by Lisa Cach
Her muscles quivering, it was all she could do to untuck her skirts and let them drop over her legs. To climb down from the rock was beyond her. She stood, swaying slightly in a gust of wind, unable to speak.
“Valerian,” he said at last.
“Nathaniel,” she whispered back, the sound carried away in the wind.
“You found the bracelet.”
She looked down at the links in her hand, then up at him again. “Oscar did, in the grass.”
His eyebrows rose, and he smiled slightly, walking forward. “Then he has for once done me a favor. I left it on the stone for you. The last storm must have washed it off.”
“You left it for me?” she repeated stupidly, her thoughts frozen in her mind.
He gave a self-conscious shrug, showing his first sign of uncertainty. “Perhaps I am not completely immune to superstition. I thought that if I left it, someday you might come back for it.”
Her mouth was dry, hope kindling to life in her breast.
He closed the remaining distance between them, looking up at her where she stood on the stone. “You see, it took me a long time to realize that you did not leave because you cared nothing for me.”
“No, it was never that. It was your family, Laetitia. . . .”
“It was more than any of that. Do you not even know yourself?”
She looked down at him, confused, unable to form a coherent thought with him standing beneath her, so close, after all this time and so many hours spent dreaming of him. Why else would she have left him, when it hurt her so badly, if not for Laetitia and his family?
He told her. “You never believed I could love you. You thought that someday I would come to my senses and see what a mistake I had made, and seek to be rid of you. You could not believe I wanted you, just as you are.”
“But you did not, not completely,” she protested. “You admitted as much.”
“I know I did. Like you, and like my family, I could not be sure that Laetitia was not an influence.” He wrapped his warm hands around her ankles, then smoothed his hands up her calves. “I know better now. The past is finished, Valerian. Laetitia is dead and buried, as is my part in that affair. It is you I am asking for, not a salve for a guilty conscience. We can be husband and wife, or we can be distant acquaintances, but nothing in between.”
“And your family?” she could not help but ask, remembering the bitter, angry face of his mother.
“This is our choice to make. Raven Hall is my home now. Make it yours.”
His hazel eyes were deep with emotion, unclouded by doubt or the shadows from his past. He was right, she knew: She had thought he could never truly love her. Had thought that no one could, beyond her parents and Aunt Theresa. She felt the cold shield she had worn around her heart split asunder, the broken halves melting in the heat of the emotion that welled forth.
“I do love you,” she said at last. “I always have.” She held out the bracelet that she had once so angrily rejected. “Will you help me with the clasp?”
She smiled as comprehension lit his eyes, and then she yelped as he pulled her down off the rock and into his arms, spinning with her in mad circles within the circle of stones. At last he stopped, and she tucked her face against his chest, her arms around his neck, feeling her world complete within this warm embrace.
“Ah, Lady Ravenall,” he said into her hair. “I love you, too.”
