But the jumbled way she asked the question didn’t seem to impact his understanding. He came to a halt midway to her side.
“Ophelia told you that?” he asked after it felt like a lifetime had passed.
She nodded. “Yes. She said you asked her not to dance more than nine times. So that I would win, I assume. So that you could tell me about your past.” She worried her hands before her. “Were you manipulating me, Nathan? Was this all part of some game?”
His eyes went wide. “No. Not a game. I suppose you could see it as a manipulation.” Her heart sank and she gripped her hands at her sides. He shook his head at the reaction. “But not the way you think.”
“Then explain it to me,” she whispered. “I want you to explain.”
“I did want to tell you about my past,” he said. “For the very reasons I told you that night. Because I was privy to a great deal of your pain and wanted to even that score a fraction. I wanted to give you some piece of myself. And I thought you would more eagerly accept it if it was because you’d won the day.”
She shook her head slowly. “But why, Nathan?”
He sucked in a long, slow breath. “It was always going to come to this,” he said softly, almost as if more to himself than to her.
“What has come to what?” she asked, and hated how it felt like her throat was closing.
He shut his eyes and drew a deep breath. When he opened them, something in his expression had changed. He looked…peaceful. Certain. He reached for her, and she was too mesmerized to back away.
He took her hand and lifted it to press to his heart. “Abigail…I love you.”
The world stopped spinning. It had to have stopped because it felt like everything had changed, not only this room or this man or her future. She stared at him, half-wondering if this was some dream and yet knowing it was real.
“You can’t love me,” she whispered because she didn’t know what else to say. “You can’t.”
“But I do,” he said, and smiled gently. “I felt the sharpness of it the first time I met you, even though we were contentious. It was why I kept coming back, poking my nose in, as you so often put it, during Owen’s investigation.”
Her mouth dropped open in shock. “No. No, you were stepping in because you wanted to protect Rhys. Because of the situation with your sister.”
He shook his head. “I told myself that. I told you that. But the truth was, I wanted to protect you. Not only out of some guilt that I’d brought hell down on you. Out of a pure desire to see you happy.”
She tried to tug her hand away, but he clung to her gently. “No, this cannot be true.”
“And yet it is. What I felt for you didn’t go away, even when the case was over. Even when you went into your official mourning period and we tried so hard to avoid each other. Do you know I used to ride past your house?”
“You did?”
He nodded. “Every few days, even though it wasn’t on my way to anything. I wanted to catch a glimpse of you. When I did, I tried to explain the thrill I felt as some kind of adversarial emotion. But it wasn’t. I know that now.”
She stumbled away, and this time he let her go. She walked, not seeing anything before her, staggered to the window and pressed her hand to the cool glass as if the shock of it would pull her from this truth. From this man.
When she could form no words, he continued, “When I started seeing you again regularly, it was like a light came back on in my life. Before we were caught and forced to marry, dancing the dance was the highlight of any day.”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “But you never said a word.”
“I refused to admit my heart,” he said. “I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening until the day I realized that you were the one who wrote the letter that saved my sister from Montgomery.”
Now she did spin around with a gasp. He nodded slowly. “Yes. I realized the truth.”
“H-how?”
“You wrote me that note to say you were going to Celeste and Owen’s after our argument. I recognized the handwriting.”
She covered her burning cheeks with her cold fingers. “I didn’t want you to know.”
“I realize that,” he said gently. “Because you didn’t trust me. Because you didn’t want to draw attention to what you’d done. Because you are selfless. Because he broke your heart and you are so afraid to let someone else hold it.”
She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until that moment when she gasped it out. “Don’t say that.”
She turned away again, and he was quiet for a moment as she tried to gather herself.
“But it’s true,” he whispered. “All of it is true. And when I realized what you’d done, everything became crystal clear. I knew I loved you. And that I had to act. Look at me.”
She hesitated, but then slowly turned to face him. She saw the truth of every word he was speaking in every line of him. Every emotion he was expressing was present in his eyes and his smile and the way he held himself.
“Every wager was an I love you, Abigail,” he said softly. “Every little teasing gesture. Every time I touched you, I branded I love you into your skin. And every time you pushed me away, that feeling only got stronger, not weaker. I love you. Not because you saved my sister, not because you are such a good person that you risked yourself for someone else. I loved you before I knew that. And that only gave me the excuse to woo you as I should have done from the moment we met.”
She blinked and thought back to the time that had passed since that argument. To the way he had taken care of her, pampered her, shared with her. To all those tiny declarations of the love he was expressing to her now. The love of action, the love of intention.
Of temptation.
He moved toward her, and she was too frozen by it all to step away. He touched her face, tracing her cheek with just his fingertip. “When we told the world we were in a great love story, I should have made that true immediately. Because I believe we are. If you trust me, if you allow yourself to love me, I promise you that we can be.”
Her feelings burned inside of her as she held his gaze. The ones she had pushed aside for weeks, months. The thrill every time she saw him coming back to haunt her. To reveal her heart to her just as he had revealed his own.
“I cannot trust myself,” she whispered.
“But you can trust me,” he insisted. “And if you let yourself, come to love me, I hope.”
She blinked. “Come to love you. No.”
He flinched ever so slightly. “You think there is no chance?”
“No, I’m telling you that I already…I already love you, as well,” she burst out.
The words hung between them, but to his credit, he didn’t launch himself at her. He didn’t celebrate. He lit up like a thousand candles, but he didn’t force her into a position where she didn’t wish to be.
“Nathan, some part of me was broken when all of Montgomery’s lies came out. I promised myself I would never risk my heart again. And yet here I am, and the risk is even bigger because I have never felt the way I do when I’m with you. It is so much stronger and more beautiful and more abjectly terrifying than it was with him. There is so much more to lose if we fail. And I’m so afraid to fail.”