“Again.”
“I love you, Mary. I love you, and I am staying, and I am never going to be my father, because my father never had you.”
She pulled back and kissed him.
The kiss tasted of salt and dawn and the sweet, clean relief of two people who had finally stopped running from each other. Evander’s hand slid into her hair, and Mary’s arms circled his neck, and the nursery held them both in the golden morning light, and Tommy slept, and the trunk of baby clothes sat open on the floor, and the world outside the windows woke to a day that was, for the first time in seven weeks, not defined by distance.
Mary pulled back. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, her smile incandescent.
“Take me to your room,” she said.
Evander looked at her. The woman in the cotton nightgown, standing in a nursery at dawn, with tears on her face and a baby’s gown in her hand, asking for everything he had been too afraid to give.
He took her hand and led her down the corridor.
CHAPTER 34
“Your hands are shaking.”
Mary closed the door behind her. Evander’s fingers trembled at his sides. She watched him curl them into fists and uncurl them, and the trembling did not stop.
“I know,” he said.
Mary moved closer to him. The morning light had grown warmer, spilling through the window and softening the room around them. She took his hands in hers and turned them palm up, feeling the strength in them, the restraint, the faint tension he had not yet let go. Her thumbs moved slowly over his wrists, gentle circles meant to soothe what words had not yet reached.
“The last time I was in this room,” she said, “I told you I could not do this. Not as an arrangement.”
“I remember.”
“This is not an arrangement.”
“No.” Evander’s voice was rough. “This is not an arrangement.”
Mary lifted his hand and pressed it against her cheek. His palm was warm, his fingers unsteady, and she turned her face into his touch and closed her eyes and let herself feel the weight of what was finally happening. His hand against her skin. His breath, shallow and quick. The tension in his body, not the old tension of control and distance, but something new. The tension of a man standing at the edge of something he wanted so badly that wanting itself had become a kind of fear.
She opened her eyes. Evander’s face was close, his gaze dark and open, and the rigid composure he wore like armor had dissolved entirely. What remained was the man beneath it. Vulnerable. Present. Hers.
“I am going to kiss you now,” she said. “And I am not going to stop.”
She kissed him. Slowly. Her mouth found his with a tenderness that made him exhale against her lips, a long, shuddering breath that carried the last of his resistance out of his body. His hands came up and cradled her face, the trembling steadier now, and he kissed her back with a gentleness that ached.
Mary’s fingers found the buttons of his waistcoat. She worked them open one by one, her knuckles grazing the linen of his shirt beneath, and Evander stood still and let her. The patience of it. The surrender. This was the man who controlled every aspect ofhis life, who managed a duchy and a scandal and a household with the precision of a military campaign, and he stood in the golden light and let his wife undress him, button by button, with hands that were steady even when his were not.
The waistcoat fell. Mary pushed it from his shoulders, and it dropped to the carpet behind him. She tugged his shirt free from his trousers and gathered the fabric in her fists and pulled it over his head, and Evander raised his arms to help, and the shirt joined the waistcoat on the floor.
She had seen him shirtless once before. In the kitchen, bleeding, the firelight moving across his skin while she cleaned a knife wound at three in the morning. She had allowed herself one second to look.
Now she took longer.
The scar beneath his collarbone, the one she had wanted to ask about and never had. The ridge of muscle across his stomach. The breadth of his shoulders, which she had felt through wool and linen but never touched. She pressed her palms flat against his chest, and his heartbeat kicked against her hands, hard and fast, and the heat of his skin soaked through her fingers and spread up her arms.
“Your turn,” Evander murmured.
His fingers found the ribbon at the neck of her nightgown. He untied it with a deliberation that made her breath catch, and the neckline loosened, and the cotton slipped an inch down hershoulder. He traced the exposed skin with his fingertips, feather-light, following the line of her collarbone from her throat to the curve of her shoulder, and Mary’s eyes fluttered closed.
“Look at me,” he said.
She opened her eyes. Evander’s gaze held hers as he eased the nightgown from her shoulders. The fabric slid down her arms, caught briefly at her waist, and fell. Mary stood before him in the morning light, bare and trembling, and the vulnerability of it should have terrified her.
