26. Jarec
— ? —
Jarec
One year since the contract.
I’ve been planning this for weeks, turning each detail over in my mind like a stone worn smooth by water. The location. The timing. The words I’ll say, if I can manage to say them without my voice breaking.
Elizabeth is in her studio, lost in whatever she’s creating, and I stand in the doorway watching her the way I used to watch her when I thought she didn’t notice. Except now I’m not hiding. Now I’m allowed to look, to want, to have.
She’s wearing one of my shirts, paint-stained and too large, her hair piled in a messy knot on top of her head. There’s a smudge of blue on her cheek and her brow is furrowed in concentration, and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
A year ago, I signed a contract in a lawyer’s office and told myself I was fulfilling an obligation. Honoring a debt. Doing what needed to be done.
I had no idea that the woman standing across from me in her thrift store dress would become the center of my entire existence.
“You’re watching me.”
Her voice pulls me from my thoughts. She hasn’t looked up from her canvas, but there’s a smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
“I’m admiring.”
“Same thing.”
“Not at all.” I push off from the doorframe and cross to her, wrapping my arms around her from behind. “Watching implies something passive. Admiring is active. Intentional.”
She leans back into me, brush still moving. “And what are you actively admiring?”
“Everything.” I press a kiss to the curve of her neck. “The way you hold your brush. The way you tilt your head when you’re thinking. The way you’ve completely ruined that shirt and somehow made it look better than it ever did on me.”
She laughs, and the sound settles into my chest like warmth. “You’re in a mood today.”
“I’m in a mood every day when it comes to you.”
She sets down her brush and turns in my arms, looping her hands behind my neck. Her eyes search my face, curious, knowing.
“What’s going on? You’ve been hovering all morning.”
I should tell her. Should explain that I’ve been planning something, that I need her to trust me, that everything I’ve done for the past month has been building toward tonight.
Instead, I kiss her.
Long and slow and thorough, the kind of kiss that still makes her melt against me even after all these weeks of learning each other’s bodies. When I pull back, her eyes are soft, her lips slightly swollen.
“Get dressed,” I say. “Something warm. I’m taking you somewhere.”
“Where?”
“It’s a surprise.”
She narrows her eyes. “I don’t like surprises.”
“You’ll like this one.” I hope. I pray. I’ve never wanted anything to go right more than I want tonight to go right. “Trust me.”
She studies me for a long moment. Then she nods.
“Give me twenty minutes.”
I drive us along the coast road as the sun begins its descent, painting the sky in shades of gold and rose. Elizabeth sits beside me, her hand in mine on the console between us, occasionally glancing my way with questions in her eyes.
She doesn’t ask. She trusts me.
The weight of that trust settles on my shoulders like a mantle.
A year ago, she trusted me to protect her, and I failed in every way that mattered.
I let my fear turn me into someone I’m ashamed of.
Let my mother and Victoria poison everything between us.
Let the woman I loved believe she was worthless because I was too much of a coward to tell her she was everything.
Never again.
I pull off the main road onto a narrow path I scouted three days ago. The car bumps along the uneven ground until we reach a small clearing at the edge of the cliffs.
The same cliffs where we walked together all those months ago. Where she stumbled and I caught her and dropped her arm like it burned because I was already falling and too terrified to admit it.
I won’t always be here to catch you.
I never asked you to.
The memory makes my chest tight. How cold I was. How cruel. How determined to keep her at arm’s length even as every instinct screamed at me to pull her closer.
I park the car and come around to open her door.
“Jarec.” Her voice is soft, uncertain. “What is this?”
“Come see.”
I take her hand and lead her through the last of the brush to where the cliff-top opens up.
She stops. Stares.
I’ve transformed the space. A table for two draped in white linen, candles flickering in glass holders that protect them from the sea breeze.
A string quartet arranged behind a screen of flowers and greenery, playing something soft and romantic that mingles with the sound of the waves below.
Lanterns hang from temporary posts, casting warm pools of light against the gathering dusk.
It’s not as elaborate as the galas she’s endured. Not as ostentatious as anything my mother would have planned.
It’s intimate. Personal. Ours.
“Jarec.” Her voice breaks on my name. “What is this?”
“It’s the dinner I should have had with you a year ago.” I guide her to the table, pull out her chair. “The first of many things I should have done differently.”
She sinks into the seat, her eyes glistening in the candlelight. I take my place across from her and pour the wine myself - her favorite, a Sancerre she mentioned loving months ago, before everything fell apart.
“You remembered,” she whispers.
“I remember everything.” I set the bottle aside. “Every word you’ve ever said to me. Every smile, every frown, every moment of hope I saw in your eyes before I crushed it. I remember all of it, Elizabeth. And I’ve spent the past year trying to figure out how to make up for the parts I got wrong.”
She reaches across the table and takes my hand. Her fingers are cold, trembling slightly.
“You don’t have to-”
“Yes. I do.” I squeeze her hand gently. “Let me do this. Please.”
She nods. Doesn’t let go.
I serve each course myself, dishes I planned with the chef after weeks of paying attention to what she likes.
The soup she always orders at the restaurant in town.
The fish prepared the way her father used to make it, a recipe I tracked down through her cousin Maya.
The chocolate torte that made her eyes flutter closed in pleasure the first time she tasted it.
Between courses, we talk.
Really talk, the way we never did in those early months when I was so determined to keep her at arm’s length.
I tell her about my father, about watching him work himself to death, about the fear that I’d inherited his inability to connect.
She tells me about her mother leaving, about growing up poor and proud, about the art that saved her when everything else felt impossible.
We talk about the future. About traveling to places neither of us has seen.
About whether we want children, someday, and what kind of parents we might be.
About growing old in this house that’s becoming a home, about filling it with art and laughter and the kind of life neither of us dared to imagine.
The stars come out as we finish dessert. The string quartet shifts into something slower, more intimate, and I realize my hands are shaking.
It’s time.
I stand.
Elizabeth looks up at me, her expression curious, trusting, completely open in a way she never was before.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the ring.
It’s not the cold band I gave her for the contract, chosen by my mother’s jeweler without any input from me.
This one I designed myself. A simple band of white gold with a single sapphire, the color of the sea that brought us together.
The sea she paints over and over again, in all its moods and mysteries.
I drop to one knee.
Her hand flies to her mouth.
“Elizabeth.” My voice is steady. I’m surprised by that. I’ve been shaking inside all day, but now that the moment is here, a strange calm settles over me. “A year ago, I married you because of a promise I made to your father. Because of a debt. Because I thought it was the honorable thing to do.”
She’s crying. Silent tears streaming down her cheeks, catching the candlelight.
“And then I spent months treating you like an obligation instead of a gift. I let my fear turn me into someone I’m ashamed of. I pushed you away when I should have been pulling you closer. I let other people come between us. I made you feel invisible when you deserved to be seen, cherished, loved.”
My voice cracks. I push through it.
“But you saw through all of it. You saw the man I could be, even when I couldn’t see it myself. You painted him before he existed - that portrait, the one in shadow, turning away. You knew there was something in me worth reaching for. And you stayed long enough for me to find it.”
I hold up the ring. The sapphire catches the light, glowing deep blue, the color of her eyes when she’s lost in thought, the color of the ocean at twilight.
“I don’t want a contract anymore. I don’t want a debt or an arrangement or a marriage of convenience. I want you, Elizabeth. Just you. Forever.”
She’s sobbing now. Full, shaking sobs that she’s trying to muffle behind her hand.
“Marry me again. Not for the families. Not for honor. Not because a dying man asked me to.” I swallow hard. “Marry me because I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything. Because I can’t imagine my life without you in it. Because you make me brave enough to be the man I always wanted to be.”
“Yes.” The word bursts out of her, half-sob, half-laugh. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”
I slide the ring onto her finger. It fits perfectly, because I measured her ring while she slept, because I’ve spent a year learning the shape of her and I refuse to get anything wrong anymore.
I rise to my feet and pull her into my arms.
She’s shaking. I’m shaking. We hold each other on the cliff where everything almost ended, where I was too afraid to hold on, and now I’m holding on so tight I don’t think I could let go if I tried.
“I love you,” she says against my mouth.
“I love you too.” I kiss her, soft and deep. “More than I have words for. More than I knew I was capable of.”
The string quartet swells.
The stars burn overhead.
And Elizabeth Fairweather says yes to her husband for the second time, meaning it more than the first.