“Let me say this.” Lord Brimsey held up a hand. “I have watched you today with my daughter, with this wonderful boy. And I have seen something that gives me hope.” He paused. “Marriage can begin in many ways. Some begin with love. Some begin with necessity. But what matters is not where you start. It is where you choose to go.”
Edward felt the words settle into his chest, heavy with meaning.
“I spent thirty years loving a woman I did not deserve.” Lord Brimsey smiled at his wife. “And every day, I chose to try to be worthy of her. That is all any of us can do. Choose, every day, to show up. To try. To love.”
Lady Brimsey reached over and took her husband’s hand. Oliver watched with wide eyes, absorbing the moment without fully understanding it.
Edward looked at Sophia. She was staring at her plate, her cheeks flushed, her fingers tight around her fork.
“To family.” Lord Brimsey raised his glass higher. “And to the courage to build something worth keeping.”
They drank. The conversation resumed. But Edward could not shake the feeling that something had shifted, some wall had cracked, some truth had been spoken that he could not unhear.
Choose, every day, to show up. To try.
To love.
Was he brave enough to make that choice?
The household retired early, exhausted from travel and emotion.
Edward stood at the window of his guest chamber, staring out at the moonlit gardens. The manor was quiet around him, the country silence so different from the constant noise of London.
He thought of Lord Brimsey’s words. Of Sophia’s flushed cheeks. Of the way she had looked at him across the dinner table, uncertain and hopeful and guarded all at once.
He thought of his confession in her chambers. The desire he had admitted to. The wall he had thrown up between them the moment the words left his mouth.
He thought of Oliver, nestled against Lord Brimsey in the drawing room, listening to stories about Sophia as a child. The boy had fallen asleep with a smile on his face, surrounded by people who loved him simply for existing.
This was what family could be. What it should be.
And Sophia had given it to them. Had orchestrated this visit, had pushed him to connect with Oliver, had opened doors he had not known were closed.
Edward turned from the window. His gaze fell on the door that connected his chamber to the one next door.
Sophia’s chamber.
His feet carried him across the room before he could think better of it. His hand rose to knock.
He hesitated, his knuckles hovering an inch from the wood.
What was he doing? What did he intend to say? That her father’s words had broken something open inside him? That he wanted to stop running, stop hiding, stop pretending that this marriage was nothing more than a convenient arrangement?
He knocked.
The sound echoed in the quiet room. Edward waited, his heart pounding against his ribs, his breath caught in his throat.
He heard movement on the other side. Soft footsteps approaching.
The door opened.
CHAPTER 31
“Is everything all right?” Sophia asked, standing in the doorway with her heart hammering against her ribs.
Edward filled the frame of the connecting door, and for a moment, she forgot how to breathe.
His shirt hung untucked, the linen parted at the collar to reveal the strong column of his throat and a glimpse of the chest beneath. Candlelight played across the planes of his face, catching the sharp line of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders, the way the fabric stretched across muscles earned through years of violence in dockside taverns.
