She was aware of the path beneath her feet and the cool air against her face and the distance between them, smaller now than it had ever been, measured not just in space, but in everything that had been said and not said across three months of gardens and lectures and rain-blurred conservatory glass. "I argued with you," she said. "The very first proper conversation we had." "You argued with me about my critique of your paper," he said. "And you were right. The sample population was appropriate. I revised my position." "You never told me that." "I'm telling you now." He almost smiled. Almost. "That is a very long time to sit on a concession."
"I was working up to it," he said. And then the almost smile she had cataloged across 12 weeks of careful observation, it arrived fully for the first time. Not the ghost of it. The real thing. It changed his face entirely, opened it, made him look younger and less careful and startlingly, unexpectedly warm. It was deeply unfair, Eleanor thought, that he had been keeping that.
He took a breath. "I wrote your name in my notebook," she said. The directness of it surprised even her. But she was tired of being careful, tired of the long cautious approach, tired of saying things that meant less than she intended. "In the margin. After Lady Morfield's dinner. I told myself it was nothing. I didn't cross it out."
He was very still. "Eleanor," he said. Her given name in his voice. No title. No careful distance. She felt it from her throat to her hands. He crossed the space between them, not quickly, not dramatically, but with the same unhurried certainty with which he did everything, and stopped close enough that she had to look up to meet his eyes. Close enough that she could see the slight unevenness of his breathing and knew it matched her own.
His hand came up, slowly, giving her every opportunity to step back, and his fingers found the line of her jaw, light as a question. Her heart was doing something completely ungovernable. The cool morning air and the warmth of his hand and the pale autumn light all arrived at once and she could not have composed a sentence in any language botanical or otherwise. "I have been," he said quietly, "trying very hard not to do this." "I know," she said. "I am not entirely certain I should." "I know that, too." She held his gaze. "Do it anyway."
He looked at her for one long moment, at her upturned face and her honest eyes and the mess of her that was sharp and warm and stubborn and present in a way that had been pulling at something inside him since a garden party and a small girl in a muddy pinafore and he lowered his head. And Eleanor Calloway, botanist, sharp-tongued sister, daughter of a woman she was slowly forgetting the sound of, stopped thinking in words entirely.
It was soft. Careful. A question answered rather than a demand made. His mouth against hers in the cool morning air of Kew Gardens with the fountain still running and the pale light still steady and the world entirely indifferent to the fact that something inside her had just put down a weight she had been carrying so long she had forgotten it was there.