“Oh no!” she gasped. “Please Theo, I do understand that your harsh words that night were directed at your father and mine. You don’t have to feel guilt for them.”
“And yet I will. But that isn’t what I meant. I meant after that, when I saw you later. When we talked privately. That was when I truly bungled things.”
“I…I don’t understand,” she whispered.
“I had already loudly refused a match. But when we stood together, watching the sun set, I turned toward you and for a brief moment I thought of taking your hand and running away with you. On our terms. Making a life together that they had no control over and no part in. I thought for a blinding moment that Ishouldmarry you. Because you were the only person who had ever made me feel so…safe.”
Theo, she mouthed, unable to actually form his name when her heart was beating so loudly and her hands were shaking with the power of that confession.
“But I walked away.” His voice broke. “I told myself I was too young. I told myself I was overwrought. I told myself I would be happy in my emptiness. And then I tried to be so. Failed. When I think of the many things I should have done in my life,thatis the action I wish I’d taken most,” he said. He was quiet then, as if letting the words sink in, as if letting her come up with a response to this wild, unreal thing.
“Why?” she finally gasped, because it was the only word she could think of under this duress.
He tilted his head. “Because then I could have spent the last fourteen years knowing you and sharing with you. Laughing and crying with you. Loving you. I could have loved you freely all this time, instead of finally admitting it to myself in a flash when I almost lost you.”
That brought up one final fear that had burned in her for days. She shook her head. “Then this all came about after the fright of my nearly dying?”
“My love for you?” he asked.
She nodded.
“No,” he said firmly. “It did not. It was a powerful jolt to my system. But it isn’t the reason why I feel how I feel. I love you, Etta, because you are so very kind, so very bright, so very beautiful. So perfect in every way that I more fear I do not deserve you than anything else.”
He came toward her. She didn’t have the strength to back away, to resist when he caught her hands, lifting them to his lips so he could kiss one and then the other.
“What I do know is that Iloveyou with every fiber of my being, Bernadette. And I hope to give you every reason to love me back one day, if you’ll risk pursuing a future where we are together, not as merely lovers, but as man and wife, duke and duchess, partners and friends.”
She swallowed, and for a moment everything was so clear. He wasn’t just talking about passion. He never had been. After all, they had both spent lives where they wanted more from those around them, but never received it.
That they could give that to each other could be the greatest gift either of them gave or received. If she were just brave enough to accept that this wonderful, frustrating, magnificent man could love her as he declared. To not compare her to the men who had been so lacking in her life, but to accept him for everything she knew him to be.
And she felt it so keenly in that moment that she could do nothing more than accept it. Because it was so clear on his handsome face.
What was even more clear was that he was just as uncertain as she was. His words had made it clear. “Did you say youhopedI could one day love you back?”
He flinched at the disbelief on her face and in her tone. “You don’t think you could?”
She was silent a moment, then she slid her hands up his chest and cupped his cheeks gently. All the feelings she had denied, suppressed, refused to speak out loud for fear of turning them into weapons against her own skin bubbled to the surface, forced her to speak.
“I love younow, Theo. I love you and it terrifies me so much that I have been trying to make it go away for weeks, months, years perhaps. But definitely in the last few days that we’ve been together.” She bent her head. “I-I love you.”
He made a sound in his chest that she’d never heard. Something triumphant but also vulnerable, something filled with joy and also relief. He dragged her into his arms, hugging her close. She clung to him just as tightly, as joy replaced worry. As the future she’d been trying not to picture exploded like the king’s fireworks across the world.
He leaned back. “You love me.”
“I do,” she admitted, and reached up to wipe a tear from his cheek. That her admission made him weep was shocking and moving. “I’ve been trying not to because I couldn’t believe you’d feel the same way. And any evidence I saw to the contrary was just a fiction I was building for myself. But the thought of losing you, it has been killing me. I couldn’t even last a day without running back to you.”
“I’m so glad you did,” he whispered, kissing her lips gently. “Because I never want to let you go. I want you to marry me.”
She didn’t hesitate them. Her joy was too powerful. She kissed him as she said yes, as she shouted yes, as she laughed when he picked her up and spun her around in a circle in his study.
When he set her down it was on the edge of his desk. His fingers dug into her hair and he kissed her again, but this time with more passion, more power. She lifted to him automatically, wanting what he would give, knowing it would be all the better now that they had declared their hearts and claimed their future.
His hands roved over her and hers over him as the kiss became more desperate and needy. “Later I’m going to savor you,” he promised. “But right now…”
He pushed her legs open and she grabbed his hips, pulling him tighter against her. “Right now I want you just as much,” she whispered.
He shoved her skirts up, she unfastened his trousers, they panted together as they shifted and moved to align themselves. He slid into her in one long thrust and then moaned, “God, I missed you.”
