Six months later, Jamie was in his study when Duncan burst through the open door with a letter in his hand. There was a delight on his face that announced that something had just gone exactly the way he had hoped.

Jamie looked up from the account book he had been pretending to read and saw the answer before the boy spoke.

“Accepted,” Duncan said, breathless.

Jamie set down the pen. “Accepted where?”

Duncan crossed the room in three long strides and pressed the letter into his hand as if he feared the news might escape if he held it too long. “The naval preparatory school. The one you said was worth trying for.”

Jamie opened it, though he barely needed to. The boy was incandescent. The application had been sent, the recommendations quietly gathered, the references secured with all the discreet effort Jamie could manage. Now the answer was here, in Duncan’s face before it was even in the letter.

He read it once and looked up. “Well done.”

Duncan’s chest lifted. “You mean it?”

Jamie rose from behind the desk and set a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I mean it.”

The smile that overtook Duncan’s face was so immediate and so bright that Jamie felt it in his own chest.

“I told you,” Duncan said.

Jamie raised one brow. “Did you.”

“Yes. I knew I would be accepted.”

“You looked very uncertain three days ago.”

“That was tactical.”

Jamie let out a breath that came close to a laugh. “Was it.”

Duncan nodded gravely, then folded the letter and looked at it as though he meant to keep it with him always.

“I want to be like you,” he said at last.

The instinct to answer such a thing modestly or not at all trembled beneath the pride on Jamie’s face.

“You should aim higher.”

Duncan’s face changed in offense so quickly it was amusing. He drew himself up. “I do aim higher.” He looked at Jamie with great earnestness. “I do not think that is possible.”

Jamie had just opened his mouth to answer when Duncan turned on his heel and left, the letter tucked under his arm, his entire happiness contained by the narrow fact that he was twelve and would not permit himself to be seen giddy for too long.

Jamie looked after him a moment longer than was sensible.

Then Maisie appeared at the door, already tugging Logan by the hand with determined impatience.

“Come now,” she said.

Logan, who had clearly not been consulted about the plan, looked toward Jamie with a resignation that did not quite hide amusement.

Maisie tugged again. “I found a bird’s nest.”

Logan glanced down at her. “You did.”

“Yes.”

“That seems important.”

“It is.”

She looked at Jamie as though he had been behaving foolishly by remaining in the study at all. “Uncle Jamie needs to come now too.”

Jamie looked from Maisie to Logan. Logan lifted one brow in silent surrender.

Jamie sighed, put the account book aside, and let himself be dragged out of the room.

***

The kitchen was louder than the study. It had become so over the months, not because the house had grown less orderly, but because it had grown full. Doors opened without hesitancy, fires were lit before anyone had to ask, and voices moved from room to room in the ordinary lived-in way of people who no longer thought in terms of permission for every small thing. The estate had become a place where one heard life before one saw it.

Clara and Logan were arguing when Jamie stepped in. Again. The argument, as far as he could tell, was the same one they had been having in different forms for several months. Logan leaned one shoulder against the table as though there was nowhere else he belonged more than right in that spot. Clara stood opposite him with her arms folded and her face trying desperately to appear annoyed with Logan. But on Clara’s left hand was a ring. She claimed it was her grandmother’s. But if anyone in the room had been inclined to believe that, Logan’s broad, triumphant grin would have abolished such foolishness.

“I am not saying,” Clara was saying, “that you do not have some use in the kitchen.”

Logan looked deeply offended. “Only some.”

“I am saying that you have been here long enough to stop pretending you are merely visiting.”

“I do visit.”

“You live here.”

“I sleep in the servants’ hall.”

Clara gave him a flat look. “You tell yourself that.”

Logan’s mouth lifted in a way that suggested he was very pleased with himself and wished to remain so.

Eloise sat at the table with a cup of tea, watching them with the same warm amusement she had worn since the first morning she noticed Logan’s unnecessary firewood deliveries and the carved spoon that had appeared by Clara’s hearth. She looked up when Jamie entered and smiled at him.

The sight of it still startled him sometimes, though not with pain now. Only gratitude.

A letter lay open on the table beside her. He knew at right away who it was from.

“Catriona wrote again this morning,” Eloise said.

Jamie crossed to the table and glanced down. The letter was brief in the way Catriona’s letters often were. She was to be remarried in the spring to a Scottish gentleman of her father’s acquaintance, a man who suited her and whom she, by all appearances, found acceptable.

Jamie looked up.

Eloise could not help a smile. “She will be happy.”

“She will.”

“And he will be sensible.”

Jamie gave a low sound. “Most likely.”

Eloise smiled at that.

The kitchen behind them remained in motion. Clara was still calling Logan impossible. Logan wore a smug, proud expression. Maisie climbed into the chair beside Eloise with a handful of twigs and began arranging her bird’s nest on the table as though it required supervision. Duncan appeared a moment later with a book under one arm and a grin that no amount of scrubbing could ever wipe away.

Jamie looked from one to the other. The room had become so ordinary in its happiness that it still felt, on occasion, impossible.

Eloise reached toward him and took his hand. That, too, was normal.

***

The grounds were quieter by evening. The house, however, was not. Jamie and Eloise walked along the edge of the lawns while the light began to thin over the water. The doors behind them stood open, fires had been lit, and voices rose from one part of the house and then another, carried by the warmth that now seemed to inhabit every room. It was a different place than the one he had inherited, different from the one he had hidden in. The change was not complete. It still had rough edges. But it was alive.

Jamie glanced at his wife. “I learned something today.”

Eloise turned her head slightly. “About Duncan’s school?”

“No.”

“Then I am worried.”

He gave her a brief look. “You should be.”

She smiled.

He stopped walking just enough to look at her properly. “The solicitor told me Lawrence was in jail.”

Her eyes sharpened.

“Apparently he had been plagiarizing deals to acquire money for his debts,” Jamie said. “That was after he was already awaiting trial for threatening a noblewoman at gunpoint.”

Eloise stared at him. He tipped his head slightly. “You do not look surprised.”

“I am not. I am only deciding whether I should be outraged or relieved.”

“Both would be fair.”

She exhaled slowly, then began walking again. “He was always too tidy to be innocent.”

“That is an excellent phrase.”

“It is also true.”

Jamie let the silence sit a moment. “The rest is behind us now,” he said, breaking the silence.

Eloise looked toward the sea. “It had better be.”

“It is.”

He hesitated. “We should think of better news to share on a day like this,” he said.

She glanced up at him, and the evening changed before she spoke another word.

“I have news,” she said.

He stopped instantly.

Her hand came to rest lightly over her midsection, and her face glowed with that delighted, warm quality he had come to know when she was trying not to smile too soon.

“I am pregnant.”

Jamie simply stared at her.

The world seemed to stop with him.

Eloise’s brows lifted. “Did you hear me?”

He did not move.

So she smiled, with patient amusement. “I am pregnant,” she repeated.

Jamie looked at her. Then at the sea. Then back at her. He crossed to her in two steps and put both hands on her face. One scarred, one whole, and both full of love.

Jamie bent his head and kissed her forehead first, then her mouth. The kiss was tender, immediate, and full of the sort of joy that made every other thing seem less important by half. Eloise kissed him back with the same certainty she had felt since the harbor, since the day she had begun to trust him with her life.

When he drew back only slightly, she was smiling.

She laughed against his lips. “I take it you are pleased.”

Jamie looked at her with stunned reverence that made the answer too obvious to need polishing.

“Terrified,” he said.

That made her laugh again. He pressed his forehead briefly to hers, closed his eyes for one second, then opened them and looked at her with a seriousness that was tender enough to hurt.

“You will make a great mother.”

Eloise winked. “That is the same thing,” she said.

Jamie let out a breathy laugh that was almost a laugh and pulled her close. The words of gratitude and wonder and fear he could have spoken remained where they belonged, because the truth was already in his hands and in her voice and in the life they had made together without knowing, at first, that it was being made.

They turned back toward the house in the late light.

Jamie looked once at the sea, then back at his wife.

For years he had thought himself cursed. He had believed the world had taken too much, too early, and left too little behind to justify hope.

He had been wrong.

He had not been cursed.

He had simply been waiting.

THE END