Page 85 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

“That is a weak word,” he admitted. “Call it adoration. Call it—rapture. I am completely borne away by you, Inez. I do not exist when you are not with me.”

“Do not exist?” she murmured. Her heart fancied itself a balloon again, rising, swelling, dancing on air. Her ribs ached with the effort to constrain it. She gripped his fingers all the more firmly. “That is perhaps coming it too strong⁠—”

“Jock would say I am rushing my fences,” Joseph admitted. “After only a week together, in truth. But in that week, Inez, I have discovered myself. I finally feel I know who I am.” He pulled their clasped hands to his chest, above his heart, which she could not feel beating through all the layers of fabric, but wanted to fancy she could.

“I am not ashamed of the man I am, when I am with you. It’s a change I welcome. I feel stronger. Better. Bolder. And more…” He groped for the word.

He was going to say something about lust. No, she begged silently, let lust not be what drew and bound him. Let desire not be the sum total of his regard for her. Lust was what her mother’s patrons came to relieve themselves of in that tiny, cramped room. Lust was what earned the ladies of Dark Lane their keep.

She wanted the force that had made Amaranthe Illingworth take the leap from being a vicar’s daughter to a duchess. She wanted what had drawn her father back to them, every time, and what had pulled her mother across land and sea to be with her beloved.

“I have been searching for a companion,” Joseph said, looking into her eyes, and she saw his heart there. “God knows it was above all what I wanted. I looked in all the wrong places, of course.”

Inez nodded. He had. And all the while she was right beneath his nose⁠—

“And all while you were right there,” he said. “In my house. I knew the first time you entered the room where I sat…”

He leaned back on his heels. She leaned forward. She remembered that moment when she had first beheld Joseph Illingworth in his study, bent over his books, that lock of unruly hair falling across his brow, his coat hung over the chair and his shirtsleeves rolled up and his fingers stained with ink as he scrambled to take notes at the speed with which his mind moved. She had fallen under his spell in that moment, and she had never even tried to escape.

“I remember I was reading Priestley,” Joseph said. “I babbled something at you about it. And you simply nodded and listened and did not tell you to be off with myself.”

“You’d discovered something,” she murmured. “You were delighted.”

He nodded. “And then you appeared. And I looked at you, with your kerchief about you and you holding that tray with tea and biscuits and listening to me natter about Priestley’s theories of mind, and I thought—insofar I was thinking of anything—I thought, ‘This is the kind of woman the Stoics admire.’”

“A servant?” she cried. “A maid who will bring you tea while you labor? When you never—” She punctuated this speech with small blows of their clasped hands against his chest, giving vent to her feelings— “paid—any—attention to me⁠—”

“Inez! I could not approach a woman under the roof of my household. In the employ of my sister?” He looked incredulous. Shocked, the dear, besotted, supremely aggravating man. “That is what Reuben did. I vowed never to be like him.”

“You tell me this now?” she cried, and communicated her spleen by punching him again with their clasped fists. She wanted to kiss him, but her mind stumbled over his words. “You approached me that night after Wigsby—that night in your home. And on the road, when we were traveling. I was under your protection then, too. You said it many a time, to every innkeep and publican.”

“That first night, I knew I was leaving, so you could not be forced to oblige me. You invited me of your free will, I recall.” His gaze on her heated, and Inez blushed. She recalled, only too well.

“And the next day. I told you to return to London. You didn’t. You returned just in time to stage a rescue, and after that—” He shrugged. “After that, I knew marriage would be the end of it, if you would relent on your feelings about the matrimonial state and have me.”

“You oaf!” Inez cried and clobbered him again. “You never told me that!”

“I thought I did!” he exclaimed. “With my words, and with my body. I cannot—I do not—I would not have responded to you as I have, did I not love you already,” he said, and though he didn’t look at Pierre and Priscilla, who were watching them avidly, the blush on his cheeks said he was aware of their riveted spectatorship. “I am—it is the way I am built, I’m afraid.”

He’d never touched a woman before her. Never found his pleasure with a woman before her. Inez held that piece of him, all hers. All of him was hers, in whole.

She was the one he chose, the one he gave himself to in the most intimate of exchanges. The only one in the world with the privilege of being this close to him, and knowing his private ways. All the Susannah Pettigrews of the world could go trip themselves with their own garters.

“What a great deal of trouble you would have saved me,” she said softly, “if you had told me any of this a good while ago.”

“I thought it was obvious.” He had the grace to look abashed. “I sought you out for counsel. For company. I confided in you as I confided in no one but my sister. I thought surely you knew my heart.”

Inez sniffled, feeling emotion perilously close to breaking through her composure. That Stoical self-control that he so admired, being of that school of philosophy himself.

“I didn’t,” she said. “You must spell it out for me, scholar that you are.”

They stared into one another’s eyes. Inez squeezed his fingers to urge him on, and he returned a rueful smile.

“I see now why fellows write these speeches out beforehand, and study them,” he said. “I look at you and all but a handful of words fly out of my head.”

“Which ones remain?” she whispered, keeping on her eyes on his face as if he might disappear if she blinked.

He opened his mouth, then paused, as if groping for words.