Dominic reached out and drew him close. Thomas came without hesitation, fitting against his side as though he had always belonged there. Dominic held him tightly—no longer mistaking distance for protection, no longer confusing restraint with strength.
“I will fight for you,” he said. His voice broke, and he let it. “I will speak to your grandparents. I will tell them what you need. I will tell them that Rovewood is your home. That I am—that I wish to be—”
He faltered.
The word stood before him—immense, irrevocable.
Thomas looked up at him, hope written plainly across his face.
“I want to be your father,” Dominic said. “Not merely your guardian. Not your caretaker. Your father—if you will have me.”
Thomas’s face crumpled—not in sorrow, but in the sudden, overwhelming release of a child who had been holding his breath for far too long.
He flung his arms around Dominic’s neck, clinging with surprising strength. Dominic held him just as tightly. Between them, the compass swung, its needle pointing steadily north while everything else in the world shifted into place.
“I’ll have you,” Thomas whispered. “I chose you ages ago. You just took a very long time to notice.”
Dominic laughed—a rough, startled sound, so unfamiliar it seemed to belong to someone else. He pressed his face into Thomas’s hair and let the tears come, unhidden and unrestrained.
He was finished with hiding. Finished with freezing. Finished with mistaking armour for survival.
“We should go back,” he said at last, when the moment loosened its hold and the cold began to press through their coats. “Miss Weston will be frantic.”
“She’ll be furious.”
“Also that.”
Thomas pulled back and studied him with an expression that was, under the circumstances, entirely too pleased.
“Are you going to tell her you’re sorry?”
“Profusely.”
“And that you love her?”
The directness of children—brutal and perfect.
“Yes,” Dominic said. “That as well.”
Thomas nodded, satisfied, slid from the bench, and held out his hand—small, cold, steady. Dominic took it.
They walked down the hill together, the folly receding behind them, the grey shape of Rovewood rising ahead, and the compass swinging lightly against Thomas’s chest, pointing—at last—home.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“We need to talk about Thomas.”
James Harding looked up from the writing desk in the blue guest room, where he had been composing a letter. His expression, as it settled on Dominic, was measured—the quiet appraisal of a man long accustomed to reading others and adjusting himself accordingly.
“Yes,” James said. “I believe we do.”
Margaret sat by the window, her embroidery lying idle in her lap, her eyes still red. She had been weeping since Thomas’s return from the folly—not the restrained tears of their first meeting, but the unguarded grief of a grandmother who had watched her grandson come back holding the Duke’s hand, his small face set with a fierce, luminous resolve that was somehow more difficult to bear than his flight.
Because resolve meant the boy had chosen.
And he had not chosen them.
Dominic remained for a moment in the doorway, acutely aware that he had never, in all his adult life, willingly entered a conversation he knew would cause him pain. Such moments had always been imposed upon him—by commanding officers, by solicitors, by a governess who wielded truth like a blade and refused him the comfort of retreat.
