Page 45 of The Unlovable Lady

“You followed me,” she said. “Did you follow me?”

“I told you I should hope to finish a conversation,” he began. “I cannot wait for a better hour. There may not be a better hour, for I have learned that much of you. The room always sends for you before I have said the thing.”

“You need not finish it.” The words came out of her by reflex, quick and practiced. “Whatever was begun under the bough was the bough’s doing. A great many people stand beneath them at Christmas and mean nothing by it, do they not?”

“I meant something by it.” He spoke without heat and without retreat, and the plain truth of it stopped her where force would have failed. “And so did you. We shall neither of us stand in a borrowed library and pretend the mistletoe was to blame, for you are too honest for it and I am too tired of it.”

Her heart beat so hard that she thought he must surely hear it, and every word she possessed deserted her.

“I am going to say a thing now,” he went on, “and I should be glad if you would let me get to the end of it. I have been a long time coming to it, and I shall not manage it twice. Will you let me?”

The deflections waited behind her teeth, every one of them ready. You are kind, my lord. It is the season. I am sure you are mistaken in me. She heard them all and reached for none, setting the fan down upon the table instead, folding her hands, and giving him her silence.

“There was a dinner at Lady Marchwood’s, the first week of the Season,” he said. “You will not remember me at it. A dowager marchioness arrived three rungs above the whole order, and the table was a ruin, and no one would lift a hand to it. I had just told a friend that I kept my hands out of other people’s wreckage. Then you crossed the room and mended it in four minutes, and took nothing for it, and folded yourself back against the wall, content to be invisible.”

“That was only the table,” she said. “The seating only wanted...”

“You credit the table, when I am speaking of the woman who saw it needed saving while no one else would look at it.”

He came a step nearer, which he had never once done in the conservatory.

“I have spent two years working out what every woman in a room was after,” he said, “and I have always been right, and lonelier for it. With you there was nothing to find.”

“I did not know that anyone saw,” she whispered.

“I know. That is my whole point.” His voice came lower. “I noticed you at your plainest, Rosalind. Before any gown, before this Season caught up to what your family troubled themselves to overlook, before there was a soul in London who knew your face but me. In a gray gown made over with more sense than money, doing a kindness no one watched. There was no design in it then, and there has been none since, for you are quite unable to manufacture one. It is the first thing I trusted about you, and it remains the whole reason I trust you now.”

Her eyes burned, though she held his gaze. He had seen her then, before the gowns, before any of it, and he had gathered it up and kept it, all this while, when she believed herself invisible.

“Whatever you have been told you are, by whatever people, they were wrong,” he told her. “I have the proof of it, for I am the man who saw the proof and have never been able to unsee it.” He stopped, and when he went on, his voice dropped further still, and she could hear what the saying cost him. “I have watched men admire a woman across a season and drift away when the wind turned. I have been the man who watches and leaves. I am telling you that I shall not be that man with you. I have left a great many rooms in my life, Rosalind. I do not mean to leave this one.”

The library was very quiet. The party came muffled through the wall, Augusta’s voice reached them through the gap in the door, and the fire ticked low in the grate, while Rosalind stood with her hands folded and her heart going hard, her whole careful life standing between her and the thing she wanted to say.

He had given her the true thing first, the heaviest one he owned, and he stood now with his hands empty, asking nothing in return. She possessed one of her own, carried up a dark stair behind a candle and never once put out.

Now, she told herself. Say it now, before the old silence closes over you again.

“I have never said this to anyone living,” she began. “I do not know how it is done. I have spent my whole life making certain I never wanted a thing aloud, for a thing wanted aloud can be taken, and I have had a great deal taken.” Her voice trembled now, and she let it tremble. “So I am going to say it before I have weighed whether it is safe. You have made a habit of saying the true thing first, and it is my turn, and if I weigh it I shall lose my nerve.”

Then the words would not come. For a long moment they simply would not come, for eleven years of swallowing them had closed her throat against the very shape of them, and she pushed the words past it and felt them tear free.

“I love you, James.”

The confession came out rough, barely above the ticking of the fire, and having said it once, the rest came all at once and past stopping. “I have loved you since the conservatory, and I think before it, and I have been so afraid of loving you that I could not say it even to myself in the dark. There. It is said. You may do with it what you like.”

For a long moment he stood entirely still.

Then he closed the last of the distance, and he did it gently, as he did everything gently. His hand came up to the side of her face, warm in the warm candlelight, and her breath went out of her unsteadily, as it had beneath the bough, though this time it met nothing in the world but him. He kissed her.

It was the lightest thing, and still her breath caught. Warmth rushed into her face and down through her.

Her hands came up between them, found the front of his coat, and held on. They were not mending anything or steadying anyone. They were simply holding him.

When he drew away by an inch, no more, she stayed where she was. His forehead was near hers. For once, neither of them hurried to fill the silence.

“There,” he murmured at last, as he had said it in the green room. “You see. It does not break anything.”

“It might yet.” She had said that before as well, and it was truer now, and she said it anyway.