“Oh,” she said. There was a plummeting, weightless feeling in her belly. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps he wished he had not spoken so. Perhaps he wished she did not remember what he’d said on the beach. “Oh, no, I—I will not hold you to them, of course. You were delirious—”
“I meant every word.”
“Oh,” she said again.
“I love you.” He was light and shadow before her, the pale gray eyes, the dark rim of black lashes around them. “I am in love with you.” His fingers tightened harder on hers for a moment before they relaxed. “I have been afraid of happiness. It has been enough to be content, because it was too great a risk to want more than that. But you—you make me want to be brave. You make me want totry.You are the most brilliant, courageous person I have ever known, Matilda Halifax. Everything was flat and gray before I knew you, and you burst into my life like—like an explosion—no, like asunrise.I—” He paused to glower at her again. “I am making a hash of this.”
She squeezed his fingers and laughed through the emotion clogging her throat. “You’re doing fine. Keep going.”
“I would cut off my right arm to make you laugh like that every day,” he said. “Or else sacrifice my pride and dignity, which seems rather more likely. I welcome any and all animals that you invite into my home. Hell, start a damn menagerieif you like. Only—” He swallowed. “Only stay here. With me. Please. Forever.”
Matilda let go of his hand and stood up. He looked up at her, his lips going white and strained, and then she could not see his face any longer, because she was peeling off her dressing gown and then pulling her nightshirt over her head.
She had a moment to take in his stupefied face before she flung herself into the bed beside him and under the covers. “Good Lord,” she managed to say, and then wrapped herself around his large, warm body. “It’s freezing.”
“Matilda,” he choked out, “what on Earth—”
She laid an arm delicately across his chest, mindful of his bruises, and tucked her head into the crook of his arm. “I made you a promise last night on that godforsaken beach. I would not tell you that I loved you until we were naked in bed together.” Her bare legs slipped in between his. “Close enough.”
“What—”
“I love you,” she said. She looked up and met his eyes. “I want to be with you. Here, or in London, or wherever else our lives take us. I want to be side by side.”
He kissed her then. He was stiff—he, who had claimed not to be injured!—and she was cautious. And then in a moment or two they were not stiff or cautious at all. His hand tangled in her hair, and he pulled her head back, and she welcomed it all, his love and fierceness and bright raw demand, and she kissed him back the same way.
Finally he pulled away, his breath shuddering out of his chest.
She grinned stupidly up at him. “I’ve been wondering. Did you mean that thing you said to Margo about the riding crop?”
He looked dazedly at her, his lips parted. “I—you—”
“I ask,” she said, “because I had one in mind as a Christmas present.”
His voice, when he spoke, was a trifle strangled. “You are going to kill me.”
“Perhaps a wedding present then. Which of those occasions do you suppose will be first?” She gazed up at him through her eyelashes and tried not to laugh at the dumbfounded expression on his face.
“You—Mattie—” He choked off the words and started again. “I did not have a chance to properly ask you. You—I thought perhaps—I know my previous attempt in that area does not recommend me.”
He had not unwrapped his hand from her hair, and she—degenerate that she was—quite relished the sensation as his hand tightened.
“But I would like to marry,” he said. “If you wanted that. I want forever, any way I can get it. I want to hold you every morning just like this and love you like I did the last time I had you in this bed. I would be so—so pleased and proud to spend the rest of my life trying to get this right.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I would like that very much.”
He stared at her. He did not appear to have made out her words.
“Christian?”
“Hmm?”
“I’d like to kiss you again, but you’re holding my hair rather firmly—”
He dropped her hair. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. She winced as he did, thinking about his ribs and his bruises.
And then he kissed her, so hard and deep that she forgot about bruises. She forgot about everything except kissing and the slide of skin on skin and Christian. She forgot the whole world outside their room, outside his body and hers and the sure steady warmth in her chest that was love.
She remembered that.
