“You know,” she started with a shaky inhale, “I came into all of this having decided that men were not to be trusted. That I had been disappointed too many times and the wisest course was simply to expect nothing.”
She looked at their joined hands, staring at their joined fingers for a moment before she continued.
“I wrote those letters as Athena because I understood something about what it was to hope for something and receive something else entirely. And I had decided I was finished hoping.” She looked up at him. “You changed that. Not all at once – you were, in fact, rather aggravating about the whole process –”
He made a sound that might have been agreement, and she chuckled.
“–but you showed me, without meaning to, what it looks like when a man actually loves the people in his life. The way you spoke of your sisters. The way you looked after Nora, even when you did not know I was watching. The way you argued with me as though my opinions were worth contesting.” She squeezed his hand. “You showed me more than you knew. And I do not intend to let that go.”
He was still for a moment, and then he brought her hand to his mouth.
“We will continue to grow together,” he said quietly, against her knuckles. “Into better people. Both of us.”
“Both of us,” she agreed.
He kissed her then – softly, in the afternoon light of the sunroom with the garden outside and the wine on the tray between them – and it was unhurried and tender and entirely unlike the fraught, breathless kisses that had come before, and she thought that this, perhaps, was what the rest of her life would feel like.
When he drew back, his eyes were dark and somehow still held immense warmth in them, and his hand moved from her jaw down her side, slow and deliberate, until she understood his intention and shifted closer to him on the blanket.
“Let me,” he said quietly. “Just this. Let me give you this.”
His fingers found her through the layers of her skirt, and she gasped softly at the first touch, a sound that dissolved immediately into the quiet of the room. He watched her face as he moved against her – attentive, unhurried, using all he had learned from their time together to make her breath catch, to make her press her forehead to his shoulder and clutch at the fabric of his coat.
“Look at me,” he murmured, and she lifted her head and met his eyes, and the intimacy of it – his gaze and attention fixed on her while he touched her – sent heat rushing through her from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.
“Cecil,” she breathed, arching into his touch.
“I have you,” he said, his voice steady and certain and entirely present. “I have you.”
She held on to him as the pleasure built – her fingers twisted in his lapel, her breath coming in small, uneven fragments – and when it crested, she pressed her face into the curve of his neck, and he held her through all of it, his free hand warm and firm at her back, his lips at her temple.
“I love you,” he said softly, while the last tremors moved through her. “I love you, Penelope.”
She came back to herself slowly, still tucked against him, his arms around her, keeping her snug and cosy.
“I love you too,” she murmured. And felt him press a kiss to her hair.
EPILOGUE
The church was full of flowers.
Penelope had not quite anticipated this. She had chosen them carefully – white roses and soft cream peonies, exactly as she had eventually decided after the great catalogue debate of three weeks prior – but seeing them now, banked along every pew and wound through the arch above the doors and gathered at the altar in arrangements that filled the whole space with their scent, was rather different from seeing them on a page.
“You are going to trip,” Lionel said from beside her.
She looked down at her feet and discovered she had, in fact, stopped walking entirely, which in the circumstances – standing at the top of the aisle, waiting for the doors to open – was perhaps wise. She exhaled shakily and tried to focus on her brother.
“I am not going to trip,” she said. “I was simply looking at the flowers.”
“You have been looking at the flowers for the past four minutes,” Lionel replied, with the fond patience of a man who had spent a lifetime managing her. “And in a moment, the doors are going to open, so I would suggest redirecting your attention to the matter at hand.”
Penelope looked at her brother, studying him closely. Lionel had gotten a new coat for the occasion – dark, perfectly cut, with a buttonhole of small white roses that matched hers – and his expression was the particular combination of warm and amused that she associated most deeply with the wordhome.
“They would have been proud of you,” he said quietly.
The words landed softly, the way the truest things tended to. She felt her throat tighten.
“Do you think so?” she managed, lifting her eyes to his.
