Chapter 35
“Stop the carriage!”
Nell clutched the seat as the cab lurched to a halt. The horses stamped and snorted, and the driver’s muffled voice carried through the roof, sharp with irritation.
“There is a man in the road, Your Grace. On horseback. He is blocking the way. It looks like His Grace.”
Lily’s heart stopped.
She leaned toward the window and pushed the curtain aside. The Dover road stretched ahead, flat and gray beneath an overcast sky. The chalk cliffs were visible in the distance. And in the center of the road, astride a horse that was lathered and heaving, sat Hugo.
He looked nothing like the Duke of Thornwaite.
His coat was unbuttoned and streaked with mud.
His cravat was gone. His fair hair was damp with sweat and plastered to his forehead.
His chest rose and fell with the ragged breathing of a man who had ridden hard and fast and had not stopped for anything.
He swung down from the saddle and walked toward the carriage. His boots were filthy. His shirt was untucked. There was a scratch across his left cheek where a branch must have caught him, and the careful, polished composure he wore like a second skin was nowhere to be seen.
He reached the window and looked at her. His amber eyes were raw, open, and terrified.
“Lily.” His voice was hoarse. “Give me a moment. That is all I ask. One moment.”
Nell pressed herself against the far side of the cab with the frozen expression of a maid who couldn’t fathom the possibility of a mud-covered Duke intercepting their journey.
Lily looked at Hugo. She looked at the road ahead, at the port in the distance, at the ship that would carry her to France and away from this man and the wreckage of everything they had built.
“One moment,” she said.
He opened the carriage door and offered her his hand. She took it. The warmth of his grip, familiar and solid, sent a tremor through her that she did not try to suppress.
He helped her down and guided her to the grassy verge beside the road, away from the carriage, away from Nell’s wide eyes and the driver’s confused stare.
The wind from the Channel carried the salt smell of the sea, and the grass was damp beneath her feet.
Hugo stood before her with his ruined clothes and his scratched face and nothing left to hide behind.
“You are right to leave,” he said. “I gave you every reason to go and not a single reason to stay. I know that. I have known it since the morning you walked out of our house, and I was not even there. I left before dawn so I would not have to watch you go, because I was too much of a coward to stand in that entrance hall and face what I had done. I let Mrs. Aldridge hand you an envelope and a set of travel documents as though that were enough. As though money could replace the words I should have spoken.”
“Hugo—”
“Let me finish. Please. Because if I stop, I may not be able to start again.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded.
He drew a breath. It shook.
“You asked me to let you in. You asked me to be honest with you, to tell you about Sebastian and my father and the deficiency Lord Sudberry mentioned, but I refused. I shut the door and told you to leave and convinced myself it was for your protection, when the truth is that it was for mine. I was protecting myself, Lily. From you. From the possibility that if you saw what lives behind the mask, you would look at me the way people have looked at me my entire life. With pity. With discomfort. With the particular, careful kindness that people reserve for things they consider broken.”
His voice caught. Not on a word. On the breath before the word, the gathering of air that precedes speech, Lily saw his jaw tighten and his throat work and the effort it cost him to push through.
“I had a stammer. Well, I still have it, in some ways.”
The words fought him. She watched it happen, watched the consonant catch, hold, and then release. The sound of it, fractured and imperfect, was so far from the polished fluency she had come to associate with Hugo Beaumont that it took her a moment to understand what she had heard.
“I have had it since I was a boy. It b-began after my mother died. She took her own life, Lily. When I was eight. And something in my voice broke after that. The words that had always come easily began to stick, and no amount of practice or willpower could make them smooth again.”
His hands hung at his sides. They were trembling. He did not try to hide it.
“Sebastian was my older brother, as you know. He was everything my father wanted: strong, confident, fluent. I was the spare. The boy who could not get through a sentence without stumbling. My father called it a deficiency. Sebastian called it worse.” Hugo’s gaze dropped to the grass.
“One night, when I was seventeen, Sebastian brought a woman home. She heard me and laughed. She asked Sebastian if I was his invalid brother. Sebastian threw me to the floor and told me that our mother had ended her life because she was ashamed of me.”
“Hugo.” She stepped toward him, her hand reaching for his arm. He flinched, and she stopped, her fingers hovering an inch from his sleeve. She did not withdraw them. She held them there, steady and open, an offering he could take or refuse.
“You do not have to finish,” she said. “Not if it hurts too much.”
“It all hurts.” He looked at her outstretched hand. He did not take it. But he did not step away. “Let me finish. I must.”
Hugo took a deep breath and continued. “My father heard the commotion. He came out of his study and saw me on the floor, crying, and he did not help me up. He asked Sebastian what I had done wrong. And then he told me to wipe my face and stop sniveling like a peasant.”
“Sebastian died three years later. A riding accident. He was thrown from a horse during a hunt, and he did not survive the fall.” Hugo’s voice flattened.
“My father never recovered. He died the following year, and I inherited a title that was never meant for me, from a family that had never wanted me to have it.”
The wind moved through the grass. A gull cried somewhere over the cliffs. Hugo stood on the roadside with mud on his boots and tears he was fighting not to shed with the truth of his entire life laid bare between them.
“That night, I sat in my room and practiced saying my own name until it came out whole. I practiced every day for years. I built the voice you know, the charm, the ease, the man who can command a ballroom without a single crack showing. I built him to survive. And I have been so afraid of anyone seeing through the construction that I pushed away the one person who ever made me want to stop building.”
He looked up. His eyes were bright and red-rimmed, and his voice came out rough and unsteady and nothing at all like the voice of a Duke.
“That is the truth. That is what lives behind the door I would not open. A boy with a broken voice who was told he was not worth saving, and who has spent fifteen years trying to prove them wrong.”
Lily’s vision blurred. She blinked hard. The tears fell anyway.
“I wish you had told me sooner,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Hearing this does not make me think less of you, Hugo.” She stepped closer.
“If anything, it explains everything. Why you fight so hard to stay composed. Why you fear being seen without armor. Why you hold everyone at a distance.” She reached up and pressed her palm against his cheek, against the scratch, against the skin that was warm and rough with stubble.
“I would have accepted all of this. Every version of you. As long as it was real.”
“I know that now.” His voice broke. “I know that because you… Besides Edward, you are the only person who has ever looked at me and seen past the performance without flinching. You saw me stammer in the study that night, and you did not recoil. You did not laugh. And I sent you away because I could not bear to be seen that way, and it was the cruelest, most cowardly thing I have ever done.”
“It was.”
“I know.”
“It was also the most frightened I have ever seen you.”
He closed his eyes. Her hand remained on his cheek.
“I am s-sorry.” The stammer surfaced again, and this time, he did not try to conceal it.
He let it come. He let her hear it. “I am sorry for hurting you. For pushing you away. For every morning I spent in that study instead of beside you, convincing myself that you deserved better, when the truth is that you deserved honesty and I was too afraid to give it.”
He opened his eyes.
“I hated watching you change yourself during our lessons. I hated teaching you to soften your edges and dim your fire and make yourself palatable to a man who would have spent the rest of his life pressing ferns and never understanding what he had. Because you are not pliable, Lily. You are extraordinary. You are sharp and fierce and brilliant, and you argue with everything. Your eyes fight with every fabric I have ever put you in, and you jumped naked into my lake on our wedding day. You shot arrows at midnight and laughed so loud you woke the horse, and I have never, in my entire life, wanted anything the way I want you.”
He took her hand from his cheek and held it between both of his. His fingers were trembling. His grip was warm.
“I love you.” The words came out without a stammer, clear, whole, and certain.
“I love you, Lily. I love your mind and your stubbornness and the way you hold a bow and the way you taste of rosewater and the way you look at me as though I am worth something even when I am giving you every reason to believe I am not. And if you can forgive me, if you will stay, I will spend every day of my life making certain you never regret it.”
The sea murmured in the distance. The gulls called. Lily stood on the Dover road with tears on her cheeks and Hugo’s hands around hers and the full, devastating weight of everything he had just given her pressing against her chest.
She looked at him. At the mud and the sweat and the scratch on his cheek and the red-rimmed eyes and the trembling hands. At the man who had ridden across half of England to stand in a road and tell her the truth he had spent his entire life hiding.
“I tried not to love you,” she said. Her voice was thick and unsteady.
“I told myself it was attraction caused by close proximity and circumstance. I told myself that what I felt would fade with distance, and I got into this carriage and watched London disappear and waited for the ache to lessen, but it did not lessen, Hugo. It grew. With every mile, it grew, because you are in every thought I have and every breath I take, and I cannot undo it. I do not want to undo it.”
She gripped his hands.
“I love you. I love the man who builds armor to survive, the boy who practiced his name in an empty room, and the Duke who rescues three-legged horses because he knows what it feels like to be told you are not worth saving. I love all of it. Every fractured, complicated, infuriating piece of you.”
Hugo’s composure shattered. Not the careful, controlled crack she had seen before, the kind he could smooth over in seconds. A real, full, irreversible breaking, the kind that happens when a man who has held himself together for fifteen years finally allows someone to see him fall apart.
A tear slid down his cheek. Then another. He did not wipe them away. “Lily.”
“I am here.” She reached up and cradled his face in both hands. “I am not going anywhere.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her.
This kiss held none of the urgency of the terrace, none of the reckless hunger of the lake.
It was slow, deep, and trembling, the kiss of a man who was afraid to break something precious and could not stop touching it anyway.
His hands cradled the back of her head. His fingers threaded into her hair, and his mouth moved against hers with a tenderness that made her chest ache.
She kissed him back. She tasted salt and brandy and the dust of the road.
Her fingers curled into the damp linen of his shirt, and she pulled him closer, closer, until there was no space between them, until his heartbeat hammered against hers through the layers of fabric and sweat and years of armor that were finally, irrevocably, coming undone.
He drew back just enough to press his forehead against hers. His breath came ragged and warm against her lips.
“Say it again,” he whispered.
“I love you.”
He kissed her again. His arms tightened around her waist, lifting her until her feet left the ground. She laughed against his mouth because Hugo Beaumont was standing on the Dover road covered in mud and holding his wife in the air and kissing her as though the world had just begun.
He set her down. His hands remained at her waist. His thumbs traced slow circles against her hips, and his amber eyes held hers with the raw, unshielded warmth of a man who had nothing left to hide and did not want to.
“Come home,” he said. “Come home with me, and I will take you everywhere. Naples. Pompeii. Greece. Every ruin, coastline, and sunset you have ever dreamed about. But come home first. Come home so I can wake up beside you and know that you chose to stay.”
“I chose you, Hugo. I chose you the night I walked into your parlor and shoved a scandal sheet into your chest. I simply did not know it yet.”
He pressed his lips to her forehead. Then her temple. Then the corner of her mouth. Each kiss was a promise, and Lily closed her eyes and let them land.
Behind them, Nell peered out of the carriage window and discreetly closed the curtain.
Hugo took Lily’s hand and led her back to the carriage.
He helped her inside, gave instructions to the driver, and tied his exhausted horse to the back.
He climbed in beside her and closed the door.
The carriage turned, the Dover cliffs receded behind them, and the road that had been carrying her away from him now carried them home.
Lily leaned against his shoulder. He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. His chin rested on the top of her head, and the warmth of him surrounded her like a coat she never wanted to take off.
“Hugo?”
“Mm.”
“Your cravat is missing, your shirt is ruined, and you smell like a horse.”
“I am aware.”
“You look terrible.”
“I look like a man who rode to Dover for the woman he loves. That is rather romantic.”
“It is rather unhygienic.”
“You married a rake, Lily. Romance and hygiene are not always compatible.”
She pressed her face against his chest and laughed, and the sound filled the carriage, warm, bright, and real. Hugo’s arm tightened around her.
Somewhere ahead, Thornwaite Hall was waiting with its empty rooms and its ancestral portraits and a three-legged horse who would need an apple when they arrived.
They were going home.
Together.