“Better?” Sebastian asked.
“I do not know. I feel—” She shook her head. “I scarcely know what I feel. It is all so much… and so sudden. An hour ago, I feared you might have forgotten me, and now—”
“Now you are engaged to be married to a duke.”
“Yes.” A breath of laughter escaped her. “It hardly seems possible.”
“It is possible. It is real.” He turned her gently towards him, his hands resting upon her shoulders. “Cecilia. Look at me.”
She did.
In the starlight, his grey eyes were softened, his expression unguarded in a way she had seldom seen. This was the true Sebastian—the man beneath the role, beneath the effort, beneath the careful composure.
“I love you,” he said quietly. “If you will allow it, I will spend my life proving it. I will be patient when you are uncertain; steadfast when you are afraid. Whatever you may require of me, I shall endeavour to be—for you are all that I require.”
“Sebastian—”
“You need not answer me now. You need not feel as I do—not yet. I wished only to speak plainly, so that you should never doubt what is in my heart.”
She reached up and touched his face.
“I love you too,” she whispered. “I have loved you since the moment you looked at me in that library and saw someone worth knowing. I loved you through those grey days apart, through every step that brought me here. And I love you now—here, beneath these stars—with the rest of our lives before us.”
He kissed her.
It was nothing like their first—no farewell in it, no grief. This was quieter, steadier. Not an ending, but a beginning.
When at last they parted, Cecilia was trembling—and not from the cold.
“We ought to go back inside,” she said reluctantly. “If we linger too long, people will talk.”
“People will talk regardless. They are doubtless already inventing opinions.” He took her hand, lifting it to his lips. “But you are right. We should return. There are congratulations to accept and well-wishers to thank and an entire evening of being stared at to endure.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It will be. But we shall endure it together.” He smiled—that real smile she had come to love. “Come, my future Duchess. Let us go face our public.”
They walked back toward the ballroom.
Behind them, upon the cold stones of the terrace, a single pearl lay gleaming in the starlight—fallen unseen from Cecilia’s necklace, waiting to be discovered.
But that discovery would come later.
For now, there was only this: two people, walking toward a future neither of them had dared to imagine.
A future they would build together.
A future that was just beginning.
Chapter Thirteen
They did not return to the ballroom at once.
Sebastian paused at the terrace doors, regarding her with an expression she could not quite read.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I am attempting to fix this moment in my mind. Before we go back inside and everything alters.”
