Epilogue #2
“Hello,” she said, tucking herself against Augusta’s side with the easy certainty of a child who had long since abandoned the concept of personal space where certain people were concerned.
“You’re my sister now. Officially. I asked James, who said it was absolutely the case and that I should remind you of it frequently, especially when I want something. ”
Augusta’s arm wrapped around the girl’s shoulders, pulling her close. “I am,” she confirmed. “Heaven help us both.”
Pippin, who had been conducting a thorough investigation of the catering table’s lower regions, trotted over to join them, wedging himself between their ankles. He looked up at their joined hands, his head tilted, and gave a decisive bark.
“He says it’s about time,” Cassie translated, with the easy authority of a child who had never let the fact of species difference interfere with her interpretive ambitions. “He’s been very patient. For a dog.”
Augusta looked across the garden to where Hudson stood conversing with James, his hand resting on his friend’s shoulder.
She smiled softly as she looked at him.
Her husband.
Here, in the dappled light of a garden she had once regarded as borrowed, with a child who was now her family pressed against her side, and a man who had chosen her, watching her from across the lawn with an expression that required no translation, she allowed herself the dangerous, radiant pleasure of belonging exactly where she was.
The bridal suite at Oakhart House had been prepared thoroughly.
Augusta stood in the doorway and took inventory: brass sconces casting a honeyed glow across dark mahogany paneling; the four-poster bed draped in ivory silk that caught the candlelight and held it, transforming the fabric into something between solid and liquid; the scent of rosewater wafting from the basin that had been placed beside the hearth; jasmine garlands coiled on the dressing table in fragrant spirals that made the entire room smell like a garden suspended at the precise moment of perfect bloom.
Her pulse abruptly abandoned all pretense of composure and accelerated to a rhythm that her lace chemise did absolutely nothing to disguise.
Hudson closed the door behind them. The room was warm. Too warm. Or perhaps the warmth was internal, spurred by the simple fact of Hudson standing three feet away with his cravat already loosened and his eyes holding hers with an intensity that made the candlelight seem superfluous.
“Hello,” he said. The word emerged rough, scraped from somewhere deep, carrying the accumulated weight of a day that had begun with pacing and ended here.
“Hello,” Augusta returned.
She was absurdly proud of the steadiness of her voice, which was the only part of her currently demonstrating anything resembling composure.
Hudson’s hand found her waist, simply resting there with the easy certainty of a man who had memorized the particular geography of her body through layers of wool and cotton and now found himself granted access to the territory itself.
His other hand rose to her hair, his fingertips brushing a stray curl at the nape of her neck where Olivia’s architectural principles had begun their inevitable surrender to the realities of a day that had involved champagne, embraces, and at least one incident with Pippin and a tray of ratafia cakes.
“I’ve dreamed of this night,” Hudson murmured. “Not the ceremony. Not the breakfast. This. You. Here. Without…” He paused, and Augusta watched the rare, fascinating struggle of a man attempting to articulate a feeling he had spent years perfecting the art of concealing. “Without stopping.”
The word landed between them with the weight of everything it implied: every midnight encounter in the library that had ended with his hand stilling on her thigh; every kiss against the window seat that had been interrupted by the sound of a footman in the corridor; every moment of want carefully banked, carefully contained, treated as something that could be portioned out in careful increments rather than consumed in the reckless, wholehearted way that desire demanded.
“And I of you,” Augusta said.
The simplicity of it surprised her. She had expected something more elaborate, had rehearsed variations in the privacy of her own thoughts for weeks, and what emerged was just that: four words, clean and honest and entirely adequate to the magnitude of what she was feeling.
His mouth found hers with a hunger that made her knees weak.
This was not the careful, measured kisses of their previous encounters.
Those had been negotiations, explorations conducted within boundaries that both of them had respected with a discipline that Augusta, in her more reflective moments, found genuinely impressive.
This was something else entirely. This was Hudson setting down a burden he had carried for longer than she had known him, and the force of it drove the breath from her lungs and replaced it with something warmer, something that started in her chest and spread outward with a velocity that made her fingers clutch at the front of his waistcoat.