If anything?
But she kept the last question to herself, too terrified to ask it.
“Youchanged,” he said, taking her by surprise. “You changedme, Helena. I have been in love with you for years, and for years, I have been fighting the feelings, tamping them down, dismissing them. But I realized that I am fighting a losing battle, a battle I no longer want to win. I surrender, hellion. To you. To love. Tous.”
Us, he had said.
Yes, oh yes.She liked the sound of that very much. Her husband was exceeding her every hope and it was too good to be true. Had he just officially surrendered?
To her?
She grinned at him. “I was not aware this was a war between us.”
“Mayhap a war of my own making.” He grimaced. “A war of the past and the present, of old ghosts and new.”
Helena shook her head. “I do not want to go to battle with you, Gabe. I just want to love you. I have always wanted to love you, from the first I saw you.”
“God, woman.” He pressed his forehead to hers, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply. “You undo me. You complete me.”
This was what she wanted to hear. What she had spent years dreaming she would hear. From these lips. Helena could not wait a moment more. She lowered her head and captured his mouth with hers.
Helena’s lips wereon his, moving in a sweetly possessive kiss. He tugged her head lower, deepening the pressure, devouring her as best as he could. She was intoxicating. Delicious. Everything he had always wanted and everything he had been warned against.
And yet, she was his wife.
She had done all she could today to protect him. For him, she would have placed herself in a position of potentially great danger. Just the thought of Lord Algernon Forsyte ever so much as laying a finger upon her was enough to make Gabe haul her closer, crushing her against him. He kissed her as if he could forever claim her with his lips.
Because he intended to. There was no more fighting the way he felt for her. What was the sense in pretending he was not hopelessly, helplessly in his wife’s thrall? He was. He had been at her mercy for longer than he had even realized.
He loved her.
That was the strange sensation he had not been able to shake, ever since the day their paths had first crossed, on that long-ago country house weekend when he had accompanied his old school chum on the hunt. He had found a spirited young lady with golden hair, emerald eyes, and a flashing, quick wit.
She had been what he had wanted, all this time. And for so long, he had resisted.
As he slid his tongue into her mouth and deepened the kiss, he mourned all the time he had wasted. What he had once been convinced was the correct path for him to trod had been proven, beyond a doubt, to be a farce today. The woman Grandfather had deemed to be a perfect countess—the same woman who had encouraged Gabe to take a mistress rather than bed her—had conspired against Helena. He could not bear to think of what she could have endured as a result.
It was too much.
He needed his wife. He needed Helena, of the white-blonde hair and the enchanting freckles on her dainty nose and the tiniest gap between her front teeth and the lips that knew just how to kiss his, the body that was meant for his, the heart that beat to the same rhythm.
The woman who loved him.
He had held the knowledge of Helena’s feelings deep within himself for so long, terrified of what it meant. Afraid to embrace it as he longed to do. But here and now, in this moment, with the woman he loved in his lap and her mouth on his, he could celebrate both her love and his.
They would not be bound by the constraints of the past. He knew that now. Rather, they would be shaped by the hopes of the future. Their future.
Together.
A rapping on the carriage alerted him, belatedly, to the fact that they had rolled to a stop. Reluctantly, Gabe tore his mouth from Helena’s. A glance out the window confirmed they had reached Wickley House. But what was happening between them was far from over. Rather, they had just begun.
He kissed the corners of her lips and then the tip of her nose for good measure. “We have arrived at home. Shall we continue this conversation in privacy?”
“If by privacy, you are suggesting we go inside and head straight to one of our chambers, I wholeheartedly approve,” she said.
He kissed her again. “My God, what did I ever do to be so fortunate as to have you as my wife?”
“You attended a country house party when I was sixteen and made me fall in love with you,” she said breathlessly, and then sealed their lips in another kiss.
