“You are the bravest woman I have ever known,” he murmured against her collarbone. His hands eased the nightgown from her shoulders, and the fabric slid down her arms like water. “You walked into a crumbling building full of children and gave them the stars. You stood in front of a church and told your stepmother you were finished being small. You married a man who did not deserve you and somehow made him want to deserve you.”
His lips pressed to the curve of her shoulder. His fingers trailed down her arms, drawing the nightgown lower, and the cool air met her skin in a wave that made her shiver.
“Lucien.” Her voice came out unsteady.
“I am not finished.” He kissed the top of her shoulder, then the slope where her neck met her jaw. His breath was warm against her ear, and his voice dropped to something low and rough that vibrated through her. “I have spent months watching you across ballrooms, wanting to touch you and not being permitted. Watching you laugh with Annabelle, wanting to be the one making you laugh. Watching you teach children, wanting to sit at your feet and learn everything you know.”
The nightgown caught at her hips. He paused, his hands resting on the fabric, his forehead touching her temple.
“Every part of you,” he said. “I want to know every part of you. Not just this.” His thumb traced a circle against her hip through the cotton. “The way you frown when you are concentrating. The way you straighten your spectacles when you are nervous. The way you hold Newton when the world is too loud. I want all of it. I want the ordinary hours as much as this one.”
Elinor’s throat ached with the sweetness of it. She lifted her hands to his shirt and pulled it free from his trousers. Her fingers found the buttons, and she worked them loose one by one, her knuckles brushing his skin as she went. He held still for her, his breath shortening, his hands motionless on her hips.
She pushed the shirt from his shoulders. The firelight caught the planes of his chest, the lean muscle beneath his skin, and she pressed her palm flat against him the way she had on theirwedding day at the altar, feeling his heartbeat quicken under her touch.
“Tell me more,” she said. “Tell me what you want.”
His eyes darkened. He took her hand from his chest and lifted it to his mouth, kissing each fingertip, his gaze never leaving hers.
“You,” he said against her ring finger. “In every way you will let me have you. For every night we have left, which I intend to be a very long time.”
He eased the nightgown over her hips, and it fell to the carpet in a pool of white cotton. She stood before him bare except for the firelight, and the vulnerability of it should have frightened her, but it did not, because the way he looked at her was not hunger alone. It was reverence.
“Elinor.” Her name left his mouth like a prayer. He traced the line of her waist with his fingertips, barely touching, the same ghost-light contact he had used with the jasmine in an alcove that felt like another lifetime. “You are magnificent. Do you know that? Not beautiful. Magnificent. There is a difference, and you are the reason I learned it.”
She pulled him toward the bed. He followed, shedding his trousers, and when they lay down together the sheets were cool against her back and his body was warm above her. He braced himself on one arm and looked down at her, his free hand cradling her jaw, his thumb tracing her lower lip.
“I worship you,” he whispered. “Every stubborn, brilliant, star-obsessed inch of you. I worship the mind that corrected an earl’s orrery at twelve and the heart that snuck out of her house to teach orphans at twenty. I worship the woman who told me to stop pretending, because no one else in my life has ever cared enough to demand that I be real.”
His mouth found hers again, deep and slow, and his hand moved down her body with a deliberateness that made her back arch. He kissed her jaw, the pulse point beneath her ear, the hollow of her throat. His lips trailed lower, across her collarbone, along the swell of her breast, and Elinor’s fingers twisted in the sheets.
“Lucien.” She breathed his name, and the sound of it made him pause, his mouth against her skin, his breath ragged.
“Tell me,” he murmured. “Tell me what you want.”
She pulled him up to face her. She cradled his jaw in both hands, this man who had built a home for children and named it after her lesson, who had run through London to stop her wedding, who was trembling above her with the effort of going slowly because she had asked him to.
“You,” she said. “All of you. No walls. No pretending. Just us.”
His forehead pressed against hers. Their breathing matched. His hand slid to her hip, and she opened to him. Elinor reached between them, guiding him into her. When he slid into her slick tunnel, he felt a resistance before he filled her.
Lucien lifted his head. “Have I hurt you?”
In response, Elinor lifted her hips and allowed him full entry. She cried out at the sensation but didn’t pull away. Instead, she wrapped her legs around his waist and arched against him, tightening herself along his length.
The tight grip of her body was almost too much to bear. “Elinor, I love you.”
“Then show me how much,” she whispered, gazing up from under her lashes. Her neck and pert breasts were flushed pink.
Her words consumed him, and he held her tight as he thrust into her. She met him thrust for thrust, and when he released, he felt her body shudder with his as he spilled inside of her.
“I love you.”
Lucien said it against her hair, his arm curved around her waist, her back pressed against his chest. The fire had burned down to embers. The room held the warmth of a space that contained two people who had stopped holding anything back.
Elinor turned in his arms. Her spectacles were on the nightstand, and without them his face was soft at the edges, but his eyes were clear. Green and warm and fixed on her withthe expression she had once mistaken for performance and now recognized as the truest thing about him.
“I love you,” she said back. “I love you, and I am going to say it every day, because we wasted too many days not saying it.”