“The fiancé?” Sam asks.

“Yes.”

“And now you have regrets?”

“There has to be a better way. I’d leave New York if I could, but my mother doesn’t want to go. Neither one of us is in a position to make enough to support us even if there was work to be had. Her treatments are very expensive.”

“What sort of treatments?”

“Oh, all sorts. Baths and the like. Medicines they use that the doctors tell me will shock my mother out of her illness. They make her body quiver, which is terrifying to see, but they say they’ll help. None of it seems to do much good, but it’s better than the alternative, I suppose—putting her in an institution.”

I went to one of the ones her doctor recommended, and the conditions were so horrific I vowed then and there that she’d never end up in such a place.

Sam doesn’t respond but instead looks to the ocean. “How was the water earlier?”

I swallow past the tears threatening. “Surprisingly warm.”

“Still interested in going swimming?” Sam asks.

“Right now? With you?”

He nods.

My heart pounds. “I didn’t think men like you did things like that. You’re always so serious.”

“Go swimming with a pretty girl? ’Course we do.”

I don’t have time for such frivolous things—for emotion, for desire, for complications—but I also can’t resist.

My hands tremble as I undo the buttons down the front of my dress, slipping it from my shoulders and letting it fall to the sand.

I don’t wait for Sam to follow suit before pivoting and heading for the water. I wade deeper into the ocean, the water skimming my belly button, higher up, covering my breasts. The ocean floor dips and rises with each indent, and I wait for the moment when I’ll put my foot down and meet nothing but water.

If Sam knew who I was engaged to, he would likely run in the opposite direction. Frank Morgan isn’t the sort to turn the other cheek while his fiancée engages in an affair with another man. A little flirting kept carefully away from the circles he controls is one thing, but to actually kiss a man, for things to go further, is deadly serious.

I am bought and paid for, my body no longer my own, a bargain I’ve made to become Frank’s wife in exchange for his financial support for me and my mother.

And suddenly, a sharp slice of anger cuts through me, filling my lungs, pouring out of me, until I want to throw my arms back and lift my head to the sky, and roar. I don’t, of course—some things are simply inconceivable—but the urge is there, the anger at my father, my brothers, at my mother, Billy Worthington, who “loved” me enough to take me to bed and then cast me aside like garbage when my family lost their fortune, at all of the moves that led to my being in this position, the people who hemmed me into a space where I don’t want to be.

I don’t want to lie down in a marital bed of my making. I want to fight my way out. And in this moment, for the space of a breath or two, I want to wash the scent of desperation and loss from the camps off me, want to pour the defeat out of me, and do as I wish rather than as others wish me to.

When I glance over my shoulder, Sam is already in the water, his torso clad in his white undershirt, the waves covering the rest of his body from his hips down. He’s more solidly built beneath those plain suits than I realized, his chest broad and muscular.

“This seemed a more pleasant idea before I got in the water,” he grumbles, and I burst out laughing.

“You should see your face.”

“It’s colder than it appears.”

“Pssh. It’s like bathwater.”

“And there are fish,” he complains. “Skimming my calves.”

I laugh again. “Need I remind you this was your idea?”

“Folly, more like.”

I inch closer to him in the water.

“You needed this,” I say, peering beneath the veneer of surliness he wears like a mask.

“I did,” he admits. “Those camps—I wasn’t prepared for that. I might have fought alongside some of those men. I know the things they saw and that they can change a man. How far am I from being right there with them, from sleeping in some godforsaken tent, drinking my problems away?”

“Your work sustains you. Gives you a purpose.” I don’t know how I know, just that I do.

“It does. Bad luck for them that the Depression came when it did. That men who were already struggling got hit with another tragedy. How many setbacks can a person take?”

“I don’t know.”

“I felt like I couldn’t breathe back there,” Sam confesses. “I want to help them, but where do you even start when things are that bad?”

“I know. The camps were the government’s answer to helping, I suppose, even if they failed miserably.”

“Were they helping? Or were they ridding themselves of a problem? Maybe they don’t want the country to see how badly everyone is really struggling, how they treat the people who were once lauded as heroes. It seems like it would have been easier to pay them the damn bonus. I—”

The instinct to soothe is there, surprising me, and I close the distance between us, lifting my arms to his shoulders and resting there, not quite embracing him, but holding him steady.

“I’m sorry.” I’m not sure why I’m apologizing or what I’m apologizing for, only that it’s the sort of thing I’ve been taught to say when someone is hurt or upset, my words and my body the tools I have been given to ease another’s sorrow.

Sam swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing with the motion. When he speaks, his voice comes out raspier than normal. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. You must be worried about your brother.”

A rush of shame fills me, because in this moment, my brother isn’t the foremost thing on my mind.

I lean into the curve of Sam’s body, the need to soothe transforming into a need to be soothed. I slide my hands lower, his heart beating beneath my palm.

Until this point, my relationship with Frank has been entirely platonic. Perhaps he believes I’m an innocent and doesn’t want to push my boundaries. Much more likely, given his reputation, he has more experienced women for such matters and has no need of me for his urges. I am a doll to be displayed on a shelf, never played with, rarely touched, only to appear expensive and pretty, and more than anything, enviable.

But the second I touch Sam, the desire that has been coiled inside me rears its head, and I’m filled with so much want, it leaves me breathless.