Ophelia should have found peace in Connor’s presence here. Her brother hadn’t sought to bury away Diggory’s evil—and because of their connection to that monster—their complicity.
The ton would gossip.
The club would likely suffer.
There’d certainly be no connection to the nobility for Gertrude after this.
Yet he’d put the lives of three lost boys—now men—before all of that.
That should be enough. It had long been the one hope she’d carried: that Broderick would abandon his Diggory-like obsession with the peerage and be content with his grand empire.
Selfishly, it was not.
Connor had come only on a matter of business.
He closed the notepads and folders he and Broderick had previously been studying. She followed each careful movement as he neatly stacked them.
“You have been . . . well?”
No, she’d been miserable—empty and aching and tortured by memories of Newgate, and riddled with a horror that would never leave. “I’ve not,” she offered instead, unwilling to lie to him.
His face crumpled. “Oh, Ophelia.” He reached for her. “I wanted to come to you,” he said, his voice ragged.
Ophelia pushed his hands away. “And yet you didn’t.” She jutted her chin. She didn’t want his pity. She wanted him in her life. She wanted his heart. “I th-thought you were at the very least a friend that you might . . . visit before . . . this.” What a pathetically weak gift to settle for. A visit from him. A mere visit when she wanted all of him, forever.
“Is that what you believe?” he murmured, drifting around the side of the desk. “That we are friends?”
“Yes. No.” For she had . . . she’d also, however, after his visit to Newgate and every intimate exchange before it, deluded herself into believing that mayhap they were more. “I . . . I . . . aren’t we?” Because even as he’d been her lover, he’d first been her friend—a truth she’d denied all these years.
He dusted his knuckles over her cheek, and she leaned into that soft caress. “I wanted to see you.” His hand fell back to his side, and she silently cried out at the loss of his touch. “There was business, however, I needed to . . . wanted to see to before I came here.”
“Business?” she echoed hollowly. The irony was not lost on her that they’d come full circle. Business was that which had brought him back into her life.
“My father wronged you. He’s since expressed regret for his treatment of you.” A muscle jumped at the corner of his eye. “I’ll not begin to explain for him or make apologies on his behalf, but . . .” His fingers curled into tight balls. “He proved your worst opinions about the nobility correct, and for that I am sorry.”
Disappointment threatened to overwhelm her. Connor had come to apologize for crimes that belonged to another. “You are no more responsible for his actions than I am of my father’s,” she said simply. “You showed me that.” He’d opened her eyes to the truth. Some in the nobility were as evil as Satan, but there were those who were good—not unlike the men and women born to the streets.
Connor sat forward in his seat. “I have operated the better part of my adult life believing I could right injustices.” Regret flashed within his eyes. “And yet Lords Middlethorne and Whitehaven—they’ll not rot in Newgate as they should for their crimes. They’ll not hang.” A seething rage spilled from his frame, and her heart ached anew with her love for him. His visceral reaction, that shared outrage—was for her.
She plucked at the fabric of her skirts. “Some are untouchable.” Those dark lords who’d sought to ruin her were amongst them. “You can never change that. No one can.”
He nodded. “Yes, some are. But everyone has weaknesses.” Connor’s gaze locked with hers. “Their reputations matter more to them than anything.” Ophelia stilled. What was he saying? “I made clear to Lords Middlethorne and Whitehaven that every scandal sheet would sing with the crimes they were guilty of . . . if they didn’t leave England.” Her heart quickened. “I promised them the moment they set foot on English soil, everyone would know their sins.”
The air exploded from her lungs. “You saw them exiled.” For me.
Connor cleared his throat. “It is less than they deserve, and I wished I could . . . do more.”
“Thank y-you,” she said, her voice catching. This man had shared in her fury and managed what no one else could . . . or ever would, for a girl born to the streets. She wanted to hurl herself in his arms and live in that embrace forever. And yet . . . “That was the business you were seeing to,” she murmured to herself. That had been the reason he’d not come sooner.
Connor took her hands in his and trailed his thumbs over the sensitive skin of the top of her fingers. That back-and-forth stroking sent little shivers from her palms all the way up her arm. “I had additional matters I needed to attend.”
His betrothal.
Her heart ached all over again. “I understand an arrangement was reached between you and the duchess,” she managed, her voice hoarse. With every admission, she left herself more and more exposed before him, but God help her, she’d no pride where this man was concerned.
Connor turned her closed hand over and brushed her palm open. “Have you ever had your future read?”
Blankly, she stared at their connected hands. Actually, she hadn’t. She’d always been too busy telling the futures of others. Incapable of words, she shook her head.
With the tip of his index finger, he trailed the intersecting line that met her wrist and followed it up to the center of her hand. “This is called your fate line.”
She studied him, wholly fixed on her palm. “What are you—?”
“There was a boy you once saved. You were destined to again meet.”
Aye, it had always seemed that way where she and Connor O’Roarke had been concerned. Their paths had been meant to cross and their fates to be inextricably intertwined. Only to be so neatly severed by Lady Bethany and her father. Several tears slipped down her cheeks.
“And this,” he murmured, grazing his fingertip over the horizontal line that met below her pinkie and following it to the middle of her hand, “is your love line.”
“Stop it,” she whispered, struggling against his grip, but he held firm.
“And in it I see a man who’s loved you so hopelessly and helplessly from the moment you entered his life as a mere child. A man who loves you even more now, as a woman of strength and courage and compassion.”
A little sob burst from her, and tears flooded her eyes, blurring his visage. “What game are ya playing?” she cried.
“There is no game,” he said, so collected. He lifted his gaze, meeting hers, and then resumed his reading. “This man will remind you how to smile and laugh and love.” Oh, God. Tears slid unchecked down her cheeks. “And there’ll be a babe. Many of them. At least four.”
A ragged sob tore from her throat.
“I offered to marry Bethany,” he said quietly.
Ophelia bit down hard on the inside of her cheek and struggled against him. She exploded to her feet. Wanting to flee. Wanting to escape him and this moment and the future.
“I did it to save you—”
“You don’t get to sacrifice yourself to save me,” she cried, tossing her arms up. “Not again.” Only he had.
“That reading,” he went on, motioning to her palms.
“You cannot steal my reading, Connor.” She knew precisely what her future would be without him in it: empty, bleak, with her married to a nob her brother approved of, and now it wouldn’t even matter. It wouldn’t matter because her heart had died in that cold Newgate cell.
“Ah, but you see, Ophelia.” Connor brushed back the moisture from her face, but there were other tears to take their place. “I can use that reading you gave me. Because our lives, like our hearts, have been forever intertwined. That future you saw for me . . . was true. Because it was linked to you.”
She covered her hand with her mouth, catching another sob.
His eyes grew somber. “Bethany freed me from her father’s expectation.”
Ophelia’s entire body went ramrod straight. Heart thudding wildly against her rib cage, she jerked her gaze to his. “What?”
“She explained that my friendship meant too much to ever keep me from the woman I love. That even as desperate as she was, she herself was unwilling to enter into another cold, empty union.”
She pressed a hand over her chest, willing his words to make sense. “What are you saying?”
He gathered her palms again and raised them one at a time to his lips, placing a lingering kiss upon her knuckles. “I am saying we are both . . . free. As such, the other business I spoke of . . . was with your brother.”
“My brother?” she echoed, desperately trying to follow.
He sank to a knee.
Ophelia gasped, jumping back a step.
“I am asking you to marry me. Even as I have no right.” No right? “My father wronged you, and because of him,” he went on hoarsely, “I’m the reason for your suffering—”
Ophelia buried the remainder of that admission behind her fingertips. “You are not allowed to take ownership of the actions of another, Connor. You rightfully wouldn’t allow it of me, and I’ll not allow it for you.”
“There will be only you, Ophelia,” he repeated, and this time, where she’d halted his profession before, she now needed it from him. Wanted it. “I love you.”
Joy exploded in her breast, but she hesitated.
“What is it?” he asked, his tone somber.
For all the time they’d known each other, from when she was a girl to this moment now, he’d made decisions that defined her future. Each time at the expense of his own. “I can’t have you like this,” she finally said, taking a step back.
His features contorted. “What? I . . . I don’t . . .” Connor shook his head.
She lifted her chin, needing him to see and understand. “You don’t get to sacrifice yourself for me, Connor. Not anymore. If you had married h-her . . .” Her voice broke, and she struggled around the despair stuck there. “There are many deaths a person can suffer,” she whispered. His marriage to Lady Bethany would have left her forever bereft. Ophelia stared beyond his shoulder. “I would have preferred the hanging.”
A sound of agony spilled from his lips. “I wanted you alive, even if it meant you’d never belong to me.”
Lifting her hands imploringly, she willed him to see. “I don’t want you to save me. I just want you to love me, Connor.”
“I do,” he said hoarsely. “I will not make decisions for you. Not any longer. Together, we’ll make them. No matter how difficult they may be, and no matter how much I might—”
Ophelia hurled herself into his arms. “I love you,” she rasped.
Connor grunted and fell back, taking her with him. “Will you m—?”
“Yes,” she breathed against his lips, cutting off that request.
As their laughter, free and unrestrained, spilled around the room, they released the chains on their past and embraced their future.