The word settled over her like warmth.
Aurelia drew in an unsteady breath. “Then, yes.”
He went very still.
“Yes?” he repeated, as though the word were too precious to trust at once.
She smiled through the bright blur in her eyes. “Yes. I will marry you.”
Owen’s hand came up, not quite touching her cheek, stopping just short as if even joy must ask permission. Aurelia leaned into that almost-touch. It was enough.
He bent his head. The kiss was brief, breathless, and wholly improper. It was over almost as soon as it began, no more than the soft meeting of lips in the sheltered edge of a ballroom, hidden by flowers and shadow and the mercy of a distracted crowd. Yet to Aurelia it felt as though the world, which had so long been arranged against her, had at last tilted toward happiness.
When he drew back, his forehead nearly rested against hers.
From somewhere behind them, Clara’s voice rose in delighted indignation. “Aurelia?”
Aurelia closed her eyes briefly. “We have been discovered.”
Owen straightened, though his hand remained near hers. “Then we had better prepare ourselves.”
“For Clara?”
“For everyone.”
Aurelia looked toward the ballroom, where the music had begun again and society continued to turn in bright, heedless circles. For once, the sight did not fill her with dread.
Let them look. Let them whisper.
She had come back for Clara. She had stayed for truth.
And now, impossibly, wonderfully, she had found love.
Epilogue
Four weeks later, on a morning softened by pale sunlight and the mild sweetness of early summer, Aurelia Finch was standing at the front of a small country church and found herself quite unable to comprehend that the life before her was, in fact, her own.
The church was not grand. It possessed no marble columns, no gilded altarpieces, no vast painted ceiling to impress the fashionable or intimidate the humble. Its beauty was gentler than that. The old stone walls held the coolness of morning, and the narrow windows admitted the light in slender shafts that fell across the worn flagstones and scattered over the gathered congregation.
Aurelia held herself very still. Her hand rested lightly in Owen’s, though she could feel the warmth of him even through her glove. That one point of contact steadied her more than any words could have done. He stood beside her, tall and grave and composed, his dark blond head bent slightly as the clergyman spoke. The morning light touched his profile, softening the strength of his features without lessening them, and Aurelia’s heart gave a small, helpless movement.
My husband.
Well, not yet, not quite, but in a few moments. The word waited before her like a threshold. She had once thought herself finished with thresholds.
When she had returned to England, she had expected whispers, not welcome. She had expected to guide Clara through her season and then retreat again into the smaller life allotted to women whose names carried too much history.
Yet the world had altered. No … the truth had altered it.
General Langley’s disgrace had spread through London with a speed no carriage could have matched. He was to remain imprisoned for a very long time. That was the phrase London used when it wished to speak plainly without sounding vulgar. As for Miss Charlotte Langley, she had quitted London under the convenient explanation of visiting relations in Paris. No one believed it. Everyone repeated it. The ton, with all its polished cruelty, understood perfectly that exile might sometimes travel in a handsome carriage and called itself family obligation.
And Aurelia’s poor, wronged mother and father had been vindicated. That thought, more than all the rest, pressed tears against Aurelia’s eyes even before the vows began. Lady Arabella Finch’s name had been cleared publicly, thoroughly and undeniably. Aurelia wished her father could have seen it.
Owen’s thumb moved once, gently, against her hand. She looked at him. He did not turn his head, yet somehow he knew. He always seemed to know when memory had touched her too deeply.
“Aurelia Finch,” the clergyman said.
Aurelia drew a breath. Owen turned toward her fully then. For a moment, the church, the guests, the light, even the solemn voice before them softened into indistinctness. She saw only him. She spoke her vows in a voice that trembled only once. Owen’s hand closed more securely around hers when it did.
