Her heart beat madly at the blazing heat of his eyes. How angry was he at her? Would he let her finish what she had to say?
“I’m not done.” She drew a breath, squared her shoulders. “I… I have to tell you about… Pierre Chenet, Jean-Philippe Martin.” She had to force out the last. “Vincent Barone.”
“I don’t give a damn about them,” he stated. “They don’t matter.”
“They… don’t?” She stared at him, confused.
“I realized that after the Winter Ball. After I acted like a bloody fool, nearly bungling our marriage beyond repair, I realized that nothing matters but us being together.”
“But I thought… you… you said that things could never be the same between us. That you couldn’t forgive me,” she stammered.
“Canyouforgivemefor being an imbecile where Cora Ashley is concerned?” he returned.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Then I can forgive you for the past. For things that were done before we were even together.” The flames in his blue eyes mesmerized her. “Now get your pretty arse over here.”
Her nipples tingled, but she held onto her remaining ounce of self-preservation. “Why?”
“Come here, and you’ll find out.”
It was a risk, she knew, but she couldn’t resist the command in his voice, the smolder in his gaze. She rose, closing the distance between them, taking those last ten inches into uncertain territory. She was a woman who’d stared death in the face more than once and run away laughing, and yet now she trembled as she stood before her husband.
He curled a big finger under her chin, tipping it up, and the tenderness that softened his hawkish features made her eyes sting.
“Pompeia, Pandora Smith or Hudson, whatever you choose to call yourself—I have loved you from the moment we met. Or, I should say, from the first time you revealed yourself to me. I have loved you every moment since, and I will love you,” he said solemnly, “until my dying breath and beyond. Because you are my lucky Penny, my wife, the other half of my soul.”
A sob worked its way up her throat; overwhelming joy and relief prevented her from speaking.
As it turned out, she didn’t have to. In the next moment, his mouth claimed hers in a kiss more eloquent than any words.
Chapter Twenty
Marcus swung his wife up into his arms and carried her to the bed.
With one knee on the mattress, he gazed down at her like the treasure that she was. Humbled by her beauty and strength and the fact that she’d pledged both so steadfastly to him, he cupped her soft cheek and whispered, “I always knew you were an angel. I just had no idea you were my own Guardian Angel.”
She flushed. “That’s doing it a bit brown. I just… lent a hand. When I could.”
“Darling,lending a handis helping with my cufflinks. Adjusting my cravat. What you did at Toulouse and before Quatre Bras…” He shook his head, unable to express the feeling burgeoning in his chest. It was too much, too large to put into words.
“It doesn’t disgust you?” she whispered. “To know that I’m… capable of killing?”
There it was. That complexity of hers that had captivated him from the start. Mystery combined with candor, sultry confidence mingling with the sweetest vulnerability.
“Did you kill indiscriminately?” he said.
She shook her head.
“Murder innocents, babes in their beds?”
Again, her head rocked against the mattress.
“Then to know that you’ve killed turncoats and enemies of our nation? That you would kill to save my life?” Bending down, he brushed his lips against hers. “No, my love, it doesn’t disgust me.”
“I would do anything for you,” she said.
There was no hesitation, no shame in her words or the lush depths of her eyes. He couldn’t help but marvel at the woman he now knew her to be. She’d survived such darkness in her life, yet her love… it had always been clean and pure. The truest thing he’d known.
