Neither one of them could say a word.
Everything had been said.
And then a hack rolled into view, and Marchand hailed it.
He helped the driver load her trunk and valise, and then he turned to her.
“Ask your mother for a sign,” he said shortly.
“I will,” she promised.
“I love you. Godspeed, Guinevere.”
He kissed her mouth, swiftly and hard. Heedless of who might see.
(Gordon the cat and the driver of the hack were the only ones who did.)
And for one final time, he closed the hack door.
It took Guinevere Woodville away from him.
Marchand sank down on the little bench in the park and closed his eyes. He tipped his head back and let the rising sun touch his lids, his throat. All of it felt gentle on his raw spirit: the little park, the breeze, the cat winding around his ankles. The birds starting up their songs.
He wanted a home like this.
All along he’d thought St. Giles had prepared him only for a life in hells. When really, viewed from another angle, with one twist of the kaleidoscope, it had prepared him for the heaven that was loving Guinevere Woodville.
He’d learned that he didn’t need to keep climbing up those ladder rungs forever.
Loving and being loved was all the distance he needed from his past in St. Giles. It was everything he’d needed for so long.
His soul was downright bruised from the infinite stretching it had done lately. But he’d long ago learned that love and pain lived hand in hand, and the privilege of loving was worth any price. Michael had taught him that.
It wasn’t that he had no fear of what might happen next.
But he was at peace.
Because he knew Ginny was a gambler at heart.
He’d already set their forever in motion. It would be ready when she came to claim it. To claim him.
What she didn’t know was that he held one final card. He’d refused to play it, even though he was certain it was the winning one. Even though it might have kept her here.
Because that wasn’t the way he wanted to win.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ginny made the final leg of her journey back to the Woodville house in a horse-drawn cart, courtesy of a neighbor who’d seen her disembark at the coaching inn. He left her and her trunks at the foot of her drive, by her request. She stood and stared at her home, a grand pile of pale gray stone, soft and worn and well-loved as the sitting room at the Grand Palace on the Thames.
But her heart, which had ached with a near unendurability the entirety of the trip home, at last lifted a little. Even though she could see William nibbling on the flowers around the fountain.
How would she feel if she was never welcome within its walls ever again?
It was her brother’s home, in truth; it was her brother’s prerogative to decide who would be welcome within its walls. She could not imagine him shunning her. After all, he’d offered to work for Marchand.
She walked up the drive, her valise bumping against her leg.
The door of the house burst open.
