Page 125 of Scars and Crowns

He waits.

I hate that he does that. He never rushes me when I'm trying to find words. Somehow that makes finding them harder. I hold up the invitation. "Do you actually want me to come to the gala?"

His expression changes immediately. "Of course I do."

"Are you sure?"

He pushes his chair back. "Anamika."

"I don't know how to do this." The words tumble out before I can stop them. "I don't know what I'm supposed to say to half the people there. I don't know which council members are important, which ones hate you, which ones pretend not to hate you, or which ones I'm supposed to smile at even if they've spent the last ten years saying horrible things about people like me."

He is already walking toward me. "And what if I say something stupid?"

He keeps coming. "What if I use the wrong fork? What if I don't know who someone is? What if everyone looks at me and thinks—"

He reaches me. "What if they wonder how the housekeeper's daughter ended up standing beside the Maharaja?"

His hands come up around my face before I can finish. And then he kisses me. Not hurriedly. Not like he's trying to silence me. Like he's trying to remind me of something.

His palms are warm against my cheeks, his thumbs resting just beneath my eyes, and the kiss is slow enough that I feel the tension leave me in pieces. My fingers curl instinctively into the front of his suit, and for those few seconds, there is no gala. No ballroom. No council. No people waiting to decide whether I belong.

There is only him.

When he pulls back, he doesn't move far. His forehead rests against mine, and I can feel his breath against my lips. "You are not going to embarrass me."

I let out a shaky breath. "You don't know that."

"I do." His voice is so certain that I look up at him.

"I've watched you build an entire life with your own hands," he says. "You built that bookshop when you had every reason to believe you weren't capable of building anything. You raised Sara when you had no one standing beside you. You walked back into this palace after everything that happened here and somehow managed to make it feel like home again." His thumb brushes beneath my eye. "Do you honestly think I'm going to stand in a ballroom and worry about whether you know which fork to use?"

A laugh escapes me despite myself. “You say that now."

"I'll say it there too." I look down at the invitation between us.

"They'll talk."

"Let them."

"Yuvaan—"

"I mean it."

There is something different in his face now. Not anger. Something firmer. "I know exactly where you came from, Anamika. I know what you had to survive to get here. I have seen you since childhood, I have seen you study endlessly for that scholarship, I have seen you crying over how you didn’t deserve your mother because she had to work so hard for you, I know how hard you worked for every single thing you have. And I'm proud of you."

My eyes sting.

He notices immediately. "I am proud that you're my wife," he says quietly. "Not because your name is on an invitation. Because you're you." I swallow hard. He presses one last kiss to my forehead. "So stop worrying about whether you belong beside me."

I look at him. "You do."

That does it.

I blink rapidly and look away before the tears can actually fall. “Okay."

"Okay?"

"I believe you."