Clare wondered how he’d ever managed to go so long without her. Ten long years, with nothing but his memories to sustain him. It didn’t bear thinking of, not now that he’d seen her again. Not now that he knew she was free. That she’d been waiting for him all this time. His love. His Maggie.
“Is it the same as you remembered?” she asked.
He pulled a face. “Smaller.”
“It stands to reason. You’ve grown bigger, after all.” She lay back on his coat, her head resting just over the edge of the collar on a tuft of forget-me-not covered grass. “Do you remember us lying here together that day? Before it all went wrong?”
“How could I forget?” He was tempted to lie down next to her. In for a penny, in for a pound, wasn’t that how the saying went? But there had to be limits. Even for him. He cleared his throat. “Have you come here often down the years?”
“Too often for my own good.” She turned her head to look at him. The collar of his coat brushed her cheek. “I believe most of these wildflowers have been watered by my tears at one time or another.”
He took her hand. The thought of her weeping over him made his chest constrict. “That’s all over now.”
“Yes.” Her fingers curled around his.
“I thought of this place a good deal,” he said. “Especially in the beginning. I wanted to come back here again. To see if I’d feel the same.”
“Do you?”
He huffed a breath. “No.”
She lifted her brows.
“It was never this place that made me happy.” He brought her hand to his lips. “It was you.”
Her eyes glistened. Good lord, the way she looked at him. As if he were, indeed, as essential to her as light or air. Her soul mate. The other half of her heart.
It both electrified and humbled him. More than that, it filled up the emptiness inside him. Made the broken pieces of him whole.
She’d been right that day in Hyde Park. Neither of them could exist outside the presence of the other. He knew he couldn’t. Not anymore.
“I love you, Maggie Honeywell,” he said huskily. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you love me? Not just the memory of me…of him…but me, as I am now?”
“Yes. For all eternity.” Her voice was a velvet promise. A vow that had never been broken. That couldn’t be broken. Not by time or distance. Not even by death, he suspected.
“Say it,” he commanded. “I need to hear it.”
“I love you, Nicholas Seaton.” Her eyes held his transfixed. “I love you, John Beresford. Whatever you call yourself, however much you’ve changed, you’re mine.”
He bowed his head, setting his face against her hand. Her words were a salve upon his soul. “I am yours.”
“Well,” she said, “now that we have that settled.”
“Yes, now that we have that settled…” He hesitated as he looked at her, choosing his next words with care. He’d already mulled them over on the journey down. Now it was only a matter of getting them out, and in the right order. “I know how you feel about this place. How much it means to you—the land and all of your tenants, but…” He faltered.
How could one man weigh himself against an entire estate? An estate that was synonymous with the Honeywell name?
But he didn’t have to formulate the right words.
Maggie saved him the trouble.
“My father always told me that the land would go on. That people didn’t matter. We didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Beasley Park.” A frown puckered her brow. “I daresay he hoped it would persuade me to accept Fred. To think only of the estate and what our marriage might mean for it.”
Her marriage.
St. Clare’s mood soured at the edges. “You don’t still intend—”
“No. But Papa was right. The land does go on. And it has, all through my illness, and while I was in mourning. It’s gone on without me.” She gave him a bleak smile. “I’ve had an epiphany, you see. I’m not as indispensable to Beasley Park as I’ve always believed.”
He pressed a consoling kiss to her wrist, that delicate place where her pulse beat so valiantly. His heart ached for her, but he couldn’t be sorry. Beasley Park was as much a rival to him as Frederick Burton-Smythe had always been. “I’ve had a similar epiphany.”
“Oh?”
“That night, when I left here, when I struck out on my own, had I found Gentleman Jim, I’d have gladly joined him in whatever