Page 130 of Charlotte
“You read beautifully,” she said. “You know poems by heart and you understand books. Your letters—”
“Were badly spelled.”
“Yes.”
His gaze dropped. “My mother taught me to read from what she had. Scripture, poems, old schoolbooks, whatever she could keep dry while we followed Pa through the camps. I learned words by sight and sound. I could read them long before I could spell them.”
“That is not shameful.”
“It was in camp.” His jaw tightened. “Men can forgive a man for not reading. They know what to do with that. A man who reads Tennyson and still spells like a boy invites a particular kind of laughter.”
Lottie’s heart twisted.
“So, you made your letters shorter.”
“Rougher, too. Safer. I thought if I wrote plain enough, no one would expect much from me.”
“I expected you.” His eyes lifted. “I read those misspelled letters and expected the man inside them,” she said. “Not because the spelling was fine, but because the heart was.”
His mouth trembled once before he mastered it.
“Never doubt me like that again, Cecil Peterson,” she whispered.
“Never.”
“I mean it. Never decide what I can carry before I have touched the weight myself.”
“I won’t.”
“Never make your fear sound like kindness.”
“No.”
“Finally, never ask Preacher Sutton to release me from anything unless I am standing close enough to object.”
A real smile touched his mouth then, small and broken and beautiful. “I will remember that.”
“You had better.”
He looked down at her hand. “Charlotte Bellamy, I love you. I love your books, your temper, your hope, your dreadful habit of being right when I most wish you weren’t, and the way you looked at my hand as if it still belonged in the world.” His voice roughened. “If you still want the whole of me, I am asking you to marry me.”
Lottie’s tears slipped free; she did not bother wiping them away.
“Yes, my darling Cecil. Yes. I still want you. I love you. I have loved you since before it was sensible, and I expect I shall continue long after it becomes inconvenient.”
He took one step toward her. She put a hand against his chest. “You may not kiss me yet.”
His eyes darkened. “No?”
“No. You asked the preacher a question, and I have been waiting a long time to be kissed by my husband.”
The look he gave her nearly melted every bone she owned.
“Then let us not keep you waiting.”
The wedding took place at the edge of the dock.
It was unconventional enough to distress Mrs. Hanford and romantic enough to delight Mrs. Beck beyond speech, which Lottie considered a balanced civic outcome.
