“I love you, Nicholas Seaton.” Her eyes held his transfixed. “I love you, John Beresford. Whatever you call yourself, however much you’ve changed, you’re mine.”

He bowed his head, setting his face against her hand. Her words were a salve upon his soul. “I am yours.”

“Well,” she said, “now that we have that settled.”

“Yes, now that we have that settled…” He hesitated as he looked at her, choosing his next words with care. He’d already mulled them over on the journey down. Now it was only a matter of getting them out, and in the right order. “I know how you feel about this place. How much it means to you—the land and all of your tenants, but…” He faltered.

How could one man weigh himself against an entire estate? An estate that was synonymous with the Honeywell name?

But he didn’t have to formulate the right words.

Maggie saved him the trouble.

“My father always told me that the land would go on. That people didn’t matter. We didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Beasley Park.” A frown puckered her brow. “I daresay he hoped it would persuade me to accept Fred. To think only of the estate and what our marriage might mean for it.”

Her marriage.

St. Clare’s mood soured at the edges. “You don’t still intend—”

“No. But Papa was right. The land does go on. And it has, all through my illness, and while I was in mourning. It’s gone on without me.” She gave him a bleak smile. “I’ve had an epiphany, you see. I’m not as indispensable to Beasley Park as I’ve always believed.”

He pressed a consoling kiss to her wrist, that delicate place where her pulse beat so valiantly. His heart ached for her, but he couldn’t be sorry. Beasley Park was as much a rival to him as Frederick Burton-Smythe had always been. “I’ve had a similar epiphany.”

“Oh?”

“That night, when I left here, when I struck out on my own, had I found Gentleman Jim, I’d have gladly joined him in whatever criminal enterprise he was engaged in. I had no particular principles. And later, when Allendale proposed to take me under his wing—to pass me off as his heir—it never occurred to me to refuse. And it wasn’t because I aspired to riches or the trappings of notoriety or nobility. It was because…all I ever wanted was to belong somewhere. It didn’t much matter where.”

“You belong with me,” she said.

Her words, spoken so simply, were his undoing.

What self-control he had left fractured on a surge of emotion. It crumbled to dust, taking the remnants of his gentlemanly resolve right along with it.

Any thoughts of propriety promptly fled. There was only her. The two of them. And ten long years of restless, painful, unrequited longing.