“We’re ready,” he said with a stiff nod at the clergyman.
And as the clergyman began a soft litany of questions, Temple faced her.Without taking his gaze from her, he slipped a finger beneath the wrist of her glove, tugged.Her pulse exploded at his touch, pounding to get to him.His touch scorched the back of her hand as he freed it from her glove, shoved that slip of lace in his breast pocket like a handkerchief.
She raised a brow, a question.
He raised a brow too, an answer.He never wore gloves.Perhaps now she shouldn’t either.
In the pews, every gathered eye burned hard on the scene they made.The clergyman stumbled over his words.
But Temple, still holding her gaze, tugged off her other glove, folded it as well.Then he put it with its mate in his pocket.The grin that slid across his wicked lips should have brought God from the heavens to smite them.It didn’t.But, God, it promised heaven right here on earth.More precisely in Temple’s bed.
He threaded their fingers together, and their rings rested side by side.They seemed to pulse to the same rhythm, and that rhythm invaded her, reset her own body’s beatings and patters and shushes.The rings were not done binding them.She felt the multi-colored light prodding with little sunlight tendrils, wanting everywhere.
For theright couple, the binding would go bone deep and ocean wide, wrapping every inch of them up in the other, a golden twine that would never break, no matter how far life forced them from one another.
How far wouldthisbinding go?Until there were no dark spaces left only to her, until he invaded every inch and corner?
No.She couldn’t allow it.There would always be one corner he could not get to.Itmustbe that way.
The clergyman asked them to repeat their vows, the same words she’d heard over and over again in transcendent weddings.They felt meaningless now compared to the ones she and Temple had exchanged last night.
But her vow…My loyalty is yours until I die.That was the one without meaning.
The clergyman pronounced them man and wife, and Temple kissed her as if he’d been born for it, leaving not an inch of himself back as their small audience roared their approval.
Diana locked her tears away with her secrets.
Because she’d just married the one man she wished to share them both with.
But never would.
