under them, she smiles, reaches out to his worn-out books with her pristine gloves, and the tips of her fingers touch his.
And he doesn't tell her (how could he?) that from the moment they met, he only begins and ends his days with thoughts of her.
And then he drives her away. Has to, really, because palace guards are asking for her, and she needs to be convinced, somehow, not to come back, at least for a while. At least until his note is safely delivered to her, hidden between the pages of another worn-out book.
Then, she'll have a lead to the truth she seeks and no ulterior reason to come back. He wonders, though, if she will.
It echoes in his ears long after she's gone, You've taken your pleasure from low life, Miss Bridgerton, and realizes he has hurt them both.
"I deserve more than that", she retorts, already in the aftermath of her anger, already forgiving him.
You don't think I know that, he wants to tell her, you don't think I've told myself that very fact over and over again, enough times to turn it into prayer?
Instead, he dives into one last scheme, into the liquid determination that pools her blue eyes, for as long as it might last.
And so it ends, more or less as he imagined it would. They discover exactly where the line between them lies, in the definite moment when they overstep it.
"This is absurd," she whispers, and the tears he can already hear in her voice paralyze him.
"I would never-", he begins to say, but he would, wouldn't he? He would risk it all for this one absurdity, to hold her hand and pull her across the border, to have her as his to lose, if only for a second.
But she tells him, one step away from the end, "I could not live with myself if you are the one who has to face the consequences", and he knows that she is the one thing he, too, would never forgive himself for risking.
Theo Sharpe should've known better.
He didn't.