Chapter 7 - The Unspoken Shift
He looked at her for a long, silent moment, the cool wind blowing a stray lock of dark hair across her forehead.
"When I asked you to help me with my speech," Elias continued, his voice dropping into a rough, intimate whisper, "I thought I was hiring someone to teach me how to pretend to have a heart."
Nora held her breath, her brown eyes wide as she listened.
"Instead," Elias said, "you showed me that I had one all along—I had just locked it away where no one could hurt it."
"Elias..." Nora started, her voice trembling slightly.
"Celeste thought she was insulting you by saying you didn't belong beside me," Elias murmured, his fingers brushing gently against Nora’s cheek, his warm thumb tracing her jawline with a tenderness that shattered every defense she had built over forty years. "She thought I needed a trophy. A ornament to show off at galas."
He stepped closer, his heavy frame blocking out the cold wind, surrounding her with his warmth and his presence.
"You were never the woman I needed to hide, Nora," Elias whispered, his grey eyes locked onto her lips before rising back to meet her gaze. "You were the only woman who ever saw me."
Nora felt her entire world shift on its axis.
All her life, she had believed that love was a game for the young, the polished, and the unblemished. She had believed that her quiet life, her age, her modest career, and her independence meant she was destined to watch the grand romances of the world from the sidelines.
Yet here stood Elias Vescari—a man who could have any woman in the city—looking at her as if she were the only person in the universe who mattered.
May you like
And suddenly, Nora realized the real question wasn't whether Elias Vescari would stand beside her.
It was why he had been waiting so long to do it.
