Epilogue #2
Edward shook Hugo’s hand. The grip lasted longer than usual.
“Well done, Hugo.”
“I had some help.”
“I should hope so.”
Oliver appeared at Hugo’s elbow. “Does this mean I am getting a cousin?”
“It does.”
“Can I teach him or her to fence?”
“When he or she is old enough, yes.”
“Can I teach it now?”
“The child has not been born yet, Oliver.”
“I could practice on Jane.”
“You will not practice on Jane,” Sophia called from across the lawn.
Aunt Margaret remained in her chair. She had not moved. She had not spoken. She held her opera glasses in one hand and her wine in the other, and when Lily crossed the garden to her, she looked up with blue eyes that were bright, fierce, and full.
“Aunt Margaret?”
“I am not crying.”
“I did not say you were.”
“Good. Because I am not. I have not cried since 1804, and a grandniece or grandnephew will not change that.” She set down her glasses and took Lily’s hands. “Your mother is going to knit. Do you understand that? She is going to knit for months. We will all drown in wool.”
Lily laughed. Aunt Margaret squeezed her hands and pulled her down and pressed a kiss on her forehead, dry, firm, and carrying sixty years of love compressed into a single gesture.
“You have done well,” Aunt Margaret whispered. “Both of you.”
The afternoon softened. The congratulations settled into the comfortable rhythm of a family that had absorbed its news and was now returning to the serious business of cake and conversation and children.
Lady Brimsey commandeered Thomas for a tour of the rose arbor, narrating the names of every bloom to a toddler who responded by attempting to eat a peony.
Lord Brimsey followed, pruning shears in hand, radiating quiet joy.
Sophia gathered Jane from wherever she had most recently climbed and settled on the blanket with her proofs.
Margaret refilled her wine and resumed her surveillance of the grounds through her new opera glasses.
Hugo drifted toward the lake path, and a moment later, Edward rose from the bench and followed him.
By the water, Oliver demonstrates Wellington the Second’s alleged ability to jump on command. The frog sat motionless on a rock. Oliver stood three feet away, pointing at the ground and issuing instructions. Leo observed from behind his stick.
“Jump, Wellington! Jump!”
Wellington did not jump.
“He is not ready,” Oliver explained. “He needs more training.”
“Clearly,” Edward said.
Hugo stopped beside his friend. They stood shoulder to shoulder, the way they had stood a hundred times before, and the lake stretched silver and still before them.
“A father,” Edward said.
“Apparently.”
“How do you feel?”
“Terrified. Elated. And quite certain that I will be terrible at it.” Hugo paused. “But equally determined to be good.”
“You will be.” Edward glanced at him. “You are already good at it. I have watched you with Oliver and Leo for two years. You are patient, you are present, and you do not condescend. Those are the only qualifications that matter.”
“You are being generous.”
“I am being accurate.” Edward turned to face him. “Hugo, you spent your childhood with a father who could not see you and a brother who refused to look properly. You know exactly what a child needs, because you know exactly what one should never go without.”
Hugo’s throat tightened. He looked out at the lake, at the place where he had swum with Lily on their wedding day, where she had jumped in naked and laughed and called him impolite for staring.
“I told her everything, Edward. On the Dover road. The stammer. Sebastian. My father. All of it.”
“I know. She told Sophia. Sophia told me.” Edward’s mouth curved. “We are a family of terrible secret-keepers.”
“And?”
“And nothing has changed. Except that you are happier than I have ever seen you, and your wife is carrying your child, and you are standing by a lake watching a nine-year-old boy shout at a frog.” He clapped Hugo’s shoulder. “I believe this is what they call contentment.”
“It is unfamiliar.”
“It gets easier.”
“Does it?”
“No.” Edward smiled. “But it gets better.”
Wellington the Second leaped off his rock and landed in the water with a plop. Oliver cheered. Leo nodded with quiet satisfaction.
“Frog jumped,” Leo said.
Hugo laughed. The sound carried across the water, and somewhere on the blanket beneath the oak tree, Lily heard it and smiled.
The afternoon mellowed into evening. The family lingered in the garden until the light turned amber and the air cooled, and Oliver had to be bribed away from the frog habitat with the promise of cake.
They moved inside for dinner, and the dining room at Thornwaite Hall held the noise and warmth of a family that filled it completely.
Hugo sat at the head of the table with Lily at his side and looked at the faces gathered around him and felt, for the first time in this house, that the portraits on the walls had nothing left to say to him.
Later, after the guests had retired to their rooms and the house had settled into deep quiet, Hugo found Lily in their bedroom.
She stood at the window in her nightgown, the moonlight turning the white cotton into silver. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and her hand rested on her stomach.
“You are staring,” she said without turning.
“You are beautiful. Staring is appropriate.”
“You said that to me once before. At the lake.”
“I meant it then. I mean it now.” He crossed the room and stood behind her. His hands settled on her hips, and his chin rested on her shoulder, and they looked out at the moonlit grounds together. “How do you feel?”
“Terrified.”
“Of what?”
“Of everything. Of being responsible for a life. Of becoming my mother, who cries at everything and measures nurseries before engagements are announced.” She paused. “Of loving something so much it frightens me.”
“You are already very good at that.”
She turned in his arms and looked up at him.
“Hugo.”
“Mm?”
“I want you to know that if our child stammers, I will love them exactly as they are. And so will you. And no one in this house, in this family, will ever make them feel as though they are less than whole.”
His throat closed. The words landed in the place where his oldest wound lived, and instead of hurting, they healed. Not completely and not all at once, but slowly, patiently, and irreversibly.
“I know,” he said. And then, because the tears were coming and he had learned, from Lily, that tears did not make him weak, he repeated, “I know.”
She reached up and cradled his face in her hands.
Her thumbs traced the lines of his jaw, and her palms were warm against his skin, and she looked at him with no performance and no reservation and nothing but the simple, devastating truth of a woman who had chosen to love him and intended to keep choosing.
“Come to bed,” she whispered.
He kissed her. The kiss began gently, a brush of lips, a question asked and answered.
Then her fingers slid into his hair, and the gentleness gave way to something deeper and more deliberate.
He tasted her mouth, her lower lip, the soft gasp she made when his hands moved from her hips to the small of her back and pressed her against him.
“Hugo.” His name in her mouth, half whisper and half want.
He lifted her. She wrapped her arms around his neck. Hugo carried her to the bed and laid her down and looked at her, spread across the pillows with moonlight in her hair and the curve of new life beneath her nightgown.
He lay beside her. His hand found the hem of her nightgown and drew it upward. His fingers trailed along the skin of her calf, her knee, and the inside of her thigh. Each inch of contact left warmth in its wake, and as Lily’s breath quickened, her fingers tightened in the sheets.
“Slowly,” she murmured.
“Always.” He pressed his mouth to her collarbone, to the hollow of her throat, and the place behind her ear that made her arch against him. “We have all night.”
“We have longer than that.”
“We have forever.” He lifted his head and looked at her. “I intend to spend every night of it reminding you that you are the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.”
“That is a great many nights.”
“I am a very resolute man.”
She laughed, and the sound melted into a sigh as his mouth found hers again. He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, as though they had never done this before and he intended to memorize every second of it.
His fingers found the tie of her nightgown and loosened it. The fabric parted, and he drew it from her shoulders. His mouth followed the path of the silk, pressing kisses to her collarbone, the swell of her chest, and the soft skin between her breasts.
Lily’s fingers moved to his shirt. She pulled it over his head and traced the lines of his chest, his stomach, and the ridge of muscle above his hip. Her touch was familiar and unhurried, the touch of a woman who knew this body as well as her own and still found it worth exploring.
Hugo lowered his mouth to her stomach.
The curve was small, barely visible, the earliest architecture of a life they had made together. He pressed his lips against it and held them there. The warmth of her skin and the knowledge of what grew beneath it filled his chest with something so vast he could not speak for a moment.
“Hello,” he whispered against her belly. “I am your father. I am terrified of you already.”
Lily’s fingers threaded into his hair. She felt the warmth of his breath against her skin and the tremor in his voice and reverence in the way his hand cradled the curve, his palm spread wide, his thumb tracing a slow arc.
“You are going to be so loved,” he murmured.
His lips brushed her skin with each word.
“Your mother is the bravest person I have ever known, and she will teach you to argue with everything and to hold a bow and to jump into lakes. And I will teach you that it is all right to be afraid, so long as you do not let the fear decide what course your life will take.”
He pressed another kiss on the curve. Then another, lower, where her hip began. Then he trailed his mouth back up, across her ribs, between her breasts, along the line of her throat, and Lily arched beneath him. Her fingers tightened in his hair.
“Hugo.”
“Mm.”
“Stop talking to our unborn child and kiss me.”
He lifted his head. His amber eyes were bright and damp in the moonlight, and the grin that spread across his face held none of its old performance. It was open and boyish and wrecked with happiness.
“As my Duchess commands.”
He kissed her. Deep and slow and aching with tenderness. His hand still rested on her stomach, his body warm above hers.
She pulled him closer. Her legs wrapped around him. His mouth left hers and traced the curve of her jaw, her ear, the place on her neck that made her breath fracture.
“I love you,” he said against her skin. Each word was a kiss pressed into her pulse.
“I love you,” she answered.
Her fingers traced the muscles of his back, his shoulders, the knot of scar tissue above his left brow where his brother had once split the skin.
She kissed the scar. She had kissed it a hundred times. She would kiss it a hundred more, because every time she did, she felt the tension beneath it ease, as though her mouth could reach the old wound underneath and soothe it.
He gathered her beneath him and cradled her face in his hands. Their foreheads touched, and the moonlight held them. The house was quiet, and the world was small and warm and theirs.
Slowly, carefully, Hugo guided himself into her. Lily moaned, feeling his length. His hips moved, and she clutched at his thighs.
She grew wetter as he slid deeper. Her nails curled into his skin as he rocked deeper. She met each of his thrusts with small cries of pleasure.
He drove deeper into her, and he whispered against her ear. “Am I hurting you?”
Lily’s answer was to grasp his hips and pull him deeper. His hips rolled with deep thrusts, and with a cry torn from her lips, Lily shattered.
Hugo groaned her name, his thrusts quickening before he buried himself deep and shuddered his own release.
Afterward, they lay tangled together in the silver light. Lily’s head rested on his chest. He draped his arm around her shoulders and the sheets twisted around them.
Hugo’s hand rested on her stomach. His thumb traced a slow, gentle circle against the place where their child was growing, and the gesture mirrored the circle he had traced on her palm at the altar, and at the opera, and in a hundred small, hidden moments since.
“I am going to teach our child to fence before they can walk.”
“You are not.”
“I am going to buy them a horse.”
“Hugo, they will be an infant.”
“A small horse. A pony. Dorado can mentor it.”
“Dorado has three legs.”
“And excellent character. Which is more than most mentors can claim.”
She pressed her face against his chest and laughed, and the vibration traveled through his ribs and settled in the place where his heart lived.
Hugo held her tighter and closed his eyes and let the happiness sit without questioning it, without waiting for it to be taken away, without reaching for the armor that had kept him safe and lonely for so many years.
He was Hugo Beaumont. Duke of Thornwaite. Husband. Father. A man with a stammer and a three-legged horse and a wife who loved him not in spite of what he was, but because of it.
And for the first time in his life, that was enough.
It was more than enough.
It was everything.
The End?