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“I have you, angel,” he murmured against her throat. “I have you. Let go. I’m right here. We’re going to do this together⁠—”

She cried out his name into the firelit dark, her whole body shuddering beneath him. His climax crashed over him a moment later with a force that left him shaking, his forehead pressed to her shoulder, gasping for breath.

For a long while, neither of them moved, their limbs tangled, their hearts hammering. So much had changed, and yet the rain was still falling softly against the windows, the fire reduced to nothing but a faint red glow.

“Well,” Laura said eventually, a laugh threading through her voice. “I believe that answers whether you meant it.”

“I meant every word.” Nathaniel lifted his head to look at her, brushing a damp curl from her temple with a tenderness that somehow felt even more intimate than everything that had come before it. “Every single one, Laura. I have never meant anything more in my life.”

She reached up and traced the line of his jaw. “Then stay. All night. Don’t go back to your rooms.”

“I told you once that I didn’t intend to leave this bed again, not for a great many nights.” He gathered her close and tugged the blankets over them, her head settling on his chest. “I meant that too. Unless, of course, you’d like to try mine.”

Laura pressed a slow kiss over his heart, feeling the rapid beat settle beneath her lips, and let her eyes drift shut, warm and thoroughly spent and finally certain of everything that lay ahead of them.

“Nathaniel.”

“Mm?”

“I find I am truly not frightened. Not anymore. Not when I am with you. You are everything, my love.”

He tightened his arm around her and pressed one last kiss to her hair. “Neither am I,” he said quietly into the dark. “Neither am I.”

EPILOGUE

FIVE MONTHS LATER

The fair was sprawled along the riverbank for the better part of a mile, a chaos of striped awnings and smoking braziers and barkers shouting hoarse over the noise of a fiddle somewhere near the water.

It was a beautiful sight.

Iris had been vibrating with anticipation since approximately dawn, and now they had finally arrived.

“There,” she said, the instant they stepped down from the carriage, pointing toward a booth. “That one. The one with the rings.”

“You haven’t even seen what the prizes are.”

“It doesn’t matter. Look at the man’s mustache, Uncle Nathaniel. Anyone with a mustache like that must have excellent prizes.”

Nathaniel considered this. “I find I can’t fault the logic. Excellent mustaches mean excellent prizes, I suppose.”

And so they played the rings. Iris lost four times in a row with mild outrage and thankfully won on the fifth, claiming a small tin whistle of genuinely appalling tone quality that immediately began playing and did not stop for the next half hour.

They ate hot chestnuts out of paper cones that almost burned Laura’s fingers through her gloves. They watched a man swallow fire, which Iris declared was obviously a trick. Then a woman walked a rope strung between two poles, which Iris declared was obviously not a trick and demanded to be taught immediately.

“Absolutely not,” Laura said.

“Miss Borden can teach me.”

“Miss Borden has a bad hip. She would not teach you to do such a thing, my dear.”

“We’ll find someone,” Iris said defiantly, and dragged them further into the fair.

At the shy-coconut stall, Nathaniel rolled up his sleeves and knocked three coconuts off their posts in four throws, to the stallholder's visible dismay and his niece's ecstatic shrieking.

“Again,” she demanded. “Do it again!”

“I believe the gentleman would prefer I didn’t,” he replied with a smile.