Her voice trembled, and she reached up to dash a tear from her cheek. “When I think of things like that, it’s a miracle you came back to find me at all, because I certainly don’t deserve your love.”
“Oh, Jess.” His own voice shook as he gathered her close and leaned down until their foreheads touched. “If you don’t deserve my love, then I don’t deserve yours either.”
“Mine’s barely worth having, as selfish as it is.”
“I’m not nearly so ready to say your love doesn’t matter. You were the only person who ever looked at me and saw potential, a future, what I could be instead of where I’d come from. To everyone else, I was the son of the town drunk or a piece of immigrant trash. But not to you, never to you.”
“No, instead you were a workhorse I whipped when you didn’t bring home enough money.” Another tear slipped down her cheek, but rather than wipe it away, she left it to glitter in the lantern light.
He pressed his lips to her skin, absorbing the little bead of moisture. “It wasn’t quite that bad. Even now, you see my scars as a testimony rather than a scourge.”
“Maybe. But there’s so much else I should have done differently.”
“We both did wrong. We both need to forgive.”
“I forgive you, Thomas, for all of it. I just hope you’ll forgive me too.”
“Everything’s already forgiven, angel.” He drew her head down to his chest, cradling it against the very scar he’d hesitated to show her. This must be what forgiveness did, not take away a person’s scars so much as overlook them, make them not matter anymore.
She sighed and wrapped her arms around him, and he held her there, in the middle of the room beneath the flicker of lantern light early on Christmas morning.
He’d have stood there with her until dawn arrived in a handful of hours, but she shifted eventually, turning in his arms until her lips brushed the mangled skin of his shoulder.
He stilled, the gesture somehow more intimate than all the kisses they’d shared before, even the ones that had led to their three daughters. Then her lips traveled higher on his shoulder, then to his neck. The underside of his jaw.
“Jess,” he groaned. “What are you doing?”
“Loving you. The way a wife is supposed to love her husband.” She was standing on her tiptoes now, but still not quite able to reach his cheek.
He leaned down and let her soft lips brush the side of his face. “Let me love you back. Tonight, in our bed. Like a husband is supposed to love his wife.”
She broke her kisses and looked up, her eyes large and luminous. “That seems like the best Christmas present you could give me.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Stockings?” Claire wrinkled her nose at the gift in her father’s hand. “Ma got you stockings?”
Heat crept up the back of Jessalyn’s neck. It had seemed like a good present the other week at the mercantile. But after what she and Thomas had shared last night…
She glanced over her shoulder at the bedroom door. The gift didn’t seem like nearly enough for the man who’d spent last night loving her. Nor did the gift seem like enough for the man who’d come back to protect her and their daughters after nearly dying in an abandoned mine shaft.
Her second present wasn’t going to seem like enough either. And what would he say about her third present—she reached into her pocket and fingered the rough object resting inside—if she even had the courage to give it to him?
“I suppose she did get me stockings.” Thomas turned the black hosiery over in his hand before looking up at her.
Jessalyn swallowed. It didn’t matter that she stood near the sofa while he was on the other side of the room by the window. He may as well have added ten logs to the fire with the way his gaze made her skin burn.
“Don’t worry though.” A slow smile tilted his lips, and he winked. Actually winked. As though they were school children and he’d just offered to share his lunch with her. “That’s not the only present she gave me.”
Oh dear heavens. Her neck flamed. Did the girls know what their father was talking about? She glanced at Olivia, laying on the couch with a hand pressed to her ear, probably in too much pain to even remember what her father had said. Claire and Megan were on the floor by Thomas’s feet, playing with the ribbons they’d opened a few minutes ago.
Olivia repositioned her hand over her ear and let out a small groan.
“Have another sip of tea, dear.” Jessalyn bent and held the mug of bitter willow bark tea to her oldest daughter’s mouth. The poor girl had gone over a month without an earache, only to wake up on Christmas morning with one so severe she had trouble walking.
“I got a ribbon, see?” Megan held up the strip of shiny pink fabric, then looked around, a frown creeping onto her face. “Where’s my new dress to match the ribbon?”
“I don’t have a dress for you this year. Remember how the shop burned?” She’d already explained they’d be short on presents, but evidently Megan hadn’t understood what she’d been saying.
