"I love you, Joshua." In the confines of the carriage, Cabot's words were inescapable. "Only you. Ever and always, you. I will not leave. I will not move on to someone else. For me, there is only and ever you."

Button gasped for breath, for words, for a line of reasoning in the whirlpool of fear and hope that choked him.

"But I — I am twice your age —"

Cabot smiled then, a sweet, sunny grin that Button had never seen before. "Not anymore. I am now thirty years to your forty-nine."

"Forty-eight," Button managed, a tiny flare of vanity piercing his overwhelming turmoil.

"Moreover, I am informed on the highest authority that I was born older than you."

Distracted by the ringing accuracy of that mad logic, Button managed some actual words. "Whoever said that?"

"Everyone's favorite prodigy and speaker of truths, Miss Atalanta Worthington."

"Oh." Attie never lied. "It must be so, then." Button turned away for a moment, his gaze fixed blindly on the grassy slope passing outside.

Silence fell, as if they sat calm and quiet together, as if there was only the trotting of expensive hooves and creaking of expensive woods. As if there was not a tempest within him.

He had been alone for so long.

An eternity ago, fifteen-year-old Joshua had turned to the one person he trusted the most for advice, for answers. Why did he feel the way he did? Why did he think the way he did?

Why was he different?

His father, his teacher, a man so proud of Joshua's skills and finesse, forever boasting of his great future as a tailor, had not answered with words but with a raised fist.

It'd been a long life since then, a good life for the most part. He had achieved so much, for himself and for the people he most admired, and yes, even for his country.

Perhaps he truly did have nothing left to prove.

Resistance and protest floated away, the storm ebbed, leaving behind only clarity and acceptance.

"Cabot," Button said, without looking away from the serenity of the dale, "I think I like it when you call me Joshua."

CHAPTER 29

Chapter 29

IN YEW MANOR, GEMMA stood in the precise center of her stillroom until she was certain that the Worthington's fine borrowed carriages were well and gone.

Then she looked down at her aching hands to realize they had been tightly fisted the entire time. Why? She wasn't angry, or frustrated. After all, she'd been the one to ask him to go.

Perhaps to stop yourself from reaching out to stay him?

Gemma spread her whitened fingers wide before her in denial of that wayward thought. She had done the right thing, the responsible thing.

However, she felt stifled by the redolent air of the stillroom. She wanted the grassy breeze upon her face. Turning on one heel, she strode swiftly from the room, through the kitchen and out the door. She needed to breathe.