Afterward, in the churchyard, Lucien watched Elinor move among their guests. She crouched to accept Georgie’s drawing, the church beneath a sky of stars,Lyrawritten across it. She embraced Mrs. Neal, who wept without apology. She held Toby, who asked if she would come back to teach them, and shepromised she would, as often as she could, and this time it was a promise she could keep.
Joanna found her and pulled her into an embrace that held laughter and tears in equal measure. Lord Morland watched from his seat, content knowing that he had lived to see his daughter happy.
Dominic approached Lucien with two glasses.
“You look different,” Dominic said.
“Do I?”
“You look like a man who has stopped running.” He handed Lucien a glass. “It suits you.” They drank.
Across the churchyard, Annabelle was introducing herself to the children, her laughter carrying above the noise. She had not met Dominic. They had occupied the same church for an hour without crossing paths, Annabelle absorbed in the children, Dominic at Lucien’s side. But as Lucien watched, Annabelle glanced toward them, and for one moment her gaze caught on the man standing beside her brother.
The look lasted less than a second. Then Annabelle turned back to Toby, who was telling her about whales, and the moment passed.
Dominic sipped his drink. “Your sister seems spirited.”
“She is.”
“I look forward to being properly introduced, when the occasion allows.”
Lucien filed that away and said nothing.
“You are nervous.” Lucien’s voice came from the bedpost
Elinor stood in their chambers at Fairmont House, her hair loose around her shoulders, her spectacles set on the nightstand beside the celestial atlas she had carried from Morland House. She wore a nightgown of white cotton, simple and soft, and her bare feet pressed against the carpet. The fire was lit. The curtains were drawn. The house was quiet.
“I am not nervous,” she said.
Lucien watched her from where he leaned, his coat and cravat removed, his shirt open at the collar. He watched her with the focus he gave nothing else, the same focus she had felt in a schoolroom, in an alcove, in a corridor at Morland Hall.
“You are fiddling with your sleeve,” he said. “You do that when you are nervous.”
She released her sleeve. “You are too perceptive.”
“I have been told.” He pushed off the bedpost and crossed the room to her.
His hand found hers, and he lifted it, pressing his mouth to her knuckles the way he had done a hundred times before, at balls and breakfasts and parlor visits and a church altar. But this time, his lips lingered, and his eyes held hers above their joined hands, and the look in them was not the charming rake, not the careful duke, not the guarded man who feared vulnerability.
It was Lucien. Only Lucien. The man she had chosen and who had chosen her.
“We do not have to rush,” he murmured against her skin. “We have all night. We have every night, from now on.”
“I know.” She turned her hand in his and laced their fingers together. “I am not afraid, Lucien. I am just …” she paused, searching for the word. “I want to remember this. All of it. I want to be present for every moment.”
His free hand rose to her face. His thumb traced her cheekbone, the same path he had traced on a night when she wept against his chest in a corridor while her father slept.
“Then we go slowly,” he said. “And you tell me what you want. And I will give you everything.”
He kissed her. The kiss was unhurried, his mouth moving against hers with the patience of a man who had stoppedcounting seconds because time, at last, was on his side. Elinor’s hands found his chest, her palms flat against the warmth of him through the linen, and she felt his heartbeat beneath her fingers, steady and strong and hers.
He drew her closer. His hands moved to her waist, then to the ribbon at the neckline of her nightgown, and his fingers paused there, waiting.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He pulled the ribbon loose.
The cotton parted at her throat, and his mouth followed, pressing a kiss to the hollow between her collarbones. His lips were warm and unhurried, and Elinor’s head tipped back, her breath catching as his mouth moved lower, tracing the line of skin the fabric revealed.
