“I shall have to consult the garden gnome. He is very particular about who is permitted to live on the premises. You may not meet his standards.”
“I shall bring references.”
“See that you do.” But her voice had gone unsteady now, the teasing thinning away, and for a moment she had to press her trembling lips together.
“Lucie,” he said, and this time there was nothing light in it at all. His thumb moved once more across her cheek. “Will you have me? Knowing all of it—knowing that there may be easier paths, simpler choices, that the world will not make it easy for us—will you have me?”
She looked up at him, and the tears stood bright and unshed in her eyes. “Kazrian.” Her hands came up and rested against his chest. “My heart has only ever been yours.”
She gripped the front of his coat, stood on tiptoe, and rose to meet him. Her mouth was soft and warm under his, and he bent to her and gathered her closer, one hand sliding to the small of her back and the other rising to cradle the nape of her neck. She made a sound against his mouth—a small, breathless thing, half gasp and half relief—and the kiss deepened and turned and grew until there was no careful distance left anywhere in the whole of the world.
“Lucie,” he managed, pulling back just far enough to speak, his forehead against hers.
“Do not,” she whispered as her hands released his coat and came up to spread across the back of his neck, “say anything sensible.”
He kissed her again, slower this time, deeper, a thing with weight and warmth and all the aching tenderness of three years’ worth of wanting. Her hands slid back down to his chest and rested there, and he could feel the small, unsteady press of her palms against his racing heart.
When they finally drew apart, it was only because breathing had become a somewhat urgent necessity. She looked up at him. “In case I did not make myself clear,” she said breathlessly, “that was a ‘yes.’”
He laughed and pressed his mouth to her forehead and murmured, “You made yourself perfectly clear.” And her arms came around him, and they stood there for a moment in the soft glow of the balcony with the music drifting out from the ballroom and his heart so full he thought it might crack the rest of him open entirely.
Then he drew back and retrieved her mask from the table. “May I?” he asked, holding it up.
She turned, presenting the back of her head, and he settled the mask gently into place, his fingers carefully working the ribbons. When the knot was secure, he brought his lips to the curve of her shoulder once more. “My heart,” he whispered, and pressed a kiss there, “has only ever been yours too.”
The evening passed in a glittering cascade of music and light and the endless, breathless joy of being together in the midst of all of it.
They danced every dance. They danced the slow, sweeping waltzes and the quicker, brighter turns, and where her steps faltered, because she had far less practice at these dances than he did, he led her so surely and so steadily that she felt as though she had known every one. She felt as though she belonged. And none of it—not one single moment of it—felt anything less than extraordinary.
She was his. He was hers. And whatever came after this—whatever the whispers and the difficulties and the slow, stubborn inches of change yet to be won—none of it could touch this. None of it could undo the simple, shining fact of the two of them, standing together in a room full of light.
Then the music quieted and Lady Lelianna’s voice rose above the lowhum of voices. “Dearest guests, it is midnight! The hour has come! Masks off, if you please.”
A ripple of anticipation moved through the crowd. Laughter and murmurs and the rustle of silk as hands rose to ribbons and clasps. The enchantments laid into the masks would dissolve at the final stroke—borrowed faces fading, illusions falling away, the whole dazzling masquerade peeling back to reveal whoever had been underneath all along.
Kazrian turned to her.
His eyes searched hers, and in them was a question he did not need to speak aloud. Whether she wished to slip away before the masks came off, to keep the secret a little longer, to remain hidden behind the cream-and-gold filigree and the small golden honeybees at her temples.
Together, openly, and without apology.
His words. His letter. The promise she had held against her chest and read until the ink blurred before her eyes.
Her heart was pounding. It was, she would freely admit, rather terrifying. The thought of an entire ballroom turning to look at her and finding not a masked stranger in gold silk but Lucie Fields, confectioner, human, the girl from Elmrow Lane who had no earthly business standing in the middle of a Rowanwood ball with her hand in a lord’s.
But she did not want to hide any longer.
“Yes,” she said.
The first stroke of midnight rang out, deep and resonant, filling the ballroom from floor to vaulted ceiling. She reached for the ribbons herself this time. Her fingers found the knot at the back, and she pulled it loose. The second stroke sounded. The third. She felt the ribbons give, felt the mask loosen against her face, and her hands came forward, and his rose to meet them, and together—his fingers over hers—they drew the mask slowly away.
He held her gaze, and she smiled up at him, helplessly and entirely, and stars, how she wanted to kiss him again.
Around them, ribbons were untied and masks were lifted, and the room filled with the bright chaos of revelation—gasps and shrieks of laughter and delighted exclamations as people discovered who they had been dancing with, who they had been flirting with, who had been standing beside them the whole evening in an entirely different face.
The eleventh stroke.
The twelfth.
