Page 110 of Duke of Sapphire

“Ian, wait⁠—”

He was already gone, the drawing room door banging against the wall.

“They’re here!” he shouted down the corridor.

Charlotte sprang up and ran after him. Her skirts caught a little on the carpet.

Mr. Gedge will have apoplexy. Ian will be out of the house before the door is fully open.

She reached the hall as Mr. Gedge swung open the front door.

Ian tore outside and straight into his father’s arms.

Nathan caught him at once, lifting him off the ground. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, bearing the same deep, dark eyes and quiet intensity that Ian had inherited, though his features were now sharply weathered by weeks of hardship and exposure. “There ye are,” he said. He turned in a quick circle with the boy in his arms. “Look at ye. Ye’re twice the size ye were.”

Ian wrapped his arms around his neck. “Ye’re alive,” he said. “Ye’re really alive.”

Eleanor stepped closer. She was slender and pale-faced, with dark hair slipping from its pins around a travel-weary yet radiant face, her right arm lay in a sling against her body, but her left went around both of them at once, drawing them together in a fierce embrace.

“Me clever boy,” she said. “Let me look at you.”

Charlotte stopped in the doorway. Her fingers curled around the jamb.

They are real. Not ink in a letter. Not names spoken in a quiet room. Moving. Laughing. Holding him. He is theirs, and they are his.

Footsteps sounded behind her. Heavy. Quick.

Henry came up to her shoulder and went past her at once.

“Nathan,” he called.

Nathan set Ian on his feet and turned. His face broke into a wide grin. “Henry.”

The cousins clasped each other hard. Nathan slapped Henry’s shoulder. Charlotte saw their heads bend together for a moment and looked away.

They needed this. All of them. We have been living in a half-world, waiting for an answer that never came.

Henry moved to Eleanor. “Eleanor.”

She smiled. “Henry.”

He took her left hand, careful of the sling on the other arm, and bowed over it, kissing her knuckles. “You have cost me years of my life,” he said.

“I will repay ye somehow,” she said. “When I’m allowed to carry a tray again.”

A laugh caught in Charlotte’s throat. She swallowed it back and stepped down from the doorway when Henry turned toward her.

“This is my wife,” he said. “Charlotte. Duchess of Sappherton.”

Nathan stared. Eleanor’s brows rose.

Yes. That sounds as strange as it did the first time I heard it.

Nathan bowed, caught Charlotte’s hand, and kissed it. “Is the world endin’?” he asked. “How in the name of all sanity did Henry Kingswell get married?”

Charlotte’s lips curved. “He asked,” she said. “I answered.”

Henry made a small sound that might have been a cough. “It is a longer story than I intend to tell on the doorstep,” he said.