Their ship was somewhere at sea, drawing nearer with each passing day. And when they arrived, everything would change. Thomas’s future would be decided. And with it, hers.
What was she to Dominic?
A governess, a lover, a woman who had somehow stumbled into a life that didn’t belong to her?
And when the moment came—when choice could no longer be deferred—what would he choose?
She thought of him that morning, standing in the nursery doorway, watching her teach, smiling with the quiet, unguarded warmth of a man who had, at last, found something worth holding on to.
Choose us,she thought, fiercely and without sound.Choose this.
But some wishes could not be demanded. They could only be hoped for—quietly, desperately, in the silence between heartbeats.
***
That night, she went to him earlier than usual.
He was at his desk when she entered—writing, his brow drawn, lamplight warming the lines of his face. He looked up, and the change in him was immediate: focus giving way to something softer, deeper, unmistakable.
“You are early.”
“Thomas asked me today whether you love him.”
Dominic stilled. “What did you tell him?”
“The truth. That you care for him very much.” She crossed to him and seated herself lightly upon the edge of the desk, facing him. “He does not wish to go to India. He wishes to remain here. With us.”
“The Hardings—” he began.
“Are coming. I know.” Her voice softened, though it did not waver. “And I know we have not yet spoken of what happens then—of what becomes of any of this—and I am not asking you to decide it tonight. But Thomas must know that he has a place here. That this is not something fleeting. That he is not to lose another family.”
“Another family.” Dominic’s voice roughened. He reached for her hand, threading his fingers through hers, holding fast. “Is that what we are?”
“I do not know what we are,” she said quietly. “I only know what it feels like.”
“And what does it feel like?”
She lifted their joined hands and pressed her lips to his knuckles—a quiet echo of that earlier moment in the library, when he had first laid himself bare to her.
“Like home.”
Something shifted in his expression—not the sharp fracture of confession, nor the consuming heat of desire, but something deeper and steadier. A settling. A recognition. The look of a man who had wandered too long and had, at last, found where he belonged.
He rose and drew her from the desk into his arms, and kissed her—slowly, thoroughly, with a tenderness that still undid her. She yielded without thought, her hands finding the now-familiar lines of him, the strength and the scars alike.
“Stay,” he murmured against her lips—the word that had become their quiet ritual, their shared defiance against a world that would deny them this.
“Always,” she answered.
And in the amber glow of his chambers, with the wind low against the windows and the house settling softly around them, she allowed herself—for that moment—to believe it.
Chapter Eighteen
“When is the boy’s birthday?”
The question left Dominic’s mouth with all the casual authority of a duke inquiring after estate rents, and landed upon Mrs Potter’s kitchen table with the grace of a brick through a window.
The housekeeper looked up from her inventory of December provisions and regarded him with an expression he had come to recognise with unease: the careful, measured blankness of a woman selecting her words with precision.
