Page 98 of Miss Ashbury and the Anatomy of Mending a Heart

“With how you feel?”

Good heavens, she told herself. Close your mouth.

“I love you, Vera. So very much. I didn’t know the definition of the word until you came along.” Stephen’s eyes were wide, the love in his face—for that’s what it was, she realized now—radiated from every line in his smile. “It’s funny—I’ve studied the body for years. Yet no one prepared me for how I feel when I see you walk into a room.”

He held a hand to his chest. “No one’s explained the possibility of the hold you have over my heart. The lightness I feel in it when you laugh. The way it flutters when you smile at me. The way it pounds when the candlelight softens your skin. And no one taught me how the mind can be completely split in two—how I can be utterly focused on what I’m doing, but that part of me still wonders where you are, and what you’re doing at any given moment.

“And the hunger I feel here.” Stephen pressed his hand to his stomach. “How I am still fully myself, just with a new obsession—that I long to know everything about you. When precisely you acquired each one of your lovely freckles. What you think about everything, all the time. How I find your interests just as fascinating as the ones I’ve always held for myself—not because they’re inherently interesting to me, but because you are.

“I find I need to apologize again for how I treated you in the beginning. Yes, I do,” he added as Vera shook her head, tears running unchecked down her cheeks. “For I only recently realized that I treated you so because you scared me. I found you beautiful upon first glance—breathtakingly so. And the last woman I’d looked at in such a way had hurt me deeply. I was foolishly trying to protect myself, and I did it at your expense.”

“Stephen.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to⁠—”

“Yes, I do. I adore you, Vera. And I know love is just a word, but I promise I’ll prove it to you every single day for the rest of my life, if you’ll let me. I would be the luckiest, the happiest man in the world if you would stoop to being my wife. Will you?”

“Don’t be daft,” she choked out.

It was all Vera could manage to say for the time being. She was strangled by the depth of her emotion. Stephen thought his heart affected? Hers felt as if it would pound out of her chest and run through the pasture.

At some point during his recklessly romantic speech, Stephen had taken her hand. Now her palm was pressed to his chest, and her focus flitted between the warmth of it sandwiched as it was between his capable hand and his waistcoat, and Stephen’s face—the hope and love she saw there.

Vera opened her mouth to give her reply.

“Vera!” a male voice bellowed from behind them.

They both turned. A man was half striding, half running down the green hillside behind them.

Vera pulled her hand from Stephen’s in her shock. “Bertrand?”

“Who is this?” Stephen said, his voice low.

“My brother.” Vera’s tone expressed how improbable it was, though it was her brother, Bertrand—the younger of the two—hurrying down toward them.

As he got closer, Vera saw his face was red; a sheen of sweat graced his forehead.

“Vera, for heaven’s sakes, there you are.” He pulled her abruptly into a hug. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“You have?”

Bertrand held her back by the shoulders. “Would have been here an hour earlier, except Canterbury and his duchess put me through the wringer answering their questions.”

“They did?” Vera blinked.

“Not that I don’t understand, once they finally explained it. Did you truly believe we’d written you off like that?” Bertrand yanked her back into a hug as if he couldn’t help himself. “Dear heavens, Vera. You’re my sister.”

She squeaked some unintelligible response. Her eyes were leaking, this time in utter shock. Bertrand had been looking for her? He still acknowledged her as family? She couldn’t help it—she began to sob into his chest.

“Aw, blast it, Vera.” Bertrand patted her about the back awkwardly with his pudgy hand. “Don’t cry. You know I can’t handle that. It’s awful. Jane’s six now and she’s already figured me out. I had to buy her a pony last month. A pony. Her mother’s furious with me for being such a pushover about it, but Jane really does love taking her little cart into the park, so I think it’s all worked out all right.”

Vera just cried harder, clutching the front of his coat. She hadn’t realized until now how much she needed to hear those words from someone. That she still was family. That she hadn’t been thrown away, abandoned. Vera hadn’t realized quite how deep that injury had gone—not until someone came along and salved it.

“You must be Baron Winthrop.” Vera felt Bertrand offer his hand to Stephen, even while the other still held Vera to his chest. “Very sorry to arrive unannounced, but it’s a bit of an emergency.”

She pushed back from her brother on a gasp. “What is it?”

“It’s Mother. She’s…she’s dying, Vera.”

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