“I won’t need you tonight,” Valaria said.“Just rest now.”
Fanny bent her head, her exhaustion as plain as Valaria’s own.She left the room and Valaria faced Callum.
“Come to my chamber,” she said softly.“Forget supper.”
He nodded and took her hand, leading her from the room and up the stairs.They entered her chamber and she expected him to pounce, to kiss her, to seduce her as she so desperately wanted after this dreadful day.But instead, he simply cupped her face.
“She truly believed you would break with me rather than have the truth come out,” he said softly.
“She had reason to believe that,” Valaria admitted.“Thanks to what I endured, I had closed myself off for so long.My first instinct was to hide everything from you.To keep you from finding out.”
“And then I did,” he said.
She nodded and stared up at him.At this wonderful man who loved her so deeply.And who she loved just as powerfully.The fear she’d had about that emotion seemed to bleed away.It left behind only…joy.Certainty.And a deep desire to confess her heart as she had confessed her past.
“Fanny didn’t understand…perhapsIdidn’t understand…that when I came to Kent’s Row I found a family, a far better one than the one I was born into.Sisters in the duchesses, a brother in Theo.”She shifted as she prepared to make the most terrifying confession of her life.“And…andyou.”
He caught his breath and she saw how deeply her words moved him.“Valaria.”
“You are the love of my life,” she continued, and found strength with every word that fell from her lips.“The whole of my heart.The person I can trust with my secrets and my body and my soul.And I know that this beginning was not…” She laughed a little.“Optimal.But if you still wish to make me your wife, I want us to be happy.To love each other.To make a future that is so beautiful and bright that it blinds even the sun.”
He blinked down at her, seemingly stunned by this, by her.“You love me?”he asked.
She nodded.“I do.”
His breath grew shaky and she was surprised that tears leapt into his bright eyes.“Then I am the luckiest man in this world or any other.And I cannot wait to make you mine.”
“I’m already yours,” she whispered, and drew him closer, leaning up for a kiss that felt like a lifetime in the making.
A kiss that sealed them as much as the way he backed her toward her bed and proved to her, over and over and long into the night, that he was hers, too.
Forever.
