When he pulled back, she shook her head, still dazed. “What are you doing?”
“Stealing what I’ve wanted from the very first moment I saw you.” He placed his hand over her chest, directly where her heart beat fast and steadily. “But I would like it more if it was given to me without hesitation.”
She blinked, her brain still trying to process what was happening.
He removed his mask and tossed it to the seat across from them. When she saw the unspoken sentiment in his adoring, hazel eyes, she couldn’t look away.
“I thought that I would have to offer some sort of grand gesture to win your hand,” he explained somewhat sheepishly. “I had a plan, you see. So, you must forgive me for deceiving you at the palace.”
“You mean to say—?”
He scratched the side of his jaw. “I wasn’t quite as sick as I pretended to be? Precisely.”
Leah wanted to be angry at him, furious, but she was too overjoyed to see him flashing that broad smile that she couldn’t summon the proper aggravation.
At her resounding silence, he said softly, “I know that you aren’t with child.”
Faced with the reminder, Leah nodded her head. “It’s true.”
“I also want you to know that I don’t care. I will happily take on the opportunity—manyof them—to see that the job is successfully completed. But only if you say yes.”
The image of the two of them wrapped up in the bedclothes, their bodies writing with passion was something she was eager to duplicate—manytimes. “Yes.”
She started to reach for him, but he held her at a distance. “You did understand what I was asking, correct?”
She frowned. “Making love.”
He chuckled and the depth and seductiveness shook her to her core. “That is part of it, yes, but I was asking something a bit more… permanent.” He brushed a stray strand of hair from her face, tucked it behind her ear, and then his focus landed back on her. “I am no longer working for the Home Office. I tendered my resignation with Wellington because I found something worth more than trying to follow in my father’s footsteps and falling to my demise in the pursuit of honor and glory. It is nice to be appreciated for one’s efforts, but not if there is no one by your side to share them with.” His eyes crinkled slightly at the corners. “I used to think that my mother died of a broken heart after my father’s passing. I still believe that holds true. For the longest time I eschewed any sort of attachment because I didn’t want anyone to suffer as she had. But I started to ponder something else. She had the privilege to have the sort of love that most only dream about.”
He cupped her face. “I would die a thousand deaths thinking that you might end up like my mother, despondent and at a loss of what to live for any longer, but I find that I’m greedy, in that I want to shower you with everything that I have to give during what time we are granted together. I want to have children with you, I want to share the same bed night after night and wake up to see you lying beside me. It might be a temporary heaven on earth, but I am willing to take what I can for the time we have together. What I want to know is are you willing to take the same risk?”
Harlan wasn’tsure whether her silence was a good sign or not.
And then he saw the single tear trickle down her cheek. It was followed by another, and another. Her amber eyes were lit up with all the brilliance of the sun, and while he had always heard the expression of someone taking his breath away, he had never actually believed it until this moment. His heart skipped a beat and his chest ached with the emotion that was tearing him up from the inside out.
When she finally spoke, her voice was broken, but it was the sweetest sound that he’d ever heard in his life. “Harlan, the one risk I’m not willing to take is being without you. I have been in torment wondering if you would still want me when you found out I wasn’t with child. I want nothing more than to share all the good days of our life together, and all of the bad days, because I will get to share them with you. That is all that matters.Youare all that matters.”
Harlan’s vision became watery by her admission. “I love you so much that I don’t know how to express it in any other way.”
“I love you, too.”
When they came together for another kiss, this one was slow and filled with all the promises they had made thus far, and the ones that were to come. It was a sealing of souls, an emotional stamp on two hearts that would never be broken.
Reluctantly, he pulled back. “Let’s go home, shall we?”
She hesitated, a strange look on her face. “I was starting to wonder where that might be.”
He threaded his hand through hers. “Wherever I am, that’s where you need to be.” He leaned out the door and said, “To Dove Haven!” He knocked on the roof of the carriage and they set off.
“Who were you talking to out there?” she asked curiously, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
He grinned. “My band of merry men, of course.”
She laughed. “Don’t say Benjamin, Hugh and Lucas all came to see us back to London?”
“That’s just it,” he said, hoping that the next surprise would be just as dear to her as it was to him. “We aren’t going to London. We’re heading back to Gravesend.”
She glanced at him curiously, and he realized, without a doubt, that he’d made the right choice. He could look at that face, whether young or weathered and lined with the passage of time, and she would still be achingly beautiful. “To the cottage?”
