Chapter 29 #3
Despite himself, Roman laughed and his wife smiled. Then he sobered, letting the humor fall away. “I do not want to shut you outside of it, Tamsin. Not ever again.”
Her eyes stayed on him without faltering, though he suspected the glimmer he saw in them might be tears.
“I do not want to come to you only after a victory. Those are too few.” Roman took one step toward her. “I thought I was giving you peace when I protected you from my failure and my grief. But I was giving you absence.”
There was more to say. Especially the most important thing, and perhaps the simplest. He had spent months learning the difference between needing Tamsin…and loving her.
Everyone needed Tamsin. Her stepmother needed her.
Her father needed her. Her brothers and sisters had needed her.
Roman himself had needed her from the moment she entered his life: he had seen how capable she was, how sensible, how useful, and thought himself fortunate to have found a woman so perfectly suited to filling every item on that long-ago forgotten list.
But need was not the truth of it. She was so much more than that. She was everything he wanted and desired in a wife, and in his heart.
She was, simply put, Tamsin.
“I love you.”
Her lips parted. Roman had thought the words would feel larger. Instead, they felt inevitable.
“I love you,” he said again, his voice strong. “Not because you make my life easier.”
Tamsin gave a watery little laugh. “I am not entirely certain I do.”
Roman smiled. “You make some parts considerably more difficult.”
“Roman.” She wiped at her eyes.
“I am attempting a declaration.”
“Surely you can do better.”
He shrugged and went down before her on one knee. “I have never made one before, Tamsin. I have never needed to, so I hope you will make some allowance for inexperience.”
Tamsin was smiling now, tears in her eyes. “I suppose I can do that, yes. For you.”
“I love you when you are useful,” he said gently.
“And when you are not. I love you when you know precisely what ought to be done, and when you haven’t the faintest idea what Holly is talking about.
” She wrinkled her adorable nose. “I love you when you solve things. I love you when you leave them for me to puzzle out.” Her smile trembled.
“I love you when you’re curious and when you’re kind and when you’re gentle, which is convenient because you are those things all the time.
Tamsin, I want you because you are simply yourself.
” Roman took her hands. “I love you with all that I am. I hope, in time, I will prove it to you.”
She looked at him for a long moment before touching his face. Her palm was warm; Roman turned his cheek into it before he could think better of the gesture.
“I love you too,” she whispered. “I have for a long time. You have my heart, Roman. The whole of it.”
His eyes closed. Not in triumph or relief, exactly—something steadier. A rightness that set his soul at ease. When he opened his eyes again, Tamsin was still looking at him.
“I should probably say something more impressive,” she said uncertainly.
“You needn’t. Eloquence is not necessary when two people understand each other as we do. Besides, I have used up all of mine.”
Her lips curved upward. “That was all of it? What will you do in Parliament?”
“Use very small, brilliant words to make my points.”
Tamsin laughed softly. She leaned forward to rest her forehead against his. “I love you,” she said again. “And I am here. Yours. Forever.”
Roman’s fingers tightened around hers.
I am here.
He had heard those words before in a dozen forms: from friends who stood beside him in council chambers, from men who answered letters and attended meetings and appeared when a cause seemed lost. But he understood them differently now.
Tamsin was not promising to fix him. She was not promising to save Walmgate. She was not offering to carry whatever he set down. She was promising her presence in his life.
That was all, and it was everything.
Roman turned his head and kissed the center of her palm. They retired to her bed together, Tamsin tucked against his side, one of her hands still caught in his. He kissed her forehead and whispered again, “I love you.”
Outside, the wind moved against Hartwell House. There would be no work for Roman tomorrow, not the kind he was used to. Only the road, and Tamsin beside him, and York falling away behind them with Walmgate still standing in it, still argued over, entirely out of his hands.
Others would carry it now. There would be petitions and meetings and arguments he would hear about only in letters, days old by the time they reached him. Walmgate might stand for another hundred years. Another thousand. Or it might not.
Roman did not know, and he would not even be there to watch it happen, one way or the other. Sitting in bed next to his wife, with a house full of trunks waiting below them for morning, he found he could let that be true without it costing him anything.
Tamsin rested her head against his shoulder. Roman stayed where he was, fully content and exactly where he belonged.