“I love you,” he choked out.
The words trembled into being between them.
Seven. There were seven freckles at the curve of her ripe-cherry mouth. He’d kissed every one.
“You love me,” she repeated. “That’s why you came with me? Not to help me find Matilda?”
“Not to help you find Matilda. Not because I think you wouldn’t have managed it on your own. I came because I couldn’t stop myself—because I wanted to fall asleep watching you and wake up to your voice. I came because you asked me to.”
She was blinking rapidly, and she opened her mouth, and he couldn’t bear to hear what she was going to say.
“I love you,” he said, his words coming faster. “That’s—oh hell, Margo. That’s why I do anything. That’s why I come to dinner at Number Twelve—just to watch you. That’s why I took riding lessons five years ago, like a child, because I wanted to keep up with you in the park, and the son of a pipe-fitter in London doesn’t grow up on horseback like an earl’s offspring.”
She blinked.
“I bring irises to Number Twelve because they’re the color of your eyes. I didn’t take the position with Chatham’s in Bath because I didn’t want to move—not if you were in London. I buy the fruit-sellers out of cherries all summer long because they make me think of you, and most of the time I think of nothing else.”
“Henry,” she whispered.
He wanted to keep babbling—perhaps if he never stopped talking, he would never have to hear her response. But his name on her lips silenced him.
She licked her lips. “Why didn’t you—why didn’t youtellme?”
This is why,he wanted to say. He had told her now—and the space between their bodies felt huge and uncrossable.
“There was no point to it,” he said. He shrugged, a short jerk of his shoulders. “What would have been the use? There was no future possible between us.”
She flinched. “Because I am a Halifax Hellion?”
“Because you—” Henry stared at her in consternation. He wanted to reach out and shake her, but he was afraid to touch her. “Are you sure you didn’t hit your head when you fell out of that tree? Not because ofyou,because ofme.Because you are a lady and I was a scholarship student at school who can barely afford the coal to heat my apartment.”
“Are you joking?” Color had risen to her cheeks. She was pink and freckled and streaked with mud, and he found a strange hot pleasure in the notion that he had made her so. She was so bloody beautiful and desirable that he almost lost the thread of the conversation.
“Not at all.”
She tilted her chin up. “If you truly think I would care about such things, Henry, then I find your declaration rather suspect. A stranger on the street who knew nothing more of me than what the scandal sheets print would know that I do not care about wealth or class or—”
“Icare,” he snapped. “I care, Margo! I have nothing to offer you, nothing at all beyond stupid pointless words. You are—the sun to me.” He swallowed. Years of habit wanted to force the words down, but he bit back his fear. “You are all the light and joy in the world, and I am good at nothing so much as watching you from a distance.”
“Bollocks,” she said.
He gaped at her. He poured out his heart, laid it on the ground for her to trod upon, and she said—
“I beg your pardon?”
“Bollocks,” she said again, and he supposed it wouldn’t be Margo if she didn’t catch him by surprise. “I think you’ve plenty of fancy words, Henry Mortimer, but you and I both know they aren’t true.” She shook her head, and a leaf fell from her hair and descended to the pebbled dirt. “You know perfectly well that you have something to offer me. You wouldn’t have come if you did not—you would have let me go alone. You wouldn’t have chased after me, over and over, if you’d thought you didn’t have something to give.”
He hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. He felt dizzied, rocked by her words and the sight of her there in the red glow of sunset. “I—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I think you’ve invented this lie about how you are so far below me to cover up the truth.”
His mouth felt dry. “And the truth is?”
“That you didn’t trust me.”
“I—” He wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Of course I trust you.”
“You don’t,” she said. “You don’t trust me to make a fair judgment of you. You invented a whole story in your mind and never gave me the chance to make my opinion heard. You never gave me the opportunity to know my mind, to have some say over what happened between us. If I had not forced the issue on this trip, we wouldstillbe dancing out of each other’s reach. We would never—”
