He clenched his jaw. “I think I must. I want to tell you what he did to my mother. And the rest…I want to tell you that as well.”
When he could manage it, he meant to add. But his voice was already ragged, his nerves frayed. Tonight had already taken a great deal out of him, and they had yet to even scratch the surface of what they would need to discuss.
“I am ready to listen whenever you are able to share it,” she told him. “There is no rush. We have the rest of our lives.”
Without asking, she seemed to know what he needed better than he did. One of her many gifts.
“Thank you, Tilly.” How easy and sweet her name felt on his lips. After so long. The last bastion of his defense against her fell.
Her fingers squeezed his. “At last.”
How far they had come. From the day they had met at Coddington Hall until now. They had been brought together by the most unlikely of sources. But fate and love had always drawn them back together, even after they had been torn apart. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, but all the emotion swelling in his chest rendered it difficult to speak.
This too, she seemed to understand. So she said it for him.
“I have never stopped loving you, Adrian. Not for one moment. When I thought I had lost you, I loved you, and even when you returned to me and you were furious with me for what had happened to you, I loved you still. Nothing matters but that.”
His eyes were suddenly stinging. How brave she was. She astounded him. Humbled him.
Amazed him.
He extricated his hand from hers.
“Come here,” he said through a throat gone thick.
“There is no place to go,” she said. “I am at your side.”
Where she belonged. But there was another place she belonged more. In his arms.
His hands found her waist, and he shifted her, pulling her across his lap. She clutched at his shoulders, head tipped back, emerald eyes burning into his. There was a smile on her lips he wanted to claim with his mouth.
“This is where I want you,” he told her, seized with so many sensations at once.
Desire, love, triumph.
There was approximately an acre of silk and all manner of undergarments and bustle between them, massive and unwieldy. He did not give a damn. She was atop him, a welcome weight, a precious bundle he wished he could carry in his arms all the way up the front walk of Haddon House. His ankle would no longer allow such feats. He would have to settle for having her positioned thus for the carriage ride only.
“This is where I want to be, Adrian. With you. Always, only, forever with you.”
Blast it, his vision was going blurry. The stinging was tears, he realized with amazement. Slipping down his cheeks now.
He had not shed them since the earliest days of his imprisonment. Emotion was discouraged at Dunsworth. Part of the punishment. Prisoners needed to reform themselves with silence and numbness. Eventually, he had become numb. Quiet and inured. A number filled with inner rage, a demand for revenge which had proven futile.
The one man upon whom he should have exacted revenge was forever beyond his reach. Tilly, however, was not.
“Oh my love, my darling.” She kissed his cheeks, quick pecks traveling everywhere. Kissed his nose.
He was reminded of that long-ago day on the lake in Derbyshire, when he had teased her with kisses everywhere but upon her mouth. He had once believed life to be flat. A line that traveled upon a predetermined trajectory, with a finite beginning, a middle, an end. But here was an astounding revelation brought upon by the miracle of the woman in his arms. Life was not flat at all. Instead, it was a circle, with no beginning and no end. Life was infinity, boundless. Where they had begun, so too they had returned.
They would always return to each other.
They were inevitable.
She continued kissing his face, catching every tear with her lips until no more fell, and they simply sat there as the carriage rattled over the London roads, gazing at each other in rapt fascination.
“Do you remember that day on the lake?” he asked softly.
“How could I forget?” A smile curved her mouth, which was still wet with the sheen of the tears she had collected. “You insulted my hat and pretended to throw it overboard.”
