Careful. Reverent.
The touch undid me more than the gunshot had.
“I should have come for you,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I should have believed what I saw with my own eyes instead of what I was told.”
“Yes.”
“I should have told you that the first night I caught you in that ballroom, I said ours because for one insane second, holding you, I looked at a complete stranger and thought, there you are.”
My breath caught.
He kept going, because once men like Roman start telling the truth, they either stop entirely or they drown in it.
“I tried to turn you into a debt. Then into a responsibility. Then into a danger. And the whole time you were the only thing that made that house feel like it belonged to someone decent.”
I laughed through tears I no longer cared about hiding. “That’s a terrible speech.”
“I know.”
“You should keep going.”
His thumb brushed just beneath my eye.
“I love you, Sky Harding,” he said, voice low and steady and entirely past retreat. “I loved you in the garden before I admitted it. I loved you in the library while pretending to care about maps. I loved you when you hit me in the hallway. Possibly especially then.”
That shocked a laugh out of me.
“Your standards are alarming.”
“My standards are finally accurate.”
I took a shaky breath.
“There is something deeply unfair,” I said, “about falling in love with the man who kidnapped me.”
His face changed instantly, pain flashing there. “Sky, if that truth is too ugly to live with—”
I put my hand flat on his chest.
His heart was hammering.
“I’m not done.”
He stopped.
