Page 102 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Annabelle’s eyes had gone bright.
“I have carried that image for twenty-three years,” he said. “I have never once walked back into that room to find out whether I could survive it. I arranged my life in every available direction to ensure I would not have to.” He looked at her. “And then I stepped inside this morning, and my legs were not going to hold steadily. I could not get enough air.”
He paused. “I thought…I thought of you,” he said. “The night in the library—your hand on my chest, the way you counted my breathing without counting aloud. How you stayed. You did not make anything of it. You simply stayed and felt my heartbeat and matched your own breathing to mine, and I followed without meaning to.” He looked at his hands. “I followed it again this morning, from memory. Your breathing. The weight of your hand.”
He saw the way she pressed her lips together, and the desperation started pulsing like lifeblood through him.
“I stayed until my legs held properly,” he said. “Until the image had moved back to where I could see it without it being the only thing I could see. Then I sat on the bench and I raised the fallboard.”
He took a step toward her. “Instead of his hands, I saw hers. My mother’s hands. Her long fingers, the way she sat at that piano—back straight, she always said it was mechanics rather than manners, that you breathe better upright. The way she tilted her head when a piece went right.” His voice did not break. He had determined it was not going to break. “I played three notes and I remembered her, and she was not the way she died. She was herself.”
Annabelle’s eyes had filled. She did not look away.
“You were right,” he said. “You have been right about this from the beginning, and I knew it, and I did what I have always done with things I know and cannot bear to act on: I argued with youinstead.” He took another step. “I have spent years telling myself that distance was responsible. That if I did not love anyone too much, I would not have to be afraid of what I might inherit from him. That I was protecting you from whatever I might do with a feeling I hadn’t learned to carry safely.” He stopped. “It was not protection. It was fear wearing the clothes of restraint, and I let it govern everything.”
She was very still, her arms at her sides, her eyes holding his.
“Pushing you away was the worst thing I have done in recent memory,” he said. “And I have done a number of things I am not proud of.”
Her breath went out through her nose. The corner of her mouth moved in the way it did when she was fighting something back.
“You brought warmth into this house,” he said. “James laughs differently than he did before you came. He talks differently. He walked into that music room today and sat down at that piano bench without hesitation, and that is not something I gave him.” He held her gaze. “When you are absent, this house is colder. I am colder. I do not know when I last wanted something for myself rather than in the management of obligation, and then you came, and I wanted everything, and I had no idea what to do with that.”
She was not going to speak until he finished. He could see it in her—the deliberate decision to hear all of it.
“I want a family,” he said. “I want what James deserves, which is a home rather than a well-run house. I want to be better than what I have been, and I have spent a long time believing that wanting things for myself was a luxury I had forfeited.” He was close to her now—close enough to see her clearly, the brightness in her eyes, the set of her mouth. “I love you. I have been in love with you for long enough that I cannot locate where it began. I am not telling you this as a bid for anything. I am telling you because I have been silent about it in every way that mattered, and I am done.”
She held him in her gaze for a moment. Then she said, “You hurt me.” Her voice was even. True.
“I know,” he said.
“You saw what I felt and you kept choosing to step away from it. Every time. As though my loving you was a problem you were managing.” The line between her brows deepened. “I have never felt lonelier than in this house, loving you.”
“I know that,” he said. “I am sorry. I am sorry for all of it.”
“If you mean this—” She stopped. Started again. “If you are truly ready to let me in. Not in the ways you can manage or the ways you’ve calculated are safe. All the way in.”
“Yes,” he said. “All the way.”
She looked at him the way she looked at things that required real reading, the particular directness of her that never hedged. Whatever she found, something in her face resolved.
“I love you,” she said. “I have tried extremely hard not to. It did not help at all.”
He crossed to her and kissed her.
It was not careful. He was done with careful—careful had cost him months and whatever interim of her patience it had consumed—and he kissed her with his whole attention committed, his hands coming up to her face. She kissed him back at the same register, both hands gripping the lapels of his coat.
He pulled back just enough to look at her. She looked back, her face two inches from his, and the nearness of it required a different kind of seeing than ordinary distance. Then she kissed him again, and his arms went around her, and he stopped looking and started learning.
Her hands moved from his coat to his waist. She walked him backward, step by step, until his shoulders met the wall beside the window, and he let her, and brought his hands up through the layers of her dress and felt the shape of her beneath them.
He reached for the pins in her hair and worked them free, setting them on the side table by feel. When the last pin came out, and her hair came down, he ran his hand through it once, unhurried, and she tipped her head back against his palm.
She was at his cravat. The knot gave on the second try, and the cloth came away, and her hands moved to the buttons of his waistcoat with the focus she brought to things she wanted done correctly.
“Are you certain?” he asked, too eager, too desperate, too wanton to make it a proper question.
She stopped with her fingers at the third button, looking up at him. “Are you asking me or yourself?”
