Chapter 34
Julian turned at the sound of her voice, his foot still in the stirrup, and whatever composure he had gathered to leave seemed to abandon him the moment he saw her standing breathless in the doorway.
Julian’s abrupt movement caused the horse to snort and the groom beside him reached out to steady the horse
He set down his foot. “Louisa—”
“Wait.” She crossed the distance between them, her chest heaving from the run down the stairs, and stopped only when she stood close enough to see the exhaustion beneath his eyes, the particular strain of a man who had clearly slept very little this past week.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. The groom wisely turned to adjust the horse’s bridle and did not look at either of them.
“You saw,” Julian said finally.
“I saw.” Louisa took a deep breath; her heart had not yet caught up with the rest of her. “Did you mean it?”
“I have never meant anything so much in my life.”
“Then why,” she asked, her voice cracking slightly, “did you not simply say it downstairs, in the drawing room?”
“Because you were not ready to see me.” He looked sad. “I did not think it fair to make you receive a declaration through a closed door. But I found I could not simply ride away and say nothing at all, so I said it the only way I could think of that did not require your permission.”
Louisa stood very still, looking up at him, and felt something in her chest that had been clenched tight for three days finally loosen.
“That,” she said, “was extremely unfair of you.”
“I am aware.”
“I had resolved to be very composed about all of this.”
“I can see that it is going splendidly.”
A startled half-sob escaped her before she could stop it. “Julian.”
“Louisa.” He said her name carefully, as if it cost him something to say plainly what he felt, though it seemed he had finally decided that the cost no longer mattered.
She led him inside, past the startled footman and into her father’s study, the one room in the house she knew would be empty at this hour, closing the door softly behind them.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Julian stood near the cold hearth, turning his hat slowly in his hands. Louisa found herself simply looking at him, at the shadows beneath his eyes, at the tension in his jaw that told her plainly how little peace this past week had granted him.
“I owe you an apology,” Julian began, before she could gather her words. “I have rehearsed it the whole ride here, and I find, now that you are standing in front of me, that I am terrified of saying it wrong a second time, so I shall simply say it plainly and hope that suffices.”
He drew in a breath. “I used the one thing you ever trusted me with against you.” His voice roughened.
“You gave me those words before either of us knew what we would become to one another, and the moment I grew frightened enough, I threw them back at you as though nothing between us had changed since. There is no excuse for that. I have searched for one the entire week and found only reasons, which are not the same thing at all.”
“You were afraid.” She said it plainly, without accusation.
“I was.” He nodded. “Afraid enough that I chose the cruelest words available to me, because they were the fastest ones, and I did not stop to consider what they would cost you before I said them.”
Louisa’s throat tightened as she watched him, and she found she could not simply stand across the room from him a moment longer. She crossed to stand before him, close enough now that she could see the faint tremor in his hands where they still gripped the brim of his hat.
“Why?”
He set the hat down on her father’s desk. He was quiet for a long moment, his jaw working.
Louisa watched him gather himself the way she had seen him do before difficult letters, difficult decisions, though this, she suspected, cost him considerably more than any of those ever had.
“Daniel,” he said eventually. “Kit’s father.
He and I grew up together. We were closer than most brothers manage to be, and when he married, I watched him love his wife with an ease I never once possessed, entirely without reservation, entirely without fear.
” His eyes had grown distant, fixed somewhere past her shoulder.
“When he died, I watched grief tear her apart piece by piece, over the course of a single year, until the cheerful, radiant woman I knew had become someone who could barely be persuaded to rise from her own bed.”
Louisa said nothing, only listened, her hands clasped tightly before her.
“So I made myself a promise, standing in my study with an eight-year-old boy upstairs who would not speak and Daniel’s grave still fresh in the churchyard. I would never again allow myself to love someone so completely that losing them would do to me what losing Daniel did to Elizabeth.”
His eyes flicked back to her face, filled with so much pain that she almost gasped.
“For years I convinced myself that loving deeply was dangerous. That if I simply kept everyone at a careful distance, I could never be destroyed the way she was. I built my whole understanding of myself around that certainty, and then you walked into my study and proposed the most practical arrangement imaginable, and I thought foolishly that I had found the one solution that would let me keep my promise.”
“And instead?”
“Instead, I fell in love with you within the first few months of our marriage, and spent the whole time since trying desperately to pretend I had not.” Something almost like a broken laugh escaped him.
“I looked at Kit’s drawing of the four of us together and told myself it meant nothing beyond an eight-year-old’s simple wish.
I felt your hand close around my wrist, teaching me a sign I have never once forgotten, and told myself it was gratitude rather than anything more dangerous.
I kissed you in my study and convinced myself, for days afterward, that it had been born purely of an argument’s heat, nothing more, because admitting otherwise would have meant admitting that I had broken the promise I made to myself. ”
Louisa felt her own eyes sting, but did not try to stop the tears this time, letting them slip free and roll down her cheeks.
“I built the same wall,” she admitted, her voice unsteady.
“I asked for a practical marriage because I believed that it was all I wanted, all I could reasonably expect after four rejected proposals from men who wished for a quieter version of me. And then, somewhere in the middle of teaching Kit his first sign, and watching you read estate correspondence to a fretful infant, and dancing with you until the crowded ballroom fell away entirely, I stopped wanting only that.”
Another tear slipped free. “I was too proud to take back my words, Julian. I had set every term of that agreement myself, and admitting I wanted more felt like admitting I did not know my own mind. More than that, I was afraid that if I told you the truth, you would look at me with kindness, and I did not think I could bear that when I wanted so much more from you.”
He slowly reached up and brushed his thumb beneath her eye, catching a tear before it could fall, the touch achingly tender.
“I was wrong,” he said, quiet and certain. “About all of it. I do not want fear dictating my choices anymore, Louisa. Or your choices, for that matter.”
“Then we have to stop letting it,” Louisa whispered, stepping closer, close enough that barely any distance remained between them, her tears falling freely now.
“It breaks my heart to see you cry. I have caused you enough of that already. I do not intend to cause any more of it, if I can help it.”
“They are not unhappy tears.”
“I know.” His hand cradled her face, both palms warm against her cheeks, his thumbs brushing away her tears with a care that undid her entirely. “I still cannot bear to have caused a single one of them.”
He bent his head and pressed his lips to her forehead, and she closed her eyes, feeling the fear finally loosen its grip on her chest beneath so simple, so tender a gesture.
“I love you,” he murmured against her skin, before drawing back just enough to meet her eyes, his own bright and full of warmth.
“I have loved you for longer than I wanted to admit, even to myself. Perhaps since the morning you knelt in front of Kit in the schoolroom and taught him his first sign without asking a single thing of him in return. I did not want to fall in love with you, Louisa. I fought it for months, with every careful argument I had. And I have never once in my life lost a fight so thoroughly, or been so grateful to have lost it.”
Louisa laughed, a small, joyful sound, tears still rolling down her cheeks even as her mouth curled into a smile she could not have suppressed if she’d tried.
“I love you too,” she said. “I think I have for a very long time.”
Julian’s thumb brushed once more beneath her eye, and then he kissed her, slow and certain this time, with a tenderness that spoke of every careful thing he had not allowed himself to say until this moment, his hands cradling her face as though she were something infinitely precious.
Louisa kissed him back with everything she had spent so many weeks refusing to name, finally unafraid.
* * *
Kit was waiting at the top of the front steps when the carriage rolled up the long drive. The moment Louisa stepped down, his hands were moving, quick and urgent, his face wrought with emotion.
“You were gone.”
“I was.” Louisa crossed to him at once, kneeling so they were at eye level, and signed her answer while speaking it aloud for Julian’s benefit. “I am sorry, Kit. I did not mean to be gone for so long.”
Kit’s hands moved again, sharper this time, something fierce beneath that Louisa instantly recognized as a child’s relief and lingering hurt. His eyes watered, and he sniffed angrily as he signed.
“You said you would come every day for lessons. Then you did not come at all.”
“You are right to be angry with me for that.”
“Don’t do it again.”