Fitzsimmons and Victorian era? 😁
When she nearly runs from the ballroom, Fitz goes after her.
The orchestra is already striking up another waltz to disguise the sound of her sudden exit. Never mind that the loveliest debutante of the season has caught her fiance in an embrace with another woman behind the potted palms. Never mind that the man who is supposed to cherish Jemma for the rest of her life looked through her with bored eyes like she meant nothing at all.
Fitz is seething and if it weren’t for the fact that Jemma needs him, he would cheerfully break her fiance’s nose. Quite possibly his jaw as well. It wouldn’t be his first fight over Jemma. At Cambridge, when one of his classmates insulted her newly wealthy family and coal magnate father, Trip had to keep him from challenging the other man to a duel. There’s something about Jemma that’s always been able to hit him where he’s most vulnerable, settling firmly around his heart and refusing to let go.
She’s trying very hard not to cry on the balcony. He can tell from how tightly her hands are gripping the stone of the railing and from the flush of color high on her cheekbones. It’s the same look she had when her first rabbit died at eleven or when her anonymous paper was rejected from the Royal Academy at seventeen or when her mother first told her whose proposals she would be expected to accept.
“I don’t want to marry him,” she says plainly, her eyes glittering with unshed tears as she tilts her face up towards him. “The idea of having to see him every morning for the rest of my life—I can’t, Fitz.”
“Then don’t marry him,” he says, as if it were that simple. “Run off to Scotland and raise prize herding dogs and become wonderfully eccentric.”
“It doesn’t work that way for me. My family are all expecting a dazzling match and I—don’t you see that I have to marry someone?” She’s worrying at the massive diamond ring on her finger, twisting the band back and forth as if she could twist it off and let it drop into the night, and her brown eyes are deep and sad and Fitz loves her so much that his heart aches a little with it.
“Then marry me,” he blurts out. Jemma’s eyes go wide as saucers.
“Marry me,” he repeats. “We’ll run off to Scotland together. It’ll be a tremendous scandal but I don’t really give a damn and my family won’t either. You might have to wear plaid to the wedding but if–”
Jemma surges forward and kisses him fiercely. It’s a little like what he imagines heaven must feel like. Her mouth is impossibly soft and clever and his hands fit perfectly around the curve of her waist and her breath catches a little in her throat when he bites her lip and Fitz wonders why on earth they haven’t been doing this for years.
“What are you doing?” he whispers when she finally releases her grip on his cravat.
“Making sure that I can’t marry anyone else but you, of course,” she says and kisses him again.