Epilogue #2
“I have never in my life,” he said, and his voice was so quiet she had to lean forward to catch it, “been more frightened than I was in that corridor. Not when Rose was ill. Not when Whitcombe stood in my study and threatened to take her. Not in any of the countless, reckless, idiotic situations I have thrown myself into over the last decade. You stood there, Penelope, and told me you were leaving, and I knew—with absolute certainty—that if I asked you to stay, you might say no. And I could survive scandal. I could survive Whitcombe. I could survive any number of punishments society chose to inflict. But I could not survive hearing you say no.”
Her hands had stilled in her lap. She was no longer pressing her thumb to her wrist. She was no longer doing anything at all, because her entire body had gone quiet—the way a room goes quiet when someone is about to say something that will change the shape of everything in it.
“So I said nothing. I let you go. I told myself it was what you wanted, because that lie was easier to live with than the truth.” He knelt.
On both knees, dropping to the carpet in front of her with the unsteady gravity of a man whose legs had simply refused to hold him any longer.
His face was level with hers. “And the truth, Penelope, is that somewhere between the nursery and the arguments and the morning you told me I was holding the baby incorrectly—”
“You were holding her incorrectly.”
The words slipped out—muscle memory, the reflex of a dozen midnight conversations conducted in whispers over a sleeping child—and for a suspended second they simply looked at each other. His mouth twitched. Not a grin. Something more fragile and more honest than any grin he’d ever worn.
“I was holding her incorrectly,” he agreed.
“And you corrected me, as you corrected everything in that house, because that is what you do—you walk into chaos and build something that works, something that lasts, something worth protecting.” His hands lifted from his sides and hovered—trembling, she could see them trembling—near her knees without touching.
“You built a home, Penelope. Out of duty and linen cupboards and midnight vigils and sheer, stubborn, magnificent will, you built a home. And I did not understand what it was until you left and took it with you.”
The fire had burned to embers. The rain was softer now, a steady murmur against the glass rather than the hammering downpour of earlier. The room had shrunk to the small, charged space between his face and hers.
“I love you.” No charm. No flourish. No careful architecture of wit and deflection.
Just three words, delivered on a voice scraped clean of everything except the naked, terrifying truth beneath.
“I love you, and I am sorry I did not say it when it mattered, and I am sorry I let you believe for one second that you were anything less than the centre of my entire—” He faltered.
Swallowed. “I am not good at this. I have practised being charming for so long that I have forgotten how to simply be honest, and I know that is not enough, I know words are not—”
“Alastair.”
“—enough to undo what I—”
“Alastair.”
He stopped. His hands were still trembling at her knees, still not touching, still waiting for permission she had not yet given.
Penelope looked at him. At this man—this impossible, infuriating, devastatingly broken man who had held a baby in the dark and spoken of belonging, who had ridden through the night to protect a friend, who had stood between a child and an earl and never flinched, and who was now kneeling on the carpet of a London drawing room with rain in his hair and his armour in ruins, asking her to believe him.
Caroline’s voice echoed through her, clear and sharp: the terrifying part is not love. The terrifying part is believing you deserve it.
She had spent her whole life putting others first. Protecting Marianne.
Shielding Rose. Running households and managing crises and building structures sturdy enough to bear everyone’s weight except her own.
She had married this man to save a child and had loved him in silence for weeks because loving him aloud would have meant admitting that Penelope Hartwell wanted something for herself, and wanting had always been the one luxury she could not afford.
She was so tired of not affording it.
Her hand moved. Not to her lap, not to the arm of the settee, not to any of the safe, neutral surfaces she had been gripping for the past ten minutes.
It moved to his face—his cheek, where the rain had dried and the stubble was rough beneath her palm and the skin was warm, impossibly warm for someone who had crossed London in a downpour.
He went still. Entirely, completely still—every muscle locked, as though her touch had short-circuited something fundamental in him.
“I am terrified,” she said. Her voice shook.
She let it. “I have been terrified since the morning you called me Duchess and I wanted to hear you say it again. I have been terrified since the night you found me outside Rose’s door and touched my face as though I were something precious, and I lay awake for hours afterward trying to convince myself that I had imagined it.
I am terrified now, because I have spent my entire life believing that wanting things for myself makes me selfish, and I want you so much it feels like it might undo me. ”
His hand came up and covered hers where it rested against his cheek. His fingers closed around hers—not tightly, not with possession, but with the careful, deliberate pressure of someone anchoring himself to the only solid thing left in the room.
“You are the least selfish person I have ever known,” he said. “And I will spend whatever time you give me proving that wanting this—wanting us—is not a weakness. It is the bravest thing either of us has ever done.”
His other hand rose. Slow. She watched it the whole way—watched his fingers pass through the dim lamplight, watched the tremor in them, watched the hesitation as they neared her face.
He cupped her cheek with such excruciating gentleness that the tenderness of it broke something open inside her that she had no hope of closing again.
She did not pull away.
He leaned in. Slowly—so slowly that she counted three of her own heartbeats before his mouth was near enough to feel the warmth of his breath on her lips.
Giving her time. Giving her every chance to stop this, to pull back, to rebuild the wall and retreat behind it.
His forehead nearly touched hers. His thumb traced the curve of her cheekbone, and he waited.
She closed the distance herself.
The kiss was soft. Careful. The press of his mouth against hers held the same trembling restraint as his hands—a man who had been given something fragile and was concentrating, with every shred of focus he possessed, on not breaking it.
He tasted of rain and brandy and the faint bitterness of cold London air, and beneath that, beneath all of it, something warm and steady and real.
Her fingers curled into the lapel of his coat.
The wool was damp, the fabric rough under her grip, and she pulled—just slightly, just enough to close the fraction of distance that remained—and the kiss changed.
Deepened. His hand slid from her cheek to the back of her neck, his fingers threading into the loose knot of her hair, and hers fisted harder in his coat, and for one breathless, boundless moment there was no drawing room, no rain, no scandal, no pride—only the press and warmth and undeniable reality of his mouth on hers and her hand in his coat and the sound she made, low and involuntary, when he pulled her closer.
When they broke apart, neither of them moved far. His forehead rested against hers. His pulse was everywhere—in his wrists, his neck, the unsteady rise of his shoulders. She could feel it where his collar met skin, rapid and ragged beneath her fingertips.
“I love you,” she whispered. The words were easier than she’d feared.
Simpler. As though they had been sitting in the back of her mind for weeks, fully formed, waiting for the lock to turn.
“I have loved you since the night you sang Rose to sleep in a voice that was completely, spectacularly off-key, and I knew then, and I was too frightened to say it, and I am saying it now.”
His laugh was soft, broken, wonderful. “My singing is not that terrible.”
“It is unconscionable. Rose forgave you only because she lacked the vocabulary to object.”
He kissed her again—brief, fierce, the smile still on his mouth when it met hers.
Then he pulled back just far enough to look at her, and the expression on his face was one she had never seen before and would remember for the rest of her life: open, unguarded, incandescent with a joy so deep it bordered on disbelief, as though he had spent years walking through rooms full of beautiful things and only now understood what it meant to hold one that was his.
“If you ever doubt me again,” he said, and his voice was rough but steady, “you come to me. Not to a carriage. Not to London. You stand in front of me and you tell me what you heard, what you fear, what you need. And I will answer you. Without pride, without distance, without any of the pathetic, cowardly deflections I have used my entire life to keep people at arm’s length.
” His thumb traced the line of her jaw. “I choose you, Penelope. Not because I must. Not because a scandal demanded it or a baby required it. Because you are the first thing in my life I have wanted badly enough to be terrified of losing, and I would rather be terrified with you than comfortable without you. Every day. For the rest of my life.”
She covered his hand with hers. Turned her face into his palm and pressed her lips to the centre of it—a gesture so small and so deliberate that his heart felt as though it missed a beat, as though the intimacy of it had reached a place the kiss had not.
“Then take me home,” she said.
He blinked. “Home?”
“The estate.” She tightened her grip on his hand. “Our estate. Where the nursery needs airing and Mrs. Keating is probably reorganising the entire house out of concern, and the linen cupboard is almost certainly in disarray because no one has supervised it properly since I left.”
The grin that spread across his face was unlike any she had seen him wear—not the rakish smirk, not the charming deflection, not the careful, calibrated weapon he deployed at balls and card tables.
This was wider, messier, uncontrolled. The grin of someone who had been offered something he had stopped believing he could have.
“The linen cupboard,” he repeated. “Of course. An emergency of the highest order.”
“Do not mock the linen cupboard.”
“I would not dare.” He rose from his knees and pulled her up with him, their hands still tangled, their bodies close enough that she could feel the damp cold of his coat through her dress and the warmth of him beneath it. “When?”
“Tomorrow.” She paused. “No. The day after. I need to write to my mother. And to Hyacinth, who will be furious she missed this, and Caroline, who will be insufferable about being right.” A flicker of something moved across her face—not doubt, but the softer cousin of it, the natural hesitation of a woman taking a step she had spent a lifetime convincing herself she did not deserve. “Are you certain?”
He lifted their joined hands and pressed his mouth to her knuckles, lingering—his lips warm against her skin, his eyes never leaving hers.
“I have never been less charming,” he said, “or more certain of anything in my life.”
The rain had stopped. She had not noticed when.
The drawing room was still and quiet and warm, the last of the firelight casting long, steady shadows across the carpet where moments ago a man had knelt and said the truest thing he had ever spoken.
Through the window, the clouds were thinning, and between them—faint, uncertain, but unmistakably there—the first pale suggestion of stars.
Penelope leaned into him. His arm settled around her waist as though it had always been meant to rest there, drawing her against his side, and she let her head rest against his shoulder and felt the solid reality of him—the rise and fall of his chest, the steady drum of his heart through the layers of damp wool and linen, the way his chin came to rest against her hair as though it had always belonged there.
And for the first time in longer than she could remember, Penelope Hartwell—Penelope Reed—stopped putting everyone else first, stopped calculating the cost, stopped armoring herself against the possibility of wanting something and being denied it.
She simply stood in a quiet room with the man she loved and let herself have this.
The End?