He stopped a pace away.
Close enough that she could see the pulse at his throat, the faint tremor in his jaw, the rawness around his eyes that spoke of something she had rarely seen from him outside the most private moments.
“I said something today,” he went on, quieter now. “Before the Hardings. I said it because it needed to be said—because I was fighting for Thomas, because the moment required it. But I said it to the wrong people first.” He drew a breath, uneven. “I should have come to you. Before anything else. Before the conditions. Before the agreement. Before any of it. I should have come here. I should have said…”
Lorraine held his gaze. Steady. Waiting.
“Said what?” she asked.
He did not look away.
“I love you.”
The words were nothing like the ones he had spoken before the Hardings—no structure, no composure, no distance. This was the private version. Unsteady. Unarmoured.
“I love you, Lorraine. I have for longer than I knew what to call it.”
“Dominic—”
Her breath caught.
“I told them I intend to marry you,” he continued. “That was not strategy. It was not convenience. It was the truth. But I should have said it to you first.”
He reached for her hands—hesitated only a fraction, then took them—and held on.
“I am saying it now.”
His grip tightened, just slightly.
“Marry me.”
His voice broke. “Not because Thomas needs a mother—he does, but that isn’t why. Not because the household requires a mistress, or society expects a duchess, or because it is the honourable thing to do after I have compromised you beyond all repair.” He lifted his gaze to hers, and the grey was luminous—bright with tears he made no effort to conceal. “Marry me because I need you. Because I am alive for the first time in four years, and you are the reason, and I cannot—I will not—go back to what I was. I need you.”
The tears came. She did not try to stop them. They fell quietly as the man she loved stood before her—undone, unguarded—and offered her everything she had long ago taught herself not to want.
“I am a governess,” she whispered. “I have a scandal. Theton—”
“I do not care about theton.” The words came sharp and certain. “I do not care about society, or propriety, or what anyone may choose to whisper. I care about you. About the woman who walked into my frozen house and refused to leave. Who held a child through his nightmares and a broken man through his. Who called me a coward because I needed to hear it—and loved me anyway.”
She looked at him—really looked. At the scar at his brow. At the mouth she knew too well. At the eyes that had once been ice and were now, at last, entirely and irrevocably thawed.
She saw the boy in the portrait.
And she saw the man who had fought his way back to her.
“Yes,” she said, the word breaking into something like laughter. “Yes, you impossible man. Yes.”
The change in him was immediate—light breaking through, sudden and fierce. He smiled, not the restrained echo she had learned to coax from him, but something wholly unguarded, almost boyish in its brightness.
He drew her into his arms and held her with a force that was less possession than relief.
“Say it again,” he murmured into her hair. “Please.”
“Yes.” She clung to him, laughing through tears. “Yes. As often as you require it.”
“I expect I shall require it frequently.”
He drew back just enough to look at her, and something in his expression stilled her—something quieter than desire, steadier. Something like peace.
