Page 57

"No—"

"You stayed because of Marian and then because of Reeve, and now there is nothing keeping you here except obligation, and I will not be any man's obligation. Not again. I have known enough of people who stay out of duty and leave the moment duty ends."

She was crying. Not the way she'd cried in the kitchen over Marian, quietly, wiping the tears away as fast as they fell. This was worse. Her face was crumbling and she was trying to hold it together and failing, and the words kept coming as though she'd rehearsed them, as though she'd been lying awake composing this speech for days, preparing herself for the moment he walked through the door with that look on his face.

"My mother kept me the way one keeps a doll on a shelf, something too fragile to use and too expensive to throw away." She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and her chin came up and her voice steadied into a dignity that he’d always admired. "I will not be kept. If you are leaving, then leave. I have the house and the tunnel and the orchard and I will manage perfectly well, and I wish you every happiness, and I am asking you, please, to go now before I—"

Her voice broke. She pressed both hands over her face and stood in the drawing room with tears running through her fingers and could not finish.

He crossed the room.

She dropped her hands and raised her chin and set her jaw and looked at him with wet, furious, devastated eyes. She was ready to be brave about it, ready to stand upright and watch him go. He took her hands and held them and said it before the courage left him.

"I want my freedom. I want to see the world. I want to live as a free man." He brought her knuckles to his mouth. "With you. All of it with you. Every road and every ruin for the rest of my life. If you'll have me."

She stared at him. Her lips parted and her hands were shaking in his and for five full seconds she didn't breathe. He watched her face cycle through disbelief and confusion and a wild, unguarded hope she was clearly trying to suppress in case it turned out to be cruel.

"You are not leaving," she said.

"No."

"You are asking me—"

"Yes."

"To marry you."

"If you'll have me. A man with no name, no title, no fortune, and a past that would—"

She kissed him. Hard and clumsy and tasting of salt, her hands pulling free of his to grab his face, his jaw, the back of his neck, dragging him down to her. The kiss was wet and graceless, and she was laughing into his mouth and crying at the same time. He caught her and held her and kissed her back and felt something in his chest crack open, a door that had been nailed shut for thirty years.

"Yes," she said against his lips. "Yes. I will marry you."

"I hadn’t asked properly."

"You were taking too long."

He laughed. It came out raw and cracked and he pulled her tighter against him and pressed his face into her hair and breathed. He closed his eyes and held on and let the feeling settle into him, heavy and warm and permanent, the opposite of everything he'd ever known.

"I have nothing to offer you," he said into her hair.

"You have hands that can mend a house and cook and tend a wound. You have a knife and a horse and a tunnel that generates income. You have an alarming number of criminal contacts. You have me, and you have a home." She pulled back and looked at him, and her face was blotched and wet and luminous. "That is not nothing."

"Audrey."

"What?"

"I love you."

He hadn't planned to say it. The words arrived the way his best instincts always did, whole and certain, without rehearsal. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened and for once in her life she had nothing to say. He watched her try, her lips forming and abandoning three different responses, and then she gave up and kissed him again, slower this time, deeper, her hands sliding from his neck to his chest and resting there, over the brand, over his heart.

When she pulled back, she was still crying. Happy tears now, though the distinction was impossible to make from the outside. She wiped her face on his shirt, which made him chuckle.

"Kit."

"Hm."

"No more secrets."