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She came apart around him with his name on her lips, and this time, when he followed her only moments later, he did not pull away in panic as he once had. He stayed, buried deep within her, his forehead pressed to hers as they both caught their breath, and when he finally did withdraw, it was only to gather her close against his chest, tucking her head beneath his chin with a tenderness that made her throat tighten with unexpected emotion.

“Stay,” she whispered, though he had given her no indication he intended otherwise.

“Always,” he promised, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I am not going anywhere, Anna. Not tonight, not ever again.”

She believed him. For the first time since the whole strange, unlikely beginning of their marriage, she believed him entirely, and she found herself thinking, as sleep began to pull gently at the edges of her awareness, of how far they had travelled from that first terrible night – the blindfold, the accusation, the cold study and the colder proposal that had followed it. She had never imagined, standing in his study that first evening demanding to know what manner of monster had taken her, that she would one day lie in his arms feeling safer, more entirely known, than she had ever felt with anyone else in her life.

Perhaps that was simply the nature of love, she thought drowsily – that it arrived so rarely by the paths one expected, and so often through the very disasters one most feared. She would have to remember to tell Edith as much, once the dust of tonight’s revelations had properly settled. Love comes when we least expect it, she thought, and very nearly laughed aloud at the thought of writing such a sentimental notion into a letter, though she suspected, drifting further into sleep with Hudson’s steady heartbeat beneath her ear, that she had never meant anything more sincerely in her whole life.

She fell asleep in his arms with a peace she had not known she was still waiting to feel.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Anna woke slowly, warm and thoroughly content in a way that took her a moment to place, until the steady rise and fall of Hudson’s chest beneath her cheek reminded her of exactly where she lay, and why.

She allowed herself several long minutes simply to exist within the quiet pleasure of it – the weight of his arm draped protectively across her waist, the soft morning light filtering through the curtains, the lingering warmth of everything they had confessed to one another only hours before. It felt, she thought, rather like waking into an entirely different life than the one she had fallen asleep dreading only days ago.

She thought of the past year, of all the nights she had lain awake in this very bed imagining what it might feel like to wake beside him properly, only to abandon the fantasy each time as foolish, impractical, a hope she had no business entertaining given the terms of their arrangement. She had told herself, eventually, that she had stopped wishing for it entirely. She realized now, lying here with the reality finally come to pass, how thoroughly she had been lying to herself.

“You are thinking rather loudly,” Hudson murmured, his voice rough with sleep, one eye cracking open to regard her.

“Am I?” Anna asked, propping herself up slightly to look at him properly. “I did not realize thoughts made a sound.”

“Yours seem to,” he said, a lazy smile tugging at his mouth as his hand traced idle patterns along her bare shoulder. “You have worn that particular expression since the moment I woke. Reflective. A little startled, as though you cannot quite believe your own good fortune.”

“Perhaps I cannot,” Anna admitted. “It still feels rather like a dream I might wake from at any moment, only to find myself back in that empty bed, waiting for a husband who never comes.”

“You will not wake from this one,” Hudson assured, drawing her closer. “I intend to remain rather stubbornly real, for the whole of our lives together.”

“What occupies you so thoroughly this morning?” he asked again when she said nothing further.

“I was thinking of us,” Anna replied. “Of how differently I imagined this morning might unfold, only a week past.”

Hudson’s expression sobered slightly, though the warmth in his eyes did not dim. “I am sorry for how long it took me to arrive here. I wasted a great deal of time we might have spent happier, had I been braver sooner.”

“We arrived when we were meant to,” Anna said, surprising herself with how easily the forgiveness came. “I do not think either of us was truly ready before now. Not you, still carrying your stepmother’s poison without anyone to share the weight of it, and not I, still too frightened of being hurt again to risk wanting anything from you beyond casual civility.”

“You are remarkably generous, for a woman I once tried to bribe into leaving the country,” Hudson said dryly.

“I have always had excellent judgment of character, despite that unfortunate first impression,” Anna stated, laughing when he pulled her back down against his chest in mock affront.

“All that matters now,” he told her, pressing a kiss to her hair, “is that you are with us. With me. I intend to spend a great deal of time proving myself worthy of having stayed.”

“You need not prove anything,” Anna said softly. “You are here. That is enough.”

“It is not enough for me,” Hudson said, more seriously now, tilting her chin up so their eyes met. “I spent a year believing that providing for you and the children from a distance was sufficient – that duty discharged from afar counted for something. I know now how little that accounted for, in the ways that mattered most. I do not intend to make that same mistake twice.”

“Then we shall simply have to see that you do not,” Anna resolved, though she softened the words with a smile, tracing her fingers idly along his jaw. “Though I confess, I rather like the side of you I have discovered these past weeks. Rumpled and thoroughly outmaneuvered by an infant’s appetite for mashed pear.”

“That was an isolated incident,” Hudson said, with as much dignity as a man could muster while still tangled in bedsheets. “I was building trust with my son. There is strategy involved that you would not fully appreciate.”

“Is that what we are calling it?” Anna asked, laughing outright now, the sound warm and unguarded in a way that made something in Hudson’s chest ache pleasantly at the sight of her so at ease.

“I shall endeavor to make it more than merely enough, regardless,” he claimed, once her laughter had subsided. “Starting with breakfast, if you are amenable. I find myself rather famished.”

They took breakfast in bed that morning, a small indulgence Anna had never permitted herself before, feeding each other bites of toast between lazy kisses until the whole affair grew rather more crumb-covered than either of them cared to admit to the maid who would eventually have to launder the sheets. Afterward, they dressed and made their way together to the nursery, where Timothy greeted his father with a delighted shriek and Lucy regarded them both with a look of mild disapproval, as though she resented them for leaving her to sleep the excitement the household had clearly experienced overnight.

“She knows,” Hudson noted solemnly, watching his daughter’s unimpressed expression. “She knows something happened, and she is furious to have missed it.”