That she did not need him.
Foolishly, he was tempted to turn back before she saw him. But he had something that needed to be said. Something he must say.
He thought the wind might blow him over when he stepped out of the relative shelter of the path onto the bridge over the shallow river. He lowered his head so that he would not lose his hat. He was on the beach, plodding over the sand, when he finally looked up again. She had seen him. She was watching him approach, sitting quietly at the top of the rock, clasping her knees. It seemed to take forever to walk the rest of the way.
He looked up at her and grinned. “Stuck?” he asked. “Do you need rescuing?”
“No,” she said with all her characteristic quiet dignity, “thank you.”
And she moved from her place to descend the other side of the rock. It was far more scalable than the side by which he had approached, he saw when he walked around it. Even so, she descended at a pace that would have put a tortoise to sleep. He would have climbed up to be close enough to catch her if she slipped, but something told him that it would be entirely the wrong thing to do. Finally first one foot and then the other was on firm ground—or on shifting sand, at least. She turned and looked at him.
He opened his mouth to speak and discovered that he had no idea what he would say.
She made no move to help him.
They stared at each other.
And because his mind really was quite terrifyingly blank, he leaned forward and kissed her instead of talking. Her lips softened and pressed back lightly against his.
“Lauren,” he said.
“Kit.” After a few moments she rescued him. “Why are you here? Why have you come?”
The dampness in the air had turned to drizzle.
“To instruct you to hurry back to the house,” he said, “if you wish to listen to Kilbourne. To suggest the cottage as a closer destination if you prefer the advice of the countess.” He grinned again.
“Kit.” She frowned. “I did not want to see you again. I really did not.”
He swallowed and set a hand against the rock beyond her shoulder. He lowered his head and noticed idly that the sand was destroying the shine on his riding boots—and he had come without his valet.
“You are still here,” he said. “Still at Newbury.” He had braced himself for the possibility that she would already be gone.
“Only until tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I will be going to Bath to choose a house. I am going to live there.”
“Is that what you really want?” he asked.
“You know it is,” she said. “Kit, why have you come? Where is Lady Freyja?”
“Freyja?” He looked up at her with a frown. “At Lindsey Hall, I suppose. Why?” But he understood before she could answer. “There is nothing between Freyja and me, Lauren. There was once very briefly, but it was a long time ago. Now there is nothing. Nothing whatsoever and never will be.”
“Yet you suit,” she said.
“Do we?” He considered the matter. “Yes, I suppose there is a similarity. That does not mean we would suit. We would not. Did this misconception have anything to do with your breaking off our betrothal?”
“Of course not.” She sighed and leaned back against the rock. “It was all arranged even before I met Lady Freyja, remember? Kit, why are you here?”
“There is something I need to tell you,” he said. “Something I should have told you before you left Alvesley. Something you ought to know whatever you decide to do with the knowledge. Once I have told you, you have only to say the word, Lauren, and I will walk back along this beach and up to the cliff top and into the village and I will never trouble you again, never try to see you again. It is a promise.”
“Kit—”
He set one finger across her lips and looked into her eyes.
“I want to marry you,” he said. “I want it more than I have ever wanted anything else in my life. For many reasons. But only one of them really matters to me. It is the one I did not tell you of because it seemed somehow dishonorable after you had carried out your side of the bargain so sweetly and so well. I love you. That is it, you see, the part I omitted. Just that. I love you. I do not believe it can really hurt you to know. It lays no obligation on you. I just needed to say it. I’ll leave now if you wish.”
She said nothing, just pressed her head back harder against the rock and gazed at him with her lovely violet eyes. The drizzle was turning to light rain. It was running in droplets down her face. But it was not raindrops that were welling in her eyes.
“Tell me to go,” he whispered.
She started to say something and then swallowed. She tried again. “I do not need you, you know,” she said.
“I know.” His heart was down in his boots somewhere.
“I do not need anyone,” she said. “I can do this alone, this living business. All my life I have shaped myself into being what others expect me to be so that I will belong somewhere, be accepted somewhere, be loved by someone. When I knew I could not belong to Neville, I felt as if I had been cut adrift in the universe. I anchored myself by retreating into an even more rigid gentility. I don’t need to do any of that any longer. And I do have you to thank. But I don’t need you any longer, Kit. I am strong enough on my own.”
“Yes.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes again. “Yes, I know.”
“I am free, you see,” she said, “to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am free to love. That is why I love you, and it is the way I love you. If you have come here, Kit, because you think you owe me something, because you believe I might crumble without your protection, then go away again with my blessing and find happiness with someone else.”
“I love you,” he said again.
She gazed at him for a long time, her eyes still swimming in tears, and then she smiled, very slowly, and very, very radiantly.
He wrapped his arms about her waist, lifted her off her feet, and twirled her about in circles, while she braced her hands on his shoulders, flung her head back to expose her face to the rain, and laughed.
Kit whooped, and because the echo from the cliffs was so impressive, he threw back his head too and howled like a wolf.
Chapter 23
How is your grandmama?” “Busy setting out the family christening robes.” “Oh.”
“I am to marry you before Christmas, get you with child by Christmas, and be pacing the floors of Alvesley by this time next year, tearing out my hair in clumps and wearing out my boot leather while you deliver our first boy. Strict orders. Why do you think I really came? Just to tell you that I love you?”
“Foolish of me.”
By the time sanity had returned down on the beach, it was raining in earnest and they had linked hands and made a dash for the cottage. Lauren had thrown off her cloak and shoes—her bonnet and gloves, she remembered too late, were still wedged in somewhere at the foot of the great rock. She was rubbing her hair with a towel and watching Kit, minus his drab riding coat, stooping down on his haunches before the fireplace, building a fire with the wood and kindling beside it.
If this were a dream, she thought, she hoped she would not wake up for a long, long while—like the rest of her life.
“Have you read your mother’s letters?”
“Yes, all of them. She is not at all respectable, Kit. And that is a massive understatement. She sounds so delightful that my heart aches. But you may want to think twice about allying yourself with her daughter.”
“Ah,” he said, reaching for the tinderbox and setting a light to the fire, “that explains a few things. It was her daughter, I believe, who swam naked in the lake at Alvesley, almost casting me into a fit of the vapors and drowning me. It was her daughter who came after me on one occasion to spend the night alone with me in the gamekeeper’s hut. Perhaps she is too shockingly fast for me.”