Chapter 27 #2
“You were wearing the ivory mask,” he said, “and you asked me to put mine on for your sake, which I did, and I stood there in the entrance hall and thought that I would do a considerably larger thing than wear a mask if you asked me to. That was the point at which the other explanations stopped being useful.”
She said nothing. She was very still.
“I should have said something then,” he said.
“I know that. I should have said something at any of the subsequent moments when the not saying it was becoming its own kind of statement. I did not, and by the time I understood properly what I was feeling and what I was not saying, you had arranged a ball and invited Elias Talbot and everything had a momentum I did not know how to interrupt without making a considerable mess of it.” He looked at the table.
“So I sat in my study all day and simply made myself miserable, which is not a period of my life I look back on with any particular pride.”
She pressed her lips together.
“I am not good at this,” he said. “I want you to have a realistic understanding of what that means going forward. I will have opinions about things and I will express them more firmly than is always necessary. I will arrange things without consulting you and have to be reminded that this is not how things work between us, and I will probably have to be reminded more than once.” He looked at her steadily. “But I love you.”
“You…” Temperance could hardly believe the words she was hearing.
And I want you to stay because this house is better with you in it and my son is better for knowing you.”
There was a pause, and they locked gazes.
“I am better, too, in ways I did not plan for and could not have predicted. I would like for that to continue.” He paused. “Permanently. if you are willing.”
“Are you proposing to me?” tears stung at her eyes but they were not born out of any sadness. “It was not a very conventional one, if so.”
“I prioritized clarity over convention,” he said. “So you will have to forgive me for that.”
“Most proposals involve getting down on one knee,” she said.
“I considered it,” he said. “I decided against as the gesture would have distracted from what I was trying to say.”
“Very practical of you,” she said, smiling.
“Consistently,” he said, and there was something in his voice that was dry and warm at the same time, the version of him she had been looking for since she sat down, and she felt it settle in the room between them like something that had been waiting to arrive.
She looked at him. At the candlelight on his face and the dark blue of his eyes and the scar at his wrist that she understood now, and she thought about everything that had accumulated between the night he arrived in her hallway with mud on his shoes and this evening, and she thought about Albina saying do not make the same mistake.
“Yes,” she confirmed, and smiled at him. “Oh, heavens. The answer was always going to be yes.”
Something in him relaxed.
The next course arrived before either of them found another word.
And just like that, Harper gathered himself again.
His shoulders straightened almost imperceptibly, his expression settled into something composed and deliberate, and when he reached for his wineglass it was with that same quiet precision that defined everything he did when he wished to be entirely in control of himself.
Once, that version of him had felt distant.
Now, it felt intimate in a way she could not quite explain.
She realized that she liked him far more this way, the quiet tension of watching a man who could be both entirely composed and completely undone.
When he glanced up and caught her watching him, the faintest hint of a smile touched his mouth, as though he understood exactly what she was thinking and had chosen not to remark upon it.
“I suppose,” he said after the footman had stepped away, “there are certain practical matters that we ought to discuss.”
“Practical matters?” she repeated, lifting her brows slightly as she reached for her glass. “That sounds rather ominous, I think.”
“It is not intended to be,” he said, though there was a trace of amusement in his voice that softened the statement.
“No?” she asked lightly. “Because it sounds very much like I am about to be informed of how things are done in this house, and I should like to know whether I am expected to agree with all of it in advance.”
“That would certainly be the most efficient arrangement,” he said, his expression steady, though she could see the humor he was not quite allowing himself.
She leaned back slightly, the warmth of the moment settling easily between them.
“And if I refuse to agree?”
“Then,” he said, pausing just long enough to make her wait for it, “we will discuss the matter further.”
She laughed softly.
“That is not nearly as reassuring as you think it is.”
“I am beginning to understand that.”
“And what are these practical matters, then?” she asked, resting her hand lightly beside her plate, her tone lighter now, but her attention entirely on him.
“Joseph,” Harper said.
She smiled immediately, because there was something so inevitable about beginning there that it felt almost right.
“Yes,” she said. “Joseph.”
“We should speak to him soon,” Harper continued, his voice quieter now, more considered, as though this was something that mattered to him in a way that went beyond simple arrangement. “I would prefer that he hear it from us, rather than from anyone else.”
“I agree,” she said, and her expression softened without her intending it to. “Though I do not think he will be surprised. He has already decided, in his own way, that I belong here.”
Harper’s gaze lingered on her for a moment, something warm and steady passing through it.
“He is not the only one who has come to that conclusion,” he said.
The words were simple, but they carried something beneath them that made her look away for a moment, her fingers tightening slightly around the stem of her glass as a quiet warmth spread through her chest.
“Well,” she said after a brief pause, her voice softer than before, “we should still tell him together. He would like that.”
“Yes,” Harper said immediately, as though there had never been any question of it. “We will tell him together.”
“And my mother,” she added, lifting her gaze again, her smile returning as she thought of Albina. “Though I suspect she will behave as though this has been her plan from the very beginning.”
“I would not be surprised if it has been,” Harper said, and this time he did not quite hide his amusement.
“She will pretend to be shocked,” Temperance continued, the laughter returning to her voice, “and then she will say something outrageous and insist she always knew this would happen.”
“That sounds entirely accurate.”
The servants moved quietly around them again, clearing plates and refreshing wine, and for a moment the conversation paused, but it did not feel interrupted so much as it felt suspended.
“And the dogs?” he asked once they had left, as though the subject belonged just as naturally in the conversation as anything else they had discussed. “If we are discussing the future of the household, then I think it only reasonable that the dogs be included in that discussion.”
She smiled more fully at that, the warmth of it lingering as she studied him for a moment, clearly enjoying the way he approached even the most ridiculous matters with such quiet authority. “And what, precisely, have you decided about them?” she asked.
“They are staying inside,” he said without hesitation.
“They’ve grown on you,” Temperance said, gleefully. “I never thought I would see the day.”
“They have not grown on me,” he said, with a composure that might have been convincing if not for the faintest shift at the corner of his mouth, “so much as I have come to recognize that resisting them is both impractical and, in Joseph’s case, entirely futile.”
“I’ll take whatever explanation you are choosing to provide.”
He inclined his head slightly, accepting the remark with more ease than she might have expected only a short time ago, and for a moment the quiet between them returned.
Temperance traced the rim of her glass absently before glancing up at him again, something softer entering her expression. “You have changed your mind about many things rather quickly,” she said, not accusingly, but with a quiet curiosity she did not try to disguise.
Harper did not look away.
“I have had reason to,” he said.
He rose then, slowly, deliberately, and came around the table. Temperance found herself standing to meet him without quite deciding to, drawn forward by something she no longer tried to resist.
And then his hand found hers.
“I want to kiss you again.”
“You don’t need to ask.”
Their lips met, and the world seemed to narrow to that single point of contact, everything else falling away. There was no measured restraint in it, none of the distance he maintained so effortlessly in every other moment.
“I love you,” he whispered against her lips.
“I love you more.”
And then, from somewhere beneath the table, a sound emerged. They both stopped and looked down to see that Soot was sitting directly beneath them.
“She was under there the whole time,” Temperance said.
“Apparently,” he said.
“How long do you think she has been there?” she said.
“I have stopped trying to understand how she gets into rooms,” he said. “Or how long she has been in them.”
He reached down and picked Soot up, and she settled against his chest.