His laugh was rough as he took her chin and tilted it to him. “No more time for that tonight, love.”
Love. The word cut through her, hitting those same chords as before, the echoes speaking its own melody. And she knew. Sheknew.
“I think I do,” she blurted, her hands still on his body, her eyes on his. “I think I do love you, Percy. I just didn’t know until this moment.”
Chapter Twelve
Percy stared at his wife. Four years of heartbreak, and now he was hearing the words he’d spent so many hours dreaming on her lips.
I love you.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it.
He sat heavily, and although Cecily appeared almost ghostly pale in the single flame of the candle, he thought he saw her smile. Dazed, he slid the hand on her chin to cup her face. “Do you mean it?”
“I thought love was—” She frowned as she looked away, eyes distant. A little lost, even. “I thought it was how I felt when I met William. But it’s not like that with you. Well, that is, sometimes it does feel like I’m floating—it did when we . . .” Her throat tightened with a swallow, and he stared at it, knowing it was almost unseemly for a man of his age to have so lost himself to desire, but here it was. His wife undid him in every conceivable way. “But then I felt other things.” Her eyes, shockingly dark in this light, returned to his. “So many other things. I thought lovewould be simple, but there is nothing simple about this. I’m only just discovering these parts of myself. And I’m afraid.”
He knew the fear that came with love; he’d been feeling it every day for years.
He took the hand that rested on his stomach and brought her knuckles to his lips. “Love is not always easy, and it is not always the beautiful, pleasant thing you read about in novels. Sometimes, it is the very darkest parts of ourselves, the worst pieces, brought to the light. With you, I am hungry, and I am jealous, and I am always scared—not of losing you, but of never having you the way I always dreamt.”
Her gaze slid downward, to where he twitched, already half hard again. Perhaps he was an old man compared to her, but his body made him feel young again—or perhaps she did.
Even so, he wanted her elsewhere, not here.
“Not yet,” he said, kissing her knuckles again, then leaning in to kiss her soft lips. She responded with more enthusiasm than he’d been expecting, and he hardened fully. “Let’s wait until we’re home and in my own bed.”
She raised her brows. “Isn’t it customary for a gentleman to visit hiswife’sbed?”
“Perhaps.” He drew her down beside him, tucking the covers around them both. They were on their way home, and his wife loved him. The tension he’d been carrying since he’d lost control eased into relief. “But I would rather have you in my bed. And then, you see, I would rather have you remain the rest of the night with me.”
After a moment, she relaxed into his embrace. “Is that customary?”
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
This time, when he kissed her, she gave up on any attempt at conversation.
In the morning, certainly for the first time in a long time, Cecily awoke with her husband beside her, his body pressed against hers. At first, she felt nothing but contentment. Then, as she remembered the previous night—the things she had done and the way she’d behaved—panic flooded her. She tensed, remembering the wanton way she’d gasped and moaned and rubbed herself against him. The way she’d come apart in his arms.
If her mother only knew how little she had behaved like a lady . . .
His arms tightened around her. “Don’t even think about running,” he said, his voice still rough from sleep.
Heavens above, she had told him she loved him. And she’d meant it. All this worrying about what love meant, what it felt like, and when the realisation had come, it had been a quiet knowing. An understanding of the world that, until then, had been denied to her.
Love, at least with Percy, was not the wild, unrestrained thing she’d imagined it to be with William. It was not found in overblown compliments and insincere flirting—it was here, pressed against her husband’s chest, his breath in her hair, and a sense of contentment that soaked through her like her warm bath.
“Cecily?” Percy’s hand moved up her arm. Then down. “How do you feel this morning?”
“Mm. Good.” She touched the arm that banded around her stomach. “You?”
“Mm.” She heard the smile in his voice. “Good.”
“I do have a question.”
“Oh?”
“Can we do that again? When we return home?”
