Chapter 28 #2
She knew the signs. The strange buzzing at the edges of her vision. The way the floor seemed to breathe beneath her feet. She grabbed for the doorframe and missed, her fingers closing on nothing, and the umbrella clattered from her grip.
The second flash was not lightning at all. It was inside her skull, hot and white and consuming, and the kitchen floor rushed upward to meet her.
She did not hit it.
Arms caught her. Hands she knew, even through the fog, because her body had memorized them before her mind ever could. They were ice-cold and shaking and they gripped her so hard it hurt, and she heard her name spoken like a prayer by a man who did not believe in God.
“Amelia? Amelia, look at me. Open your eyes!”
She obeyed, though it took everything she had.
Nicholas’s face swam above her, close enough to count the raindrops caught in his lashes.
He was soaked through and white as chalk.
There was blood on his temple, a dark line of it running into his collar, and his coat was torn at the shoulder where something had struck him or he had struck something. He looked half-dead.
He looked like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“You’re bleeding…” she whispered.
A sound escaped him that was not quite a laugh. “You nearly collapsed in my arms and that is what concerns you?”
“You’re bleeding, Nicholas…”
“It is nothing. The carriage—” He stopped, shook his head as though the explanation was too long and too stupid to bother with. “I walked.”
“You walked.” She stared at him. The rain hammered against the door he must have come through, still hanging open behind him, letting in the cold and the wet and the noise of the storm. “From where?”
“Walton Street. The axle broke.”
“That is over three miles.”
“Yes.”
“In this.”
“Yes, Amelia, in this.”
She was still half in his arms, her legs unsteady, her head ringing with the aftershock of the fit that had almost taken her.
His grip on her had not loosened. She could feel his heartbeat through the soaked fabric of his shirt, violent and fast, and she realized he was shaking.
Not from the cold. From something worse.
She pulled back enough to see his face properly. The blood at his temple. The bruise already darkening along his jaw. The wild, wrecked look in his eyes that she had never seen before, not even the night he had found her running from De Rees.
He was terrified.
Of losing her.
“You came,” she said, and her voice broke on it.
“Did you think I would not?”
“I waited over an hour. I thought—”
“I know what you thought.” His voice was raw. “You thought I had failed you again. You were putting on your cloak. You were leaving.”
She said nothing, because it was true.
“I have lied to you,” he said. “About my name, about Coventry, about London. I have earned every ounce of your distrust—”
“You are bleeding on my floor,” she cut in, pulling free of him. Upon closing the door, she crossed to the fire, snatched the cloth from the counter, and returned to press it against his temple. He winced but did not pull away. “Sit down before you fall down.”
Bemusement cloaked his expression. “I will not sit down. I will say what I came to say.”
“Nicholas, you are hurt. Please sit. I am not going anywhere with you like this.”
With a hand on his elbow, she guided him to a seat near the hearth, fussing around the wound on his temple.
“You should not have refused to see me,” he grumbled, crossing his arms.
“At the time, it did not seem possible to me that I could hurt you,” she said, guiltily.
“Why?” The word trembled, rain dripping from his hair into his face.
“Because I am but a man, Amelia. And regardless of what you think of me, regardless of what I have done, I deserve to be treated as a human being with my own capacity for hurt. That you could cast me off so quickly for a misunderstanding after I have done right by you all this time is unfair.”
“It was not all this time… You lied to me. You lied to me about your trip,” she protested weakly, looking straight into his face.
When had they gotten so close? “You speak about mortification, but you have embarrassed me far more than I ever embarrassed you. I know that you did not go anywhere near Coventry. You went south to London.”
“I… did lie about that,” he confessed. “But that was my only mistake in all of this.”
“You did not see S in London?”
Understanding flashed in his face.
“Well, did you?” she repeated.
He nodded mutely. She tried to rise, and he grabbed her softly by the arm.
“But it was not for the reasons you think,” he pressed.
“I did not seek her out for any reason other than to set our lives into order. She is the wife of the man who attempted to duel me. I spoke with her only to sever the last thread binding us, to ensure that she would not poison the rest of our lives. It was duty that compelled me to go and to lie to you.”
“Then it was duty that led you astray.” Amelia shook her head, her eyebrows creased in sorrow. She clutched her stomach. “You were with her. You saw her. Do you expect me to believe nothing happened between you?”
“Yes. Because meeting with her only confirmed what I already knew to be true, though I only now realize I needed no confirmation…”
He adjusted his grip on her, telling her wordlessly that if she wanted to leave, she could.
“And what did you know?”
“That no woman I have ever met has touched my heart as you have. That there is no one on this earth who can hurt me like you. I wanted to protect what is ours. I… I…”
Amelia froze.
“I scarcely know what love is. But what I feel for you, Amelia... If that is not love, then love must not exist. You are… Being with you is…” He pressed his eyes shut.
“Like finding a second sun. I know no other way to describe it. I have tried, desperately, to convince myself that it was not true. But it is true.”
He caught her wrist where she held the cloth to his wound.
“I love you. I have loved you since you accosted my driver on Cornmarket Street and asked me to impersonate myself.
I did not know it then. I have been slower than you deserve in knowing it.
But it is true, Amelia. If you leave tomorrow, it will still be true.
If you never speak to me again, it will still be true.
“I am not asking you to stay because I need you to save me. I am asking you to stay because the thought of you gone from my life is the only thing that has ever truly frightened me, and I have been a coward about everything else.”
The cloth slipped from her fingers. Neither of them moved to catch it. For a moment, it seemed he could not bear to look at her. Amelia did not move away from him. She felt him inch closer.
Gently, her fingers found his chest, touching the space over his heart.
“You could be saying anything and not mean it,” she whispered through silent tears.
“I mean it.”
“How do I know I can trust you? You have said yourself that you are a good actor, a persuasive liar in your own league.”
“I cannot answer that for you.”
“I do not want to decide for myself.”
“And yet you must,” he pressed. “Whether to trust me or not. Whether to leave or remain.”
She laughed miserably. “Remain where?”
“With me!” he stressed.
Her eyes locked with his.
“But we are not… Our marriage is…”
“None of that matters! It is just us, and now, and we can make of everything else what we wish. “
Tentatively, he interlaced his fingers with hers. Her skin tingled where their fingers met, her body alighting at her touch.
“What came before does not matter. Choose, Amelia. I would follow you to the end of the world at your command. I just… I just need to know.”
The seconds that elapsed between his offer and her kiss felt like they lasted hours. But her mouth was suddenly on his, hungrily pressing her lips to his.
At first, she did not know what it meant: a goodbye or something else entirely. But at that moment, it did not matter.
Because she was in his arms again.