Completing her task, Pamela gathered up her basket and rose, brushing ineffectually at the muddied stains on her gardening gown. She wound her way through the maze of garden paths and was approaching the steps to the terrace when the sudden appearance of Ames, the butler, startled her.
“My lady, there is a caller,” he said stiffly.
“I am not at home, Ames,” she reminded him gently, since apparently he had forgotten.
She had no wish to endure yet another stilted visit from a polite acquaintance, wondering why she had not attended the latest ball, or offering the newest on-dits traveling through their set. It all seemed so very hollow to her. Instead, she preferred to devote herself to her drawing and, now that the weather had improved and spring had finally returned to London, her gardening as well.
“I advised such, however, the caller is insistent.” He bore a card on a salver, which he offered her.
Pamela stared at the card, heart thudding hard, the words swimming before her on that small white rectangle. She blinked, half-expecting it to disappear. Or for the letters to take a different shape and prove her wrong. And yet there they were, crisp and undeniable.
Wonderful and terrifying.
For a moment, she wasn’t able to force her mind to form any thought of coherent sense. She even forgot her own name.
After four months, here in London? But how could it be? The papers had said nothing of a royal visit.
What was he doing here? What did it mean?
Pamela wetted her lips. “Surely you are mistaken, Ames. Is this some manner of jest?”
“No jest, Lady Deering.” The butler’s countenance remained as somber and unreadable as ever.
She looked down at her ruined gown and muddied fingers, dismay sinking some of the tentative hope welling within her. Of all the days she had decided to eschew gloves, why this one?
“Where is he?” she asked past a tongue that had gone numb.
“In the drawing room, my lady,” Ames intoned.
With her basket still on her arm, Pamela gathered her skirts and rushed past the butler, through the door leading into the main hall. She looked a fright. She was most certainly not in any state to greet a king.
A king.
Her feet tripped over themselves and she nearly fell in her haste and shock.
Theo had returned to her, just as he had promised. But she knew she didn’t dare hope he would keep all his promises.
She reached the drawing room, its door open, and found what could have been a stranger, his back to her as he paced down the Axminster, were not his form and figure so very familiar and beloved.
Pamela stopped, clutching her basket, muddied and damp and uncertain.
So very uncertain.
She took a deep breath as Theo turned, the tense lines of his expression softening as his hazel stare bored into hers.
“Pamela,” he said.
“Your Highness,” she managed, dipping into the poorest curtsy she had ever fashioned, bogged down as she was by her sodden skirts and basket and heavy heart.
They stared at each other, the distance between them suddenly so small after these lonely months, and yet, it may as well have been a vast sea.
“You were tending your herbs?” he asked softly.
As if he had not left her bed at dawn four long, painful months ago and successfully reclaimed his throne. As if he were not a monarch, dressed in fine black trousers and matching waistcoat and cravat and coat, his crisp white shirt a remonstration to her sad, dirt-bedecked morning gown. As if time and distance and stations did not separate them at all.
“Yes.” She swallowed hard against a rush of tears, summoning the courage to ask the question whose answer she feared most. “Why have you come?”
He was moving toward her now, taking long-limbed strides that brought him before her, near enough to touch. His hair had been trimmed, she noted, and his beard as well. He was as handsome and as beautiful as ever.
