“We should go to bed,” she said. “Separately to our chambers. The children will have questions in the morning, and we should be rested enough to answer them.”
“That is very practical advice.”
“I’m a very practical person.”
“You are. It’s one of the things I cherish about you.” He released her hand slowly, reluctantly, as though letting go of something precious.
“Good night, Mel.”
“Good night, Rhys.”
She moved toward the door, toward the corridor that would take her to her room, to the trunk she would need to unpack, to the life she was choosing to build.
At the doorway, she paused and looked back.
He was standing where she had left him, watching her with an expression of such open tenderness that it made her chest ache. The firelight caught his features, illuminating the hope and the uncertainty and the affection that he was no longer trying to hide.
“Should my thoughts be of any comfort to you, know that I deem you quite matchless in your capacity for affection. You will be a husband to be envied and a father most beloved.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because you’re willing to try. Because you’re willing to fail and get up and try again. Because you adore those children enough to face your own demons for their sake.” She paused. “And because you chose me. A woman who will never let you settle for less than your best.”
He smiled, the expression genuine and unguarded.
“I chose well, then.”
“You did.” She returned the smile, feeling the rightness of it settle into her bones.
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I ask.”
She left him standing in the study, the fire dying in the grate, the night wrapping around the house like a blanket. Tomorrow there would be conversations and announcements and the complicated work of building a future together. Tomorrow there would be children to reassure and plans to make and a hundred practical details to address.
But tonight, there was this, a promise made and accepted, a future chosen, a family beginning to take shape.
It was, she thought as she climbed the stairs to her room, worth every risk.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Your Grace, the correspondence from Cornwall has arrived.”
Jenkins, the butler at Rhys’s London townhouse, stood in the doorway of the study with a silver tray bearing a small stack of letters. His expression was carefully neutral, as it had been for the three weeks since Rhys had returned to London with instructions that any communication from Hartfell was to be brought to him immediately, regardless of the hour or circumstance.
Rhys set aside the parliamentary report he had been reviewing and reached for the letters with an eagerness he did not bother to disguise. There was no point in pretending indifference; the entire household staff had noticed the transformation in their employer, and Jenkins was far too experienced to be fooled by false composure.
“Thank you, Jenkins. That will be all.”
The butler withdrew with a slight bow, closing the door behind him. Rhys sorted through the letters quickly, identifying each by handwriting: there was one from Anna, written in the precise, measured script she had developed over months of practice: one from Viola, whose handwriting was still developing but whose letters contained drawings that compensated for any lack of verbal eloquence; one from Thistle, whose correspondence tended toward enthusiastic accounts of her latest scientific discoveries punctuated by creative spelling.
And one from Mel.
He saved hers for last, as he always did. The children’s letters were a joy, but Mel’s were something else entirely: brief, practical communications that nonetheless contained depths he had learned to read between the lines.
Anna’s letter was a detailed report on the household’s functioning in his absence. She had included a chart documenting various metrics she deemed important: meals served on time, lessons completed satisfactorily and behavioral incidents requiring intervention. She closed with a formal request for his consideration of several books she wished to add to the schoolroom library, complete with justifications for each selection.
