"By hook or by crook?" Cleav repeated, a smile stretching across his face. "Or by garters."
"Cleavis!" Esme protested. "How could you believe that I married you for your house?"
"I don't anymore," he said. "When I saw you this evening, my proud, imposing Esme, who knows she's just as good as everybody else, trying to hide her light under a bushel of meaningless manners, I knew you loved me."
Reaching for her, he pressed her tightly against his shirt as if he wanted to fuse herself with his own. "Nothing but real, true love could have made you humble yourself."
"I am humble! I failed you," Esme whispered against his chest. "I've embarrassed you in front of your friends. I know how much their opinion matters to you."
Cleav shook his head. "No, you don't, Esme," he said. "Because it doesn't matter. You love me for myself. That's a hundred times more fulfilling than having the whole world love me for something I can pretend to be."
"Oh, Cleav," Esme wailed. "You deserve to have a lady, a real lady."
Cleav smoothed her brow with one long finger.
"I have a lady, Mrs. Rhy," he whispered. "I have you."
"I'm no lady! You saw that tonight."
"You are a lady, and you always have been. I saw that one morning in church."
"In church?"
"The day they gave your family that charity basket," he said. "We humiliated you. But you never cowered or cried or hid your face. You raised your chin and just looked right past us. You knew you were as good as anybody. And you've taught me that I am, too."
His lips found hers, and he tasted her gently.
"All this to-do about being civilized and proper," he said. "It's kept me in a stew for too many years. Finery and genteel conversation don't make us ladies or gentlemen. City folks have their ways and we have ours. When we try to be what we're not, we only shame ourselves."
"You mean you want me to be just Esme Crabb?"
Cleav smiled. "I want you to be Esme Rhy," he said. "I want you to be the lady that I love."
He kissed her then, and the sweetness was such that Esme couldn't let it go. She answered his lips with urgent exploration of her own.
Their bodies strained against each other in passion both remembered and renewed. Esme felt the now familiar warmth melting her loins, and she eagerly squirmed to meld that fire against the evidence of his response.
"I love you," Cleav whispered. "I've wanted to tell you that every day, every time I've touched you. I've wanted to say it and now I can't stop."
"I love you, Cleav," Esme answered. "I don't know if it was that first day in the store or later when I got to know you. But I couldn't live without you, and I would have done anything to keep you, to help you, to make you happy."
"Even pretend to be something you are not," Cleav said accurately.
"I'd swim like a fish if it was what you wanted," she declared.
Cleav's smile was naughty. "Swimming was not quite what I had in mind," he said. "But if I take you upstairs, will you promise to wiggle like a trout out of water?"
Esme giggled and then shook her head reprovingly. "Only if you promise to give me another of those no-hands fish looks."
"Can't promise that, ma'am," he answered. "Tonight I'm planning to put these hands all over you."
"Well," Esme suggested. "How about prissy talk? Can I expect some of that at least?"
"My dear Mrs. Rhy, I vow to eloquate with such magnificence that you will find yourself incapable of resisting supine repose for the remainder of the evening."
"Mmmm," she replied appreciatively.
Cleav grasped her hand, and they hurried to the house like eager children.
