She was wearing a green dress and she was as vivid against the blue sky as a sail.
She’d cast off mourning.
Which is precisely what his heart did in that moment. And his heart felt like the sail on the fastest, sweetest cutter of all.
In case he was hallucinating—not that he’d ever dare taste any of Delacorte’s wares—he walked slowly, slowly toward her, fighting the wind. If she was a vision, he wanted it to last as long as possible.
Her eyes were filled with tears, but her face was filled with light.
“I cannot bear the loss ofyou,” she said. She dashed at her eyes with a knuckle.
“And I cannot bear thinking of you needing tobearanything. When you could be where you are wanted and loved.”
He didn’t dare come closer.
Not yet.
“I never told you why I wanted you, Tristan. Because the reasons that I want you are the reasons that I love you.”
He scarcely dared breathe.
“I was afraid to say them aloud because I was so afraid to be hurt. Or to lose you. And then it seemed my fears came to pass. And so I lashed out. And I lied. Because I love you.”
He took another step closer. Only one. His impulse was to make this easier for her, but she needed to do this for herself.
“I love you because here you are standing patiently, and you are waiting for me to speak because youwantto hear what I have to say because what I say and think matters to you. Because you have a tender heart, whether you know it or not, and a magnificently tough hide. Because your soul is fathoms deep and you speak in poetry and you don’t even know it. And you’re sosureof yourself, which is maddening, but also such a relief because I have never known anyone so strong. I don’t want to need you, but I do. I do. You make everything better. And I don’t have a poem. But I love you.”
Those were the words.
The ones that opened an Aladdin’s cave of riches.
He was moving toward her now, as one moves toward light and air.
“I will make you happy, Tristan,” she vowed. Her voice broken. She was weeping now. “If only you’ll stay. Please don’t leave. Please don’t leave. Please don’t leav—”
He took a liberty: pulled her up against his body and stopped her words with a kiss.
He wrapped her tightly so she could feel safe. So she could feel every bit of his strength and know he was hers.
She clung to him.
And then he kissed her again, because she was Home and she was his.
Slowly, as though they both had all the time in the world.
He closed his eyes and did what he’d longed to do in the hall the day he’d first kissed her: he rested his cheek on the top of her head.
Epilogue
One month later...
“It is exactly as you described, sir,” Massey breathed, in pleasure.
He rotated in a slow circle in the drawing room at The Grand Palace on the Thames, taking in the worn settees and comfortable mismatched chairs filled with laughing people, the thick old rug that all but hugged one’s feet, the fire leaping in the fine old fireplace, before he abruptly, reflexively—the way he probably would the rest of his life—stopped to admire Mrs. Emily Massey sitting beside Mrs. Lucinda Farraday on the settee. Emily was radiant in a marigold silk, one of the things he’d bought for her with his share of the Blue Rock gang reward money. Emily was grateful for such a lovely dress, she’d told him, but all she really wanted was him.
“I ask you!” he’d said, awestruck, when he told Captain Hardy what she’d said. “Is any man luckier?”
Tristan was no more comfortable with sticky sentiment than he’d ever been. Happiness had made him no more verbose or more patient with fools. He wouldn’t debate the finer points of luck, given that he was certainhewas the luckiest man alive.