He looked at her. The morning light was merciless and unromantic, and it showed every line of exhaustion on his face and every crease in his ruined coat. Behind her, she could hear Charlotte moving about and she had no doubt Annie hovered nearby.
It was not a terrace in the moonlight, nor a garden by a fountain. It was a shabby doorstep on a gray morning, and they were both wrecked, and it…
It was perfect.
"I love you," he said. "I think I may have loved you since a funeral in a country churchyard, when I watched a seventeen-year-old girl hold her whole family together and I thought, Who is taking care of this girl?" His voice was rough and raw and entirely without artifice. "And every day since, every single day, the answer has been the same. Me. I want it to be me. I desperately want to be the one who takes care of you. To be entrusted with your safety and your happiness… It would be the privilege of a lifetime."
Her vision blurred. She blinked hard and the tears spilled, and she didn't care, because he was still talking.
"I told myself it was guilt. I told you it was guilt. And the guilt is real. Andrew is gone, and I will carry that for the rest of my life. But Estella—" His voice broke on her name, and that undid her completely. "Guilt doesn't explain my feelings for you. It doesn't make a man memorize the exact shade of blue a woman's eyes turn in candlelight. Or have him carrying a coat everywhere he goes in case she's cold. It certainly doesn’t leave him awake at night thinking about her laugh, or memorizing her smiles—" He made a sound, rough and helpless. "Guilt has nothing to do with how I feel when you smile at me."
She was crying properly now. Sobbing, really. She didn't care.
She loved him so much her chest couldn't contain it.
"I should have told you weeks ago," he said. "I should have told you the night you kissed me on that terrace. You were so brave, and I—I was a coward. I pushed you away because I was afraid that wanting you was the most selfish thing I'd ever done. That I didn't deserve?—"
"Don't." She stepped onto the doorstep and closed the distance between them. "Don't you dare tell me what you don't deserve."
He looked down at her. She was barefoot and tear-streaked and her hair was a catastrophe and she had never felt more powerful in her life. It was all so clear now. How he loved her. How much he'd always loved her. "You've been paying our debts," she said. "For two years. The milliner. The kitchen funds. Mr. Phelps and his sudden departure for Cornwall."
His throat worked. "Estella?—"
"It was you. It was always you." Not a question.
"Yes." And the single word was like a key turning in a lock.
She let out a sharp exhale of relief and then she threw herself at him. It was horribly undignified, but he caught her against his chest and held her so tightly it made her weepy all over again.
"You impossible man." Her voice was muffled against his shoulder. His hand slid into her hair as he held her to his heart.
She was laughing and crying at the same time as she tipped her head so she could look up at him. "You told me it wasn't you. You looked me in the eye and?—"
"I know." The arm around her waist tightened like he might never let her go. "I was wrong about everything. I was wrong to push you away, wrong to lie, wrong to think I could watch you marry someone else and survive it."
He reached for her hand and pressed it flat over his heart. She could feel it hammering beneath her palm, just as it had at the ball. "I can't live without you. I don't want to. Whatever I owe Andrew—I know now. The best way I can honor him is by making you happy. If you'll let me."
She looked up at him. This difficult, stubborn, deeply good man who had been loving her in secret for two years and fighting it every step of the way.
She rose on her toes.
"Estella." It was a growl that sent shivers through her. "If you kiss me on this doorstep— Your maid is watching, and your sister is watching, and every neighbor on this street?—"
She kissed him.
It was not like the terrace. The terrace had been desperate and stolen. This was something else.
This was a beginning.
Both his arms came around her and dipped down slightly, lifting her up off her feet so he could kiss her properly. Her feet dangled as she wrapped her arms around his neck, savoring the kisses as his mouth moved over hers with a tenderness that made her knees dissolve.
He kissed her the way he did everything—thoroughly, completely, and with his whole stubborn heart.
When they finally broke apart, she was breathless and grinning, and he was looking at her with an expression of such stunned, helpless adoration that she wanted to frame it and hang it on the wall of every room she'd ever live in.
"Was that a yes?" he asked, his voice rough.
"That depends." She kept her hand on his chest. She could still feel his heart pounding. "Are you asking?"
