She couldn’t let herself think it. Couldn’t let hope kindle when she’d spent the past week ruthlessly smothering every spark.
But he was moving now, striding through the crowd with a singular purpose that sent whispers rippling in his wake. Guests scrambled aside, their shocked faces turning to follow his progress. The orchestra faltered again, this time losing the melody entirely before struggling to recover.
He was coming toward her.
Heaven help her, he was coming straight toward her, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything except stand frozen as he closed the distance between them with steps that devoured the gleaming floor.
“Tobias!” His name tore from her throat before she could stop it—half gasp, half prayer. Her hand flew to her chest, where her heart threatened to beat straight through silk and skin. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Didn’t slow. Just kept advancing until he stood directly before her, close enough that she could see the rapid pulse at his throat, could catch the faint scent of night air and horses clinging to his clothes, could feel the heat of him even through layers of fabric and propriety.
Close enough to touch.
Close enough to destroy her completely.
“I’ve been a fool.”
His voice was rough, stripped of every careful modulation he usually employed. This was Tobias laid bare—no charm, no wit, nothing but devastating honesty that cut straight to the bone.
Gasps erupted around them. She heard Lady Pemberton’s scandalised cry, heard the whispers exploding like powder kegs across the ballroom. But none of it mattered. Nothing mattered except the man before her and the words falling from his lips like stones into still water.
“I told myself letting you go was noble. But there’s nothing noble about watching the woman you love marry another man.”
The woman you love.
The words struck like lightning, illuminating every dark corner where doubt had festered. Her lungs forgot how to function. Her knees threatened to give way. The entire world tilted sideways, and only his presence—solid and real and impossibly here—kept her from collapsing entirely.
“If you marry him, Amelia—” His hands clenched into fists at his sides, as though preventing himself from reaching for her required physical effort. “—I’ll will not survive it. It will kill me. Because he’d have what’s mine.”
“Tobias!” Shock warred with something dangerously close to joy. She should be horrified. Should be scandalised by his audacity, by the spectacle he was creating in front of half of London society.
Instead, her treacherous heart soared.
He stepped closer, until propriety ceased to exist, until there was nothing between them but charged air and months of denied longing. His eyes—those grey eyes that had haunted her dreams—burned with possession and desperation and terrible vulnerability.
“You’re mine in every way that matters.” His voice dropped, roughened by emotion that stripped him bare before London’s elite. “And I’m yours—though heaven knows I don’t deserve you.”
Her breath stuttered. Tears burned behind her eyes, blurring his beloved face into watercolour impressions.
“I love you, Amelia.” The confession emerged raw and absolute. “I’ve loved you from the moment you walked into my life and turned it upside down. From the first time you looked at me with those blue eyes and saw past every mask I’d constructed. From the moment Henry called me Papa and I realised I wanted nothing more than to be exactly that—to you, to him, to the family we could build together.”
The ballroom had gone utterly silent. Even the orchestra had abandoned all pretence of playing. Every eye fixed uponthem with avid fascination, witnessing what would undoubtedly become the scandal of the season.
Amelia couldn’t bring herself to care.
“So if you want me to leave,” Tobias continued, his voice breaking slightly, “say it. Tell me to go, and I’ll walk out that door and never return. I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what might have been if I’d fought harder, if I’d been braver, if I’d chosen love over honour. But I’ll do it if that’s what you truly want.”
He paused, chest heaving, every line of his body taut with desperate hope.
“But if you don’t?—”
He stopped. Waited.
The question hung between them like something infinitely fragile and utterly precious. Around them, London society held its collective breath. Somewhere to her left, she heard Ashbourne make a sound of protest, but it was distant, meaningless.
Her entire world had narrowed to the man before her.
To grey eyes burning with naked vulnerability.
