Except, he quickly proved himself a liar by saying likewe can’t get naked in this carriage, Clio, andI couldn’t figure out how to get us back in these damned outfits if I tried. He was not to be moved, not even when she gave her most expressive pout.
“I’m not going to carry you in from the street without your clothes, princess,” he argued, which she supposed was rational except for all the ways that rationality itself seemed idiotic right now.
They finally made it home, and barely soon enough, as Clio felt that she was about to catch fire andburnthe clothes off them if they didn’t move quickly.
Again, she half-dragged him, the distance between the front steps and their bedchambers—or his study, or the library, or anywhere with a reasonably private flat surface—seemed far too long. It was made even longer when Hector stopped allowing her to drag him and said, “Wait.”
She pinned him with a look.
“Hector,” she said, and even though she said it as pointedly as she could, he smiled. It made it very hard not to smile back. “If we wait, I willdie.”
He only smiled more at this very serious threat.
“Come on, princess,” he said, this time tugging her toward a parlor at the front of the house. “I have something to show you.”
“Andthenyou will take me to bed?” she demanded.
His fingers tightened briefly around hers.
“Yes,” he said, sounding a bit strangled. “Lord, woman, you’re killing me. But yes. Just … let me show you.”
He crossed to a shelf and produced …
“It’s a toy train,” she said, accepting the item with careful fingers. Because it wasn’t just any toy train, it was one that triggered a memory. “The one that I broke, in the shop.”
“Aye,” he said, reaching out to touch a place where the toy had been patched over with plaster and paint. It wasn’t perfect—it wasn’t as though it had never been broken—but it was clearly fixed. “I fixed it. I had a devil of a time getting the shopkeeper to find the thing. But he still had it lurking around, and I offered to pay full price for it, so he didn’t have much reason to argue.”
“But … why?” she said, tracing her fingers over the faint scars on the toy from where it had been damaged.
Hector’s hands came to cover hers.
“This is what I do,” he said. “I fix things. But …” He cleared his throat. “I do not know how to fix a marriage alone. I want to. But I can’t do it by myself. So, I was thinking … perhaps, if you agreed to be by my side, we could fix it together.”
A happy shudder went through Clio, so fierce that she nearly dropped the train again. But she wouldn’t—she wouldn’t let something precious slip from her fingers again.
“I want that,” she said, her eyes prickling with tears. “I choose you. I choose us, together. Hector, Iloveyou.”
For a moment, he didn’t respond. He took the train from her hands and set it very carefully on the shelf. Then he picked her up around the waist, whooped, and spun her in a circle.
“Hector, your leg!” she protested, laughing.
“Bugger my leg,” he said. He put her down only long enough to get an arm under her knees, so he was cradling her in his arms. “My leg will be fine. What was the point of swinging that damned forge hammer all those years if I can’t do this, hm?”
“I thought it was fixing things,” she said, delighted, as her arms went around his neck and he strode toward the stairs. It wasn’t necessarily a picturesque moment. Her skirts were still trying to get everywhere, and there was a decided hitch in his step now that he’d abandoned his stick and added her weight.
But it wastheirimperfect moment, and she wouldn’t have traded it for the world.
He kicked the door to his bedchamber to let them in. Clio was torn between kissing him and looking around at this room, which she hadn’t seen before.
Or, rather, she was very, very briefly torn, and then Hector kissed her on a sensitive spot beneath her jaw, and she decided that looking at the decor could wait.
“I know you don’t like to hear it,” he said into her skin, “but you really are so beautiful.”
“It isn’t that I don’t like to hear it,” she said—unnecessarily, probably, because she could feel herself blushing. “I just don’t want it to be the only thing you like about me.”
“Oh, princess,” he said, and thenthrew heronto the bed. “I like many things about you.”
Clio had just been tossed like a sack of flour—she would not admit to having adored it—so she felt entitled to challenge him a bit. “Oh, yes? Like what?”
