She was quiet for a moment. Ptolemy had migrated from her feet to the warm armchair Tristan had vacated, and was now arranging himself next to his mother.
“You do too much,” she said.
He turned from the window. “I beg your pardon?”
“For me.” She met his eyes steadily. “You spoil me. All of the private library visits you’ve arranged, and the riding lessons. Notto mention bringing in all of the cats, which I know you would never have done otherwise.”
He shrugged. “It is still cold outside.”
“Then this trip. I know you have planned it meticulously.” She stopped, because the warmth in her throat was becoming something more difficult to manage. “You do all of it for me.”
“Yes,” he said, with the mild inflection of a man confirming an obvious fact.
“I know why,” she said. “I told you, on our wedding day, that I had never been first. That I was the sixth daughter, and there was never enough left over by the time anyone got to me. And you heard it, and you—” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “You have been remedying it. Methodically. The way you do everything.”
He was watching her. With that way of his where he made her feel seen with a thoroughness that was simultaneously the most comfortable and most unnerving sensation she had experienced.
“It is too much,” she said quietly. “I am not fragile, Tristan. You don’t have to?—”
“Imogen.”
She stopped.
He cupped her cheek. “You think,” he said, “that I do these things for you.”
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “And no.” He sat beside her on the window seat. He locked his eyes on hers. “I do them because they make you—” He paused. “I do them because I get to watch your face when something pleases you. And I find that I am quite incapable of giving that up.”
She stared at him.
“I had not,” he said, “before you—known that I was capable of this. Of any of this,” he said. “I have always lived an orderly life that never brought with it many surprises or alterations.Until you.” He paused again. “I thought I was a man of moderate feeling. I had arranged my life on that basis. I had selected a wife on that basis.” His eyes did not move from hers. “And then you came down that aisle and spoke vows with me, and I have not been moderate since.”
She could not speak. She was not certain she was breathing.
“What I feel,” he said, “is not moderate. It is not—” He stopped, and she could see him searching, which he did not often do—he was not usually a man who searched for words, he simply had them, precisely the right ones, always. “It is not manageable, Imogen. It is not the kind of thing I can organize, structure, or keep in its proper column. It is—” He inhaled deeply.
“It is very large. It is the largest thing I have ever known in all of my thirty-two years. And the scholar at the British Museum, and the kittens, and bringing you tea every morning—” His voice was even, but only just. “I do not do those things only for you. I do them because they are the only available currency for something that has no other way of being expressed. Because what I feel for you is too—” He stopped. “I have todothings with it, Imogen. Or it has nowhere to go.”
She looked at him. And smiled. Because she knew all about that big feeling he was describing. “You love me,” she said.
Something moved through his face. The last of the careful, residual structure he had been maintaining came down. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yes,” he said. “I rather think I do. Though I would prefer,” he added, “if you did not inform Flynn. He will be insufferably pleased with himself.”
She laughed. And then, because it seemed the only possible response to a man who had just taken himself entirely apart in a library window seat, she put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.
He kissed her back without reservation, with his hands in her hair.
When she lifted her head, his eyes were open, watching her.
“I have been trying,” she said, “to find the correct moment to tell you something for rather longer than a week. Something other than our baby.”
He waited.
“I love you,” she said. “I suspect I have been falling in love with you since our wedding day.” She kept her hands at his face, her thumbs against his jaw. “I love you and all your meticulous plans. I love that you spoil me. I love that you whisper to the kittens when you think no one is watching.” She searched his face. “I love that you are not moderate. I love that you couldn’t be even when you tried.”
He was looking at her with the expression she had never found a word for. She found one now.