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“You needn’t do that,” she said softly. “Surely a maid could.”

“I don’t want a maid.” He glanced back at her, the firelight catching the line of his bearded jaw, something quiet and certain glinting in his eyes. He pushed up his sleeves a bit more, revealing his muscular forearms.

“What do you want, then?” she asked.

“I want five minutes where it is only the two of us. How does that sound, Duchess?”

Laura fell silent at that and only smiled, watching him coax the flames higher.

Eventually, he rose and settled into the chair beside hers, close enough that their knees touched. He reached over and took her hand, his thumb tracing her knuckles as if memorizing their shape.

“I meant what I said tonight,” he told her. “Every word of it. I need you to hear it again, now that we’re home, now that there’s no carriage rattling under us and no fear left over from your father’s table clouding it. I am not waiting for an heir, Laura. I never was.”

“I think I know that now,” she murmured.

“And if it comes someday, because you want it to, because you’ve made your peace with it in your own time and in your own way, then I will love that child with everything in me. But I did not marry you for that. I did not fall in love with you for that. And I will not spend the rest of our life together making you feel as though your worth to me hinges on whether it happens.”

Laura’s eyes stung, and she let them, no longer feeling the need to hide it from him, or herself, the way she once might have. The shame of it all left with the words: I did not fall in love with you for that.

“I want to believe it. I think a part of me does,” she sighed.

“Then let me spend the rest of my life proving it.” His hand tightened around hers. “I know what your father is. I know the cruelty of a man who measures a daughter’s worth by what she can bring, whether it’s a favorable marriage or an heir or simply his own comfort. I grew up watching my own father do something not so different to Isabella, but dressed up in prettier language. I will not do that to you. I would rather renounce my title than watch you carry that fear alone for one more day.”

“It isn’t only the fear of dying,” Laura admitted, the words coming slower now. “Though that’s part of it.”

“Then what is it?” he asked. “Tell me so that we can face it together.”

“I don’t know how to want something simply because I want it, rather than because someone else has decided I’m meant to provide it.” She looked down at their joined hands, at the careful way his thumb kept moving over her skin.

“I know, Laura,” he said. “We have all the time in the world.”

“I don’t know yet what I want, where children are concerned. I only know that I want the choice to be mine. Truly mine. Not anyone else’s.”

“And it is yours,” he said simply. “It is your body; it was always meant to be yours.”

“Truly?”

“Yes, and I am only sorry that it took this long and an evening at your father’s table for me to say it.”

“Come here,” she said, and he did, rising from his chair to kneel before hers, much as he’d knelt before the fire.

She reached out and cupped his face in both hands, feeling his beard beneath her palms, the warmth of him steady and real and entirely hers.

I love you, Nathaniel. Entirely. However this marriage began, that’s the truth of where it’s brought me.

She didn’t say it out loud, but something in his hot gaze told her that he understood the air was changing between them.

Something broke open in his face, raw and unguarded in a way she’d rarely seen from him even in their most private moments, and he turned his head to press a reverent kiss to her palm.

“You don’t think me a beast then?” he asked roughly. “The way the rest of London does?”

“You are not a beast,” she said fiercely, her tears spilling over. “You have never been that. Not once since I met you.”

He kissed her on the lips, slow and soft and sweet, like coming home.

Laura immediately melted into him, her hands sliding into his hair. She closed her eyes to focus on the feeling before he rose and gathered her up from the chair.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he carried her the short distance to the bed. He laid her down gently and followed, bracing his weight on his forearms.