“This is mine,” she said quietly, her voice steady even as her body was not, her movements beginning in a slow, deliberate rhythm. “You are mine. Whatever happens. Whatever the law says. Whatever the Hardings decide.” She bent her head and pressed her lips to the scar at his brow. “I chose you. I am choosing you. And I will go on choosing you—until you tell me to stop.”
“I will never tell you to stop.”
“Then don’t.”
She moved again, and his hands closed at her waist, and the world beyond the candlelit room—the ship, the clock, the law, the future—fell away, leaving only this: the woman above him, moving with him, choosing him, refusing to release her hold.
They did not sleep until nearly dawn.
And when they did, it was tangled together in the narrow governess’s bed, his arms locked around her, her face pressed against his chest, both of them holding fast as though morning itself might try to take what the night had given.
It would. In time.
But not yet.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“There’s a carriage on the drive, miss.”
Jenny’s voice carried the breathless urgency of a woman delivering news she knew would detonate. Lorraine looked up from the letter she was composing—to Mrs Whitmore, a woman she had not written to in months—and felt the ground shift beneath her.
“A carriage.”
“A hired post-chaise. From York, by the look of it.” Jenny twisted her apron in her hands. “Mrs Potter thinks—”
“The Hardings.”
Jenny nodded.
Lorraine set down her pen. Her hand was steady. The rest of her was not.
Early. Two weeks early.
But the roads from Portsmouth were clear. January had been mild. And the universe, which had spent three months granting her an improbable happiness, had evidently decided to balance its accounts.
She rose. Smoothed her dress. Checked her reflection in the nursery window—governess composure intact, hair pinned, collar straight.
“Where is Thomas?”
“In the schoolroom, with his paints.”
“And His Grace?”
“In his study. Graves has gone to inform him.”
Lorraine closed her eyes for one breath. Then another. On the third, she opened them—and became Miss Weston.
“I will fetch Thomas. Ask Mrs Potter to prepare the blue guest rooms.”
She found Thomas cross-legged on the schoolroom floor, painting a winter wren with the focused intensity of a boy who had discovered that art might contain feelings too large for words. The compass lay beside his knee, as it always did. Captain, the wooden horse, stood sentinel upon the windowsill.
He looked up when she entered, and something in her face made his brush still mid-stroke.
“What is wrong?”
He reads me too well, she thought.He reads everyone too well.That was what became of children who learned early that survival depended upon reading the weather in the faces of others.
“Nothing is wrong, sweetheart.” She knelt beside him—bringing herself level with his gaze, close enough to reach if he needed her. “Your grandparents have arrived. The Hardings. They have come to meet you.”
