I miss you, and I love you.
Until we meet again, and I love you.
As if the words simply could not be repeated enough.
She saw him, and it was akin to coming alive, like the Tuscan sunflowers Miss Farnsworth had once described.Girasole, they were called in Italian, which translated asturns-toward-the-sun. Orsun-turners.
Isla felt like that. Tavish was her sun, and whenever he appeared, her entire soul rotated in his direction, helplessly drawn to his brilliant light.
Finally, she understood the profundity of every poet who had scribbled lines about love. What had Shakespeare said?
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Yes! That was the precise sentiment. Isla would cast herself to the very edge of doom—beyond, even!—before she would cease loving Tavish Balfour.
“What are we to do, Tavish?” she whispered.
Their situation felt untenable—a band stretched too taut that could snap at the slightest disturbance.
They never spoke of the future. But the deeper she fell in love, the less Isla could envision a life without Tavish.
He stroked her cheek with his thumb. “Ye do know that in Scotland, we don’t need permission to marry.”
“Yes. It’s why the English fly north to Gretna Green to tie the knot.”
“Aye. Anyone can marry here, even at our ages. It only requires two witnesses.”
“Is that all?”
Isla hadn’t thought . . .
Or, rather, shehadthought. Aboutit. Marriage and all its attendant activities . . . at great length and in shocking detail. She had even gone so far as to bribe one of the housemaids to tell her precisely what occurred in the marriage bed between a man and a woman.
She supposed most gently-born ladies would swoon over what the maid had described. Isla, however, had hung on every word. And then, to imagine engaging in that activity with Tavish.HerTavish.
The thought left her flushed and warm with a terrible, empty yearning deep in her belly.
“I have given it some thought. How we could go about a marriage . . .” Tavish began. “Or, rather, that is . . . if ye should like . . .” A ruddy flush crawled up his neck.
“Are you . . .” Isla stepped out of his arms. “Are you asking me to marry you, Tavish Balfour?”
He tugged on his neckcloth. “And if I am?”
Euphoria. That was the only word Isla could summon to describe the emotion that battered her breastbone.
Married.
To Tavish.
YES!
“Well,” she said, breathless. “If you ask me to marry you, I expect you to do it proper-like.”
“Proper-like?”
She pointed at the ground. “On your knees, of course. And including many flowery things about my person and your adoration of my virtues.”
