Page 22 of Better in Black
“You’re not really a lord,” James charged. “You don’t own any land! And you’re already married!”
The Beautiful Cordelia and Ajatara both looked at Lord Hawke in shock. Could it be true?
But James wasn’t done. “Also, you have seven children!”
“Seven?” Cordelia said, as this seemed ever so slightly beyond belief.
Lord Hawke’s head hung low. This was a man who had been unmasked. A fraud and a reprobate. And, yes, father to seven children.
“It’s true,” he admitted. “I need to marry you for the money.”
“You never loved me at all?” Cordelia said, just making sure.
“Never,” Lord Hawke said. “I’m actually quite devoted to my wife. But seven children are very expensive.”
“Get out of here before I chop you up and feed you to Krog,” Ajatara said, glaring at the useless would-be bigamist.
Lord Hawke, who also wasn’t quite as brave as he’d pretended to be, scurried away.
Which left James and Cordelia to face each other. They were both smiling, despite the bizarre situation and their ridiculous clothes.
Lucie bit the end of her pen. Slowly, she wrote:
Sometimes, the first love that presents itself is not the truest; sometimes it is only when we learn the truth of ourselves that we can understand what it means to love. Long ago, when the Beautiful Cordelia first met Lord Hawke, she had barely been more than a child. She had been innocent, and rather foolish, and it was no surprise she had fallen for his lies along with his admittedly very handsome face.
But from all her adventures, the Beautiful Cordelia had learned quite a lot…
Lucie wrote, and she was thinking about Cordelia, the fictional one and the real one, but maybe, just a little, she was also thinking about herself, and the foolish young girl she had been when her own love story began. She wrote:
She’d learned about courage, about truth, about love. And also about herself. She was now ready to fall in love for what would truly be the first time. And the last.
“I love you, Cordelia,” James said. “Marry me.”
“I will!” Cordelia said.
It seemed like a perfectly happy ending.
It seemed like the end. But as Lucie stared at the page with a sinking feeling, she knew it very much wasn’t. More was needed—from her. She wrote:
Cordelia turned to Ajatara in confusion. “Why isn’t it working?”
“It’s still not believable,” Ajatara said. “There’s no character development. Cruel Prince James has never met the Beautiful Cordelia before. How can he love her if he doesn’t even know her?”
“I know her perfectly,” James said. “Better than my own heart.”
“Ah, then you must know of the sadness in hers,” Ajatara said. “And as long as there is sadness in her heart, there can be no happy ending.”
Cordelia shook her head, her red hair flying. “No. I have my true love. What could I possibly have to be sad about?”
But James looked into her eyes. Then, without any cruelty at all—with a surprising degree of gentleness, in fact—he touched two fingers lightly to her heart. “I know you, Cordelia. When you said you wanted to talk to me, I sensed something was troubling you. Ajatara is right. I can sense your sadness. And I know why it’s there.”
“Why?” Cordelia said. She sounded genuinely curious. Maybe this was the true meaning of love: someone who saw you so clearly that when your feelings swirled in confusion, he could explain you to yourself.
James knelt before her, as if to propose marriage, again. Instead he proposed a solution to the abiding mystery of her melancholy.
“We are the main characters in the stories of our lives,” James said. “Everyone is. And maybe there’s a part of you that worries what happens, now that it feels as if the love part of the story is over. Everything we went through—some of it was terrible. Some of it was wonderful. But there’s a reason books always end at happily ever after. It’s not because the story doesn’t keep going. It does—it’s just that nobody wants to read about the business of going about daily life, loving each other while you bicker about who forgot to call for a hansom cab and where are the tea towels and such. People want to read the exciting part, when it’s all risk and danger and will they or won’t they end up together. But it doesn’t matter whether anyone else wants to read the rest of our story, Cordelia. What matters is whether we want to live it together. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“You’re right,” Cordelia said in amazement, and pulled James to his feet. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted, too.”
