Chapter 31
“He has written again,” Letitia said, appearing in the breakfast room doorway.
Isadora did not look up from her tea. “I know.”
“That’s three letters in four days.”
“I know, Letitia.”
“The second one was longer than the first.” Letitia stepped further into the room and sat down, nervous energy rolling off her. “I know because it was thicker. I did not open it.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I considered it.”
“I know that too.”
Letitia looked at her. “Are you going to read any of them?”
“No.”
“Izzy—”
“No.” Isadora set down her tea. “I am not ready to read them. When I am, I will. Until then, I would appreciate it if everyone would stop telling me about their arrival.”
“Everyone is William,” Letitia said. “And me. That is only two people.”
“It feels like considerably more.”
“That is because we are both very present.” Letitia reached for the toast with the composure of someone regrouping. “Cecily thinks you should read them.”
“Cecily has not said that to me.”
“Cecily says it with her eyes every time someone mentions James in your presence, which is a form of saying it.” Letitia eyed her narrowly. “They are very expressive, your eyes.”
“Please stop.”
“I am stopping.” A pause. “I have stopped.” Another pause. “Also, he rode here, in the rain, without a carriage.”
Isadora looked up. Letitia held her gaze pointedly.
“It has been raining the whole day,” Isadora said.
“Yes.”
“He rode through that.”
“Apparently.” Letitia buttered her toast with great serenity. “He is in the library as we speak. William let him in twenty minutes ago. They spoke for a few minutes, and then William came to find me and told me to find you, which I am now doing.”
Isadora looked at the window. Outside, the rain was driving sheets against the glass. The grounds were entirely grey beyond it.
She thought about James riding through that.
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know what he could possibly say that would change anything.”
“I know,” Letitia said.
“After everything—”
“I know, Izzy.”
“I told myself—” Isadora stopped and pressed her hands flat against the table. “I told myself very clearly what this was, and I allowed myself to believe otherwise, and the result is—” She gestured to herself.
“The result,” Letitia said carefully, “is that a man rode in the rain to reach you.” She put down her butter knife. “Which is not nothing. I think it is the most romantic thing I have ever seen.”
Isadora looked at her tea, which had gone cold.
“He’s in the library,” she mumbled.
“Yes.”
“My library.”
“Technically, his library, since the system—”
“Letitia.”
“Go,” Letitia urged, without drama. “Whatever happens, go.”
Isadora heard the storm before she reached the library door.
The library was at the corner of the house where two sets of windows met, which meant that in bad weather, it accumulated the sound of rain from two directions simultaneously. She had always found the percussion of it against old glass in a room full of books soothing.
She stood outside the door for a moment and pressed her hand flat against the wood.
He rode in the rain.
She opened the door.
He was standing at the far window.
She stopped.
He was… She had not fully prepared herself for the sight before her, which she recognized was foolish given that she had been told he was here.
He was soaked through in the way that said the riding had been long and the rain had been serious and he had not stopped for either. His coat was dripping, his hair plastered to his forehead, water trickling down his jaw.
She could only assume he had not been offered a change of clothes. Or he had declined one.
He turned around when she came in. He looked…
She had seen James in many states over the weeks at Ashbourne. She had seen him in his study at midnight. She had seen him in the nursery at three in the morning. She had seen him in the entrance hall with the composure stripped entirely from his face.
She had not seen him like this.
He looked exhausted in a bone-deep way, like a man who had come a long way and was not certain of his reception, but had come anyway.
He looks… deliciously handsome.
“You rode,” she said.
“Yes.”
“In that. You should have used a carriage.” She gestured to the windows, to the weather pressing against them.
“The carriage would have taken longer.” He shrugged. “I did not want to take longer. I have already waited too long.”
She looked at him.
He looked back at her, and she almost tore her gaze away.
“You haven’t read my letters,” he said.
“No.”
“I know. I have been… I have been writing them anyway because the alternative was doing nothing, and I could not do nothing.” He curled his hand over the back of the nearest chair.
He is nervous.
“I found the reverend.”
She stilled. “Thomas Bennett.”
“Yes. I went to Alderton.” He looked at her steadily.
“He had everything. Letters from my cousin to Clara, dated correspondence that accounts for her whereabouts during the entire period Mortimer’s letters claim.
Financial records. Documentation going back to when they met.
” He paused. “The letters Mortimer produced are false. Completely and demonstrably false. Violet is my cousin’s daughter.
She has always been his daughter. The petition will be withdrawn within the week. ”
Isadora released a long breath. “She is safe.”
“She is.” He nodded. “She has always been safe. I simply needed the proof to make it irrefutable. Mortimer has nothing.”
She looked at the window. “Thank you,” she said. “For going. For…” she trailed off. “Thank you.”
“That is not why I came,” he rasped.
She looked back at him. He had not moved from the chair. He was standing behind it with both hands on the back of it now. She recognized the gesture.
“I came because of the other letters,” he said.
“The ones you didn’t read. Which I understand.
I understand why you didn’t read them. I said things in that entrance hall that required—” He broke off.
“I said nothing in that entrance hall, which is the problem. Which is why I am standing in your library, because I said nothing and I should have said everything, and I am going to say it now, whether you want to hear it or not.”
She went very still.
“Caroline Pembley came to the townhouse uninvited,” he said.
“I sent her away. Nothing occurred, and nothing would have occurred because…” He looked her right in the eye.
“Because I don’t have room for anyone else.
” He paused. “She means nothing. She never meant anything. Whatever existed ended long before I understood why it ended.”
“Why did it end?” she asked.
“Because of you,” he said simply.
The rain pressed at the windows.
Isadora could feel her heart racing, which it had no business doing because she had spent the past several days constructing a very reasonable case for why none of this was something she intended to permit herself to feel.
“James…”
“I let you leave,” he continued, his voice rough, uneven.
“I stood in the entrance hall, and I had everything I needed to say, but I let you leave. I saw the tears you were trying to hold back, and I thought…” He pressed his hand harder against the chair, his knuckles turning white.
“I thought that I had already hurt you. That I would go on hurting you simply by being who I am. That the kindest thing I could do was let you go.”
“And now?” she prompted.
“Now I am standing here because it turns out I cannot…” He exhaled, a short, unsteady sound.
“I cannot do it. I cannot be in that house without you in it. I cannot walk past the nursery and see the chair by the window or sit at the breakfast table or look at the south shelving and—” He stopped again.
“Violet has been asking for you, in the way she watches the door and holds out Archibald at nothing, offering him to a room with no one in it.”
Something cracked quietly in her chest.
“James,” she croaked, her vision blurring with tears.
“I am not finished,” he begged. “I have been aching to say this for four days, and if I stop, I will lose my nerve.” He pressed his lips together.
“I thought loving someone would ruin me. I have spent years believing that… that if I allowed it, if I let it be real and named and present, it would dismantle something essential in me and I would not survive the dismantling.”
His eyes held hers. “I was wrong. I was completely wrong because the dismantling happened anyway. It happened the moment you walked out that door, and it happened faster than anything I was protecting myself against. I have understood that the thing I was afraid of losing was already the thing I was losing by being afraid.”
The room fell silent.
“You let me leave.” Her voice was not even, but she was not going to apologize for that.
“Yes.”
“You stood there and said nothing.”
“Yes.” He ran a hand through his wet hair.
“I was—” She pressed her hand against her sternum, against the place where the events of the past days had been sitting.
“I stood there, and I needed you to say something. But you said nothing, and I thought—” She sniffled.
“I thought I had imagined all of it. Every bit of it. I thought I had constructed the whole thing because I wanted it to be true.”
“You did not imagine it,” he murmured. “You did not imagine any of it.” He came around the chair.
He crossed the room and stopped in front of her, close enough that she could see the tears in his eyes, the composure fraying at the edges.
“I love you,” he confessed.
She gasped.
“I have loved you for longer than I know how to account for, and I have been the last person to understand it, and I am asking you—” His voice broke slightly on the last word.
“I am asking you to come home. Not because the household needs a duchess. Not because of Violet or the estate.” He exhaled.
“But because I cannot imagine the house without you in it. Because I cannot imagine walking into any room without looking for you first.” He held her gaze.
“Because you are the only home I have found, and I was too afraid to say so, and I am saying it now.”
The rain grew louder.
Isadora felt her eyes burn. She had told herself she was not going to cry. Alas, she was not going to manage that.
She drew a shaky breath. “I cannot promise to trust easily. I need you to know that. I am—” She pressed her lips together. “I have spent a very long time building something in a specific direction, and I cannot dismantle it overnight. I will not pretend otherwise.”
“I know. I am not asking for easy.”
“And I cannot promise that I will never remember how it felt to walk away from Ashbourne believing you did not want me.”
“Then let me spend the rest of my life proving you wrong.”
That was what undid her. Her tears spilled over before she could stop them.
“I do not wish to walk away either,” she whispered. “Because I…”
James sucked in a sharp breath.
She looked at him. At the rain-soaked coat and the exhausted eyes and the hand that had risen to her waist and stopped, as though he was waiting for permission to touch her.
“Because I love you too,” she breathed.
Relief flashed across his features. “Isadora…”
He reached for her. His hand found her jaw first. When she didn’t pull away, he exhaled and pressed his lips to her forehead with a tenderness that was nothing like the distance he had been keeping for weeks.
His hand slid to the back of her head, and he simply held her there, his lips against her forehead, breathing.
She understood that this was the gesture of a man who had been afraid for a very long time and had finally been allowed to stop.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured against her skin. “For the entrance hall. For not saying it. For every—”
“Stop,” she said softly.
He stopped. Then he kissed her softly. With weeks of longing, regret, fear, and aching tenderness poured into the touch of his mouth. He kissed her as though he had crossed every mile of that storm simply for the right to do this.
Isadora rose on her tiptoes, her hand sliding into his damp hair, and kissed him back with everything she had. He made a low sound against her mouth and pulled her closer.
When they broke apart, his forehead came to rest against hers.
They stayed like that for a moment.
She felt him press another kiss to her forehead and then lower his face to the crook of her neck, nuzzling her. She pressed her hand against his chest and felt his heartbeat. Fast, and unsteady, and entirely human.
She closed her eyes.
“You are soaking my hair,” she murmured.
He made a sound against her neck, barely a laugh.
“I know,” he said, lifting his head to look at her. “I apologize.”
“You rode herein a storm.”
“Yes.”
“That was…” She paused. “That was very dramatic of you.”
“I am aware.” His arms tightened around her. “Was it too much?”
“No,” she said with a watery laugh. “It was enough.”
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Isadora gradually became aware that he was still soaking wet and that this was becoming her problem by proximity.
“James,” she said softly.
“Mm?”
“You need dry clothes.”
“I need to stay exactly where I am for another moment.”
“You are going to fall ill.”
“I will happily fall ill.” He lowered his lips to her forehead once again.
She laughed, and she felt him shift at the sound, felt him smile against her skin.
“I love you, Isadora,” he said against her forehead, low and certain. “Come home.”
She looked at the raindrops trickling down the windows and thought about choosing daily until the choice became instinctive.
“Yes,” she said.
She tightened her arms around him and held him closer.
“Yes.”