I paused. “But that isn’t what stayed with me.”
The chapel remained very quiet around us.
“Your hands,” I said finally.
Geoffrey blinked once.
“The way you hold a quill.” My gaze dropped automatically toward his fingers resting against his knee. Ink still stained the edge of one thumb. “The expression you make when you’re reading something that changes your thinking. The sound of your boots in the corridor before dawn. The way you fold yourself onto freezing chapel floors because I’m sitting there and you’ve decided I shouldn’t be alone.”
A warmth moved slowly across his face so brief and unguarded it nearly undid me.
“That’s the after,” I whispered. “That’s what I’m doing after. None of that was in any textbook.”
I leaned my head lightly back against the stone wall behind us.
“I just wanted to sit with it for a while,” I admitted. “The war is over. The psalter is here. And I’m…” I laughed softly beneath my breath. “I’m home.”
Geoffrey reached over and took my hand. His fingers were warm despite the cold. We sat together on the chapel floor while the morning light climbed the narrow windows inch by inch and the psalter rested quietly on its lectern between us.
“I love you,” I said.
Geoffrey looked at me with that open expression I loved most.
“I know,” he said softly. “As I love you.”
Then he lifted his hand to my face. His thumb brushed slowly along my jaw before he tilted my face upward and kissed me.
Softly at first. The kind of kiss that understood exactly what had nearly been lost. His hand curved warm against my skin while the other settled carefully at my waist, drawing me closer without hurry, and some detached historian-shaped corner of my brain observed that Geoffrey de Warenne kissed exactly the way he approached diplomacy.
Focused. Patient and dangerously thorough.
When we finally pulled apart neither of us moved very far. His forehead rested against mine.
Outside the chapel, the castle had begun waking fully now. Somewhere, I could hear servants arguing over something involving barrels. The household accounts waiting in my solar remained unfinished. All of that could wait five more minutes.
“Thank you,” he said simply. “For staying.”
Emotion tightened unexpectedly in my chest. “You’re my home.”
A servant came to fetch Geoffrey to his father and Aldwin. He kissed me, then left as I lingered a moment longer in the chapel doorway looking back toward the psalter resting dark and silent inside its glass case.
“Thank you,” I told it quietly, because I was a historian. And I respected primary sources.
Twenty
HARPER
Epilogue
Three Years Later
Eleanor Sally de Warennebelieved puddles were among God’s greatest creations and by the age of three had developed a remarkable talent for finding them before any responsible adult could intervene.
“She has Geoffrey’s determination once she decides upon something,” I told Aldwin as Eleanor marched directly through a stretch of mud with absolute confidence in her own judgment. “No force on earth is moving her now.”
“She has your habit of ignoring practical advice,” Aldwin replied.
But there was no real severity in it. He stood beneath the apple trees watching his niece with one hand resting against the low stone wall beside the garden. Autumn sunlight caught in his dark hair while Eleanor crouched beside a puddle studying her own reflection with the concentration of a philosopher confronting the mysteries of existence.