“I want you to know everything,” he said softly. “The parts I hid. The parts I feared. All of it.”
“I already know the essential parts,” she replied with a quiet smile. “But I shall gladly learn the rest.”
And in the warm light of the yellow parlour, with tea cooling forgotten beside them, it felt less like courtship and more like something steadier.
Something enduring.
***
The tour of the estate occupied most of the afternoon.
Christian proved a far more animated guide than Fiona might have expected. He showed her the old mill, wheregenerations of Thornwick wheat had been ground into flour; the tenant farms, where sturdy families worked land their forebears had tended for centuries; and the folly on the eastern ridge—a crumbling stone tower erected by some long-departed ancestor for reasons no one now remembered.
He knew the name of every tenant, though many of them knew him more by reputation than by sight. He knew the age of every building, the origin of each odd curve in the hedgerows and each stubborn dip in the fields. He spoke of drainage systems and crop rotation with a quiet intensity usually reserved for matters of Parliament or bloodstock—knowledge gathered through years of steward’s reports, careful observation, and long rides across the estate taken when the fields were empty of their workers.
And throughout it all, he found reasons—transparent, unnecessary reasons—to keep her close. A hand at her back while descending a slope. Fingers laced through hers when the path narrowed. His arm offered even when the ground was perfectly level.
As though he needed the reassurance of her presence.
Fiona found it almost unbearably dear.
“You love this place,” she said at last, as they stood upon the eastern ridge and looked down at the castle below. The afternoon sun had broken through the lingering cloud, turning grey stone to silver and shadow to gold. “Despite everything. Despite what it represents. You love Thornwick.”
“It is my home.” He spoke without flourish. “The only place that has ever felt… mine. The walls know my shape. The land knows my tread. Here, at least, I do not have to pretend to be anything other than what I am.”
“And what is that?”
“A man doing his best.” The corner of his mouth curved faintly. “Whatever that means.”
She leaned lightly against his shoulder. “It means a man who knows his people by name. Who has poured himself into this land when he believed himself worth very little. It means someone steady. Someone good.” Her voice softened. “Someone worth loving, Christian. Whether you credit it or not.”
He turned toward her.
The struggle in his eyes was not theatrical—it was ingrained. The reflex of doubt honed over the years.
“I am trying,” he admitted quietly. “To believe that I deserve this. That I deserve you. But the old arguments are… persistent.”
“Then I shall be more so.”
She rose onto her toes and kissed him—soft, unhurried, certain.
“Whenever those arguments begin,” she murmured against his lips, “I will answer them. I will be very tiresome about it. I will remind you precisely what I see: a man who endured crueltyand did not become cruel in return. A man who protects what is his. A man who feels deeply, even when it frightens him.”
He made a small sound—half laugh, half something dangerously close to breaking—and gathered her into his arms, pressing his face briefly into her hair.
“I do not deserve you,” he murmured.
“Fortunately,” she replied, wrapping her arms about him, “that is no longer the deciding factor.”
He huffed a breath that might almost have been a laugh.
They stood there for a long while, wind moving through the winter grass, the castle below them bathed in late light. The world felt, for once, expansive rather than oppressive.
Not a prison.
A beginning.
***
