Page 107 of A Lady’s Guide to Mystery and Mischief

Farah led him to the bench, patting the spot beside her in invitation once she was seated. “I wanted so badly to tell you how I felt, you know. How I feel.”

Grey blinked, bewildered as he lowered himself beside her. “You did?”

“Yes!” she breathed. “I kept waiting for the perfect moment. And then when I realized that you loved me—”

“Sorry, when you realized what?”

She waved a hand in the air. “Don’t worry, it was only a few hours ago. Anyway, when I realized that, I wondered what you were waiting for.”

“I wanted to at least attempt to create the magic you’ve been seeking,” he said, wincing as a lantern went out in the morning breeze.

“I could not have pictured anything more magical or perfect,” Farah murmured, turning her attention to the garden.

Grey followed suit. It was as if her mere presence made him see the perfection in it—the gently swaying lanterns, the soft, misty light, the dewdrops clinging to the plants he so lovingly cared for. He didn’t know how he’d come to be here, sitting beside a woman who loved him, in the garden of a house that had been exorcised of its demons. He didn’t know how he’d gone from the Grey of many years ago, newly orphaned, caught in the cloud of his own grief, struggling to carve out a place for himself in a new, unforgiving world, to the Grey of today, who sat in a place that seemed far kinder than it had the day he had first arrived.

He broke the hush that had fallen over them. “You once told me I didn’t have to live on the periphery if I didn’t want to.”

“I remember,” she said, taking his arm. “And I remember promising to protect you if you ever decided to leave it.”

“It feels safer now,” he said, “to try to exist in the center of my own life instead of on the edges of it. Safer because of you.”

Farah smiled. “There’s nothing that needs hiding from anymore. I promise.”

They’d soon discover who Grey Montgomery was outside of the shadow of his past. He had an entire identity to explore now that he’d loosened his grip on the habits that had allowed him to survive. While they’d served their purpose, it had long been time for him to have let them go, something that would have been impossible had he continued to spend his life adrift.

Had Farah not invited herself into his office.

He bent his head toward her. “What are you thinking about?”

“How something that once felt like the end of my story feels very much like a beginning.”

“How do you mean?”

“I never thought about what would happen after I fell in love,” she explained. “And now—now I see so much stretching out in front of me.”

He had to know. “You intended on returning to Painswick, were you not?”

“Yes. Helena told me to do one thing for myself before summer’s end.”

“Is that right?”

Farah turned, her knees brushing his. “I wonder if you’ll do something for me, Grey.”

“Anything.”

*

The swiftness of his response warmed Farah to her very core. He really would do anything for her, wouldn’t he? Just as she would do anything for him.

She had spent years searching high and low for romance, believing she had to work twice as hard as everyone around her to see a lick of it in her own life. And yet—and yet it had found her in the one place she hadn’t thought to look. It had never occurred to her, all those weeks ago, that Grey was the man she’d been searching for. Around him, she’d been wholly herself. Around him, there had been no attempts to impress, no endeavor to draw love from him the way one might helplessly attempt to draw water from a stone. And, somehow, love had bloomed, unprompted and unforced.

But, despite her elation, the intense relief at knowing he loved her as much as she loved him, something nagged at the corner of her mind.

“Everything has always felt like a mad dash for me, somehow,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Even when life seemed terribly slow, I always felt that I was rushing toward something. I think what I would like is—is time.”

“Time?”

She nodded. “Yes, time. Not just for me, but for the both of us. I would like for things to go as slow as they possibly can. I don’t—I don’t want to feel as if I’m making yet another mad dash to the altar.”