Epilogue

Six months later

Selina let her pelisse fall from her shoulders and puddle on the floor. She spared one single thought for the way it would wrinkle, decided she did not care, and collapsed into the bed at the center of the room.

She flung her arm over her face and groaned.

"Have they killed you?" inquired Peter mildly.

"Yes." She felt the mattress shift as Peter settled himself beside her, his warmth seeping into her body in contrast to the modest bedchamber's December chill.

"Well, at least your death will get this inn into the papers. They'll probably erect a plaque in your honor. The Dancing Dog: The Final Resting Place of the Ninth Duchess of Stanhope."

"She died as she lived," Selina offered from beneath her arm.

"Trying to keep Kent family members from hurling themselves into chaos?"

She laughed despite herself and relocated her arm, tipping her face toward Peter's. "A hairbreadth from catastrophe and loving every minute of it."

They had sent Freddie to Eton that fall. He had been determined to go, his face set and his chin stubbornly lifted, though his trepidation was apparent.

That had lasted all of three months before Lu had dressed in breeches and jacket and taken herself off to Eton after him. She'd bluffed and bullied her way from the headmaster's office into a Latin tutorial before they'd managed to track her down.

"I left you a note," Lu had protested when they'd hauled both children into Freddie's neatly appointed room. "I told you I was perfectly safe."

"Your note," Peter said precisely, "informed us that you had taken a boat to Antigua."

Lu stared at him. "Well, obviously. If I told you the truth, you would've known exactly how to find me."

Several hours later, they had given serious consideration to Lu's arguments for why she should be allowed to stay at Eton, listened to Freddie's pink-cheeked rebuttal as to why Lu should not , and removed everyone to an inn with the discussion tabled for after Christmas.

"Do you know," Selina told Peter now, turning on her side to look more fully at him, "I haven't the faintest idea what to do in this situation."

"Mm." He tangled his fingers into her hair. "Neither do I."

"Do you suppose that's just… how things will be from now on? Utter pandemonium the majority of the time?"

"Very possibly."

He muffled her laugh with his mouth, and she felt herself relax for the first time since they'd realized Lu was gone. She sank into his kiss, and his fingers tightened in her hair.

After a long, long moment, he pulled back. "I'm so damned glad you're here."

She luxuriated in the warmth of his arm around her, in the curve of his mouth. "There's nowhere else I would rather be."

"You could be tucked into your office at Belvoir's, reading dirty books as we speak."

She shrugged. "Don't think I haven't brought samples in my portmanteau."

His eyebrows climbed. "Have you now, wife?"

She squirmed away and made an abortive dive for her travel bag beside the bed, but Peter was quicker. He swooped upon her and snatched the bag from her grasp, rifling through the stack of uncut pages while she shrieked and laughed beneath him.

She did not know what Laventille had sent her this time, and Peter's staggered face had her mightily curious.

She was fairly certain one of Lydia's more subversive essays had gotten mixed up in the bag, however, so perhaps that explained his expression. In the last six months, Lydia had quickly become one of her most popular anonymous pamphleteers, her reserve nowhere apparent in the radical texts she authored. Lydia had been spending more and more time at Belvoir's—last week Selina had caught her emerging from the upstairs office at a startlingly early hour, ink smudged on her gloves. It was most intriguing.

She was just craning her neck to look over Peter's shoulder to see what had caught his attention when he reached back inside her travel bag. "What's this?"

She blinked at small velvet bag he'd produced. "I have no idea. You—"

Oh. He was grinning down at her, looking enormously pleased with himself. She plucked the bag out of his hands and tugged open the drawstring, tipping its contents into her palm.

It was a ring. A brilliant green emerald set in a filigreed gold band.

"Sorry it took so long," he said. "I wanted to get it right."

Her mouth opened, but no words came out.

"You once told me that your private rule was to never have any green Belvoir's books on your person," he said. His eyes were warm and intent on hers. "And now—well. I wanted you to have something to remind you that you've nothing to hide. To make you recollect how proud you should be every time you look at it."

The ring went blurry before her eyes. He had not stopped surprising her—his love and his constancy and that clear-eyed vision for the world he imagined into being.

"I love you," she said. "I love you so much."

He brushed her hair back from her face. "I love you, too."

She slipped the ring onto her finger, opposite from the hand that wore the brass circlet from their wedding.

"Wait," he protested. "That's the wrong hand."

She smiled so hard at him that a tear slipped free. "No, it's not."

"I got this so you could replace that makeshift wedding ring—"

"Never."

"It turns your finger green!"

She laughed. "I like it."

"Oh for God's sake," he said, and kissed her.

He was still kissing her—only with her bodice unfastened and her chemise decidedly askew—when a spectacular racket erupted outside their door.

Selina dragged herself away from the temptation of his mouth. She was breathing a trifle unevenly. "Should we—see what that noise is?"

He bent his head to her ear and a shiver ran through her body. "Absolutely not."

She laced her fingers through his curls and kept him there, arching up against him until—

"It's not my fault this time!"

Lu's voice outside their door was muffled but clearly audible.

"I swear it," Lu said, the pitch of her voice rising. "This time it was Freddie—I think he set the Christmas goose free—they seem awfully agitated about it—"

Peter lifted his head, looked from the door back to Selina. And then he lowered his brow to hers and groaned.

She laughed against his mouth.

"I'm going," he mumbled. "I'm going. You stay right here. Do not move."

"I might look through the samples—"

He leaned down and hitched her skirts up to her waist. "Don't you dare move. I will be right back ." He planted a kiss at the line of her stocking, and she laughed again.

He looked up at her, his curls falling over his brow. "Worth it?"

She felt so much—warmth and amusement and pleasure. Excitement and challenge and sheer delight. And love. So much love. "Always," she said. "Always."