He surveyed the roof, the new slates clean and sharp among the remnants of the old, repairing leaks and keeping the castle watertight. He hadn’t thought about leaky roofs or, honestly, any creature comfort in months. They simply existed now.
This was Leah, he thought.
This was what Leah did.
She quietly inserted herself into one’s life and silently went about improving things, until one day, you realizedeverythingwas better for her presence.
Her soul—bright and love-filled—expanded outward, taking everyone into her care.
The wind buffeted him, tugging at his jacket and rumpling his hair. The air smelled of Scotland—damp earth and blooming heather and wild moor.
It smelled of home.
Only . . . Fox had never had a home. Not really.
The English countryside and, at times, London had been his home as a child, but neither had ever felt like a place he belonged. His mother’s madness and his father’s financial instability had seen to that.
The army had offered a sense of belonging—the men he knew there . . . Dennis, in particular—but the army was hardly a home.
India had never been home. More like a way point on a journey to someplace else.
Scotland was his chosen place of residence, his refuge.
But right now, thehomethudding under his sternum was not a place, but a person.
Leah.
Shewashome to him.
All his exhaustion, the weary thinness of his soul, had slowly healed under the care of her hands. She had nurtured and prodded and loved him back from the half-life he had been living.
It blindsided him then.
A deep welling of emotion rising upward and scouring all pain and doubt in its wake.
A brilliant white-hot wave of . . . love.
Complete. Undeniable.
Yes.Thiswas love.
He loved her.
Fox Carnegie loves Leah Penn-Leith.
The thought filled him with wonder, with awe, with rightness.
He loved the faint hint of a dimple in her left cheek when she smiled. The way her hips swayed beneath her skirts as she walked. The quiet strength of her nimble mind.
He leaned a hand on the parapet, as if his body were unequal to withstanding the force of all thefeelingcurrently swelling his chest.
This was nothing like what he had felt for Honoria.
That had been more akin to obsession, he could see that now. Securing her hand had been like betting at a racetrack and choosing the winning filly.
Such emotions had hardly brought out the best in him. It had rendered him heedless, peevish, and jealous—insecurities Honoria had preyed upon like a professional. She had required his unwavering devotion and punished him when he hadn’t followed her rules.
Leah made no such demands.
