But her heart beat steadily. She could feel.
And she felt the warmth of his next words before he even said them.
“I love you, Theodosia.”
A bolt of joy burst through her, more powerful than the sizzle of lightning in the sky.
Roman held her more tightly and spoke a promise into her eyes. “I know I’m not the kind of man you—I didn’t go to school long—you can’t love a man like me because—well, because I don’t have a diploma of any kind. But Theodosia,” he murmured tenderly, “I swear I’ll get one. I’ll learn everything you know. I’ll practice using good word choices. I’ll study the stars, the sun, and plant roots. I’ll learn Latin and Swedish, and I’ll never be roinous, facinorous, or tonitruous again. I’ll try to be everything you want me to be, Theodosia, if that will help you to love me the way I love you.”
His poignant vow made her weep. She reached up and lost sight of her hands as she buried them within the mass of his raven hair. “You already are, Roman, and I already do,” she declared through her tears. “I have loved you since the day I first saw you.”
He crushed her to him, then kissed tears and rain from her face. “Marry me, Theodosia.”
She touched her lips to his and tasted not only her tears, but his as well. “On one condition,” she whispered.
“Anything. God, anything at all.”
She smiled into eyes almost too blue to be true. “I desire to possess the same wisdom you do, Roman,” she murmured with all the love she felt for him. “Therefore I will marry you only if you’ll teach me common sense.”
Remembering all the hundreds of illogical things he’d seen her do and heard her say, he decided it would take an entire lifetime to teach common sense to her.
An entire lifetime. Spent with a woman so beautiful, so wonderful, that he could not understand what good thing he’d done to deserve such a precious gift.
“Agreed, Miss Worth,” he whispered tenderly.
“Then I will marry you, Mr. Montana.”
Smiling a lopsided grin, he leaned down to her. And as his lips met hers, he made a wondrous discovery.
Sacrificing in the name of love was not sacrificing at all.
For in giving one received more than one ever dreamed of having.
Epilogue
Her arms full of freshly pickedbluebonnets, Theodosia gazed out over twenty-five thousand acres of the richest grassland the Rio Grande Plains had to offer. In separate fields raced Thoroughbred stallions, the very best from her father’s farm in New York. In other meadows fine Spanish mares grazed along with their beautiful foals.
And riding toward her astride a gray stallion, his long ebony hair spilling about his broad shoulders, was the man who had pulled a castle from the air and planted it on solid ground.
The sight of him never failed to mesmerize her. “Roman,” she whispered into the warm spring breeze.
He stopped Secret before her. “If you don’t quit picking so many bluebonnets, there won’t be a one left in the entire state of Texas, sweetheart.”
She glanced down at the mass of blue-flowered stalks in her arms. “Roman, I will have you know that I have collected thousands of seeds to plant. I would never pick so many flowers without thought to their survival.”
He realized she hadn’t understood that he’d only been teasing her and smiled over her endearing lack of common sense. “Oh, well in that case Texas has nothing to fear. The name Theodosia Montana will go down in history as the woman who saved the bluebonnet from extinction.”
A small head with a mop of black curls upon it poked out from behind him. “How is your research, Mommy? Will Dr. Wallaby be pleased with your findings when he comes to visit us from Brazil?”
She gazed lovingly at her precocious five-year-old daughter, the child she’d once thought would belong to Lillian and Upton. “I suspect Dr. Wallaby will be highly pleased, Genevieve. I have not as yet made the startling discovery he hopes for, but I feel I am at the brink.”
She glanced at the assortment of microscopes, racks of vials and test tubes, and piles of notebooks she’d placed on sturdy wooden tables beneath the towering oak tree. Dr. Wallaby had been ecstatic over her offer to remain in Texas and continue his search for the cure for impotence.
She’d never seen the green jungles of Brazil, and she never would.
But every morning when she opened her eyes, she saw the heaven-blue of Roman’s eyes.
“When will you tell me what discovery you are trying to make, Mommy?” Genevieve asked. She lifted her leg over the saddle and, with her father’s help, slid to the ground.
