Bess saw her words land. She saw the way his throat worked as he swallowed. She looked into his green-gray-blue eyes and saw the last three weeks—the last three decades—of using his body to mask his unhappiness. Of punishing himself for the sin of feeling too much. Of pushing himself past his limits in the search for ever-elusive peace.
But all that had to end now. They would find a new way, together.
Nathaniel nodded once, and that felt like a vow, too.
“I should never have left you in Little Kissington,” he said, his voice a painful whisper. Bess wanted to shush him, to save his poor ravaged throat, but he was determined. “I should have made sure you understood—Bess, you are everything. I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t welcome you with open arms. I will do everything in my power to give you the life you want, and damn anyone who doesn’t like it. That is the legacy I will leave behind, the highest honor I could imagine: to spend my life trying to make you happy.”
In his strained words, Bess heard the echo of the awful thing she’d said to end the conversation in the Five Mile House kitchen.
I could not be happy as your wife.
Shuddering with regret and relief and the raw, scraped-open feeling of having come within a hairsbreadth of losing everything, Bess dropped her forehead to his shoulder. He smelled of smoke.
“I’m sorry I sent you away,” she gasped out, clutching at him. “I was afraid that marrying me would ruin your life.”
“I’m afraid, too. Losing you nearly destroyed me.” He pressed the words into her hair. His hands were heavy on her back, holding her so closely their heartbeats seemed to merge. “But marrying you? Ah, Bess, that will be the making of me.”
She smiled helplessly into his chest. “I may always struggle to conquer my instinct to sacrifice my own happiness for others. The way I was raised, the world I come from—even just being a woman, all of those things embedded that instinct in me. To make peace instead of causing trouble. But maybe you can teach me to fight it.”
His hands flexed against her. “The way I taught you to throw a punch.”
“The way you taught me to see myself.” She lifted her head and met his eyes, the deep oceanic blue-green of hope. They flared when she said, “I love you, Nathaniel Lively, Duke of Ashbourn. Berserker.”
Bending down to kiss him tenderly, she murmured, “Husband.”
He groaned into her mouth and kissed her with a tender, possessive drive that made her feel claimed from her head to her toes.
This wasn’t a fairy tale, Bess knew. It wouldn’t always be easy, or pretty, or nice. Sometimes it would be messy. But she knew that this man would love her through all of it.
He would never waver or falter, because it was his mother who’d been right about him—Nathaniel felt…everything. He felt too much.
Except it could never be too much for Bess. She’d lived alone, untouched, unloved, for so many years; she eagerly soaked up every drop of Nathaniel’s intense, all-consuming love, and looked for more.
They were a perfect match.
The duke and the serving girl. Bess kissed him again, reveling in the hungry way he deepened the kiss, the way they fell into it together.
Maybe it was a bit of a fairy tale after all, she mused, smiling against his lips and feeling him smile in return.
Because Bess had every intention of living happily ever after.
Epilogue
Five Years Later…
Nathaniel strode through the front doors of Ashbourn House and felt, as he always did, the weight of cares slip from his shoulders the moment he stepped inside.
Tossing his hat and gloves onto a side table, Nathaniel breathed deeply of the air of quietly joyful serenity that permeated his home.
It was a marked contrast to the cheerful chaos of the home he’d just left—the Augusta Lively Home for Orphaned Children.
Set in the Wiltshire countryside not far from Little Kissington, the Augusta Lively Home comprised a large, comfortable manor house on spacious grounds with plenty of room for small humans to explore, run, and play.
When Parliament finally voted against Nathaniel’s proposal for the government to resume funding of the Foundling Hospital, it had been a crushing blow. But founding their own children’s home had given Nathaniel and Bess the freedom to organize and run it exactly as they wished.
Kindness and encouragement were the order of the day. Pragmatic instruction in skills that would help the children find jobs, balanced with plenty of time to roam the woods and fish in the stream, to build castles of imagination and simply be children.
The Augusta Lively Home tolerated no unreasonable barriers to entry or prohibitive “morality” clauses. Anyone who needed help was welcome within her walls—and there were many who flocked to her, in hope and despair.
