Most people relaxed in slumber, worries and cares melting from their faces and restoring them to innocence.
Not Nathaniel. He slept the way he did everything, with a fierce concentration and intensity that meant he looked a little angry, even in sleep. God only knew what it said about Bess that she found it as endearing as she did.
She’d give anything to see that pinched frown between his brows now, she thought. The tiny line she’d smoothed away, night after night at The Nemesis, feeling warm and fond and achingly tender for it.
There was no frown creasing Nathaniel’s handsome features now. There was no life at all—only the pure, cold marble of a statue.
If she hadn’t been touching him to feel the warmth of his flesh, if she couldn’t rest her hands at the center of his chest to feel it rise and fall, she would have thought the worst.
She would’ve thought he’d already gone.
Looking at him now, Bess forced herself to confront the reality that he might yet.
“Don’t go,” she whispered over their clasped hands. “I’m here. Can you hear me? I came back, Nathaniel. For you. So you must come back to me. Don’t go.”
Her voice broke along with the lump in her throat. Her eyes were wet and burning, but she didn’t dare close them. If she took her gaze off him for even a moment?—
“I need you with me,” she went on, uncaring of the rough rasp of the words tearing out of her aching throat. “I was wrong to let you leave, I was wrong to tell you I wouldn’t marry you. I was wrong, so wrong, to say that love doesn’t matter. It’s the only thing that matters.”
She was crying now in earnest, her upper body leaned over his on the chaise, her wrenching sobs shaking them both as she wept into his chest.
“I was wrong,” Bess choked, “but at least I realized it and followed after you. I would follow you anywhere, Nathaniel.”
She pressed a damp, imploring kiss to the back of his hand. “Please, please, don’t go where I can’t follow.”
For a moment, she thought she’d imagined it—but no, there it was again. The hand she held twitched, then flexed. She sat up with a gasp, her gaze flying to Nathaniel’s face, but his eyes were still closed.
His hand, though. It turned in her grasp until she cradled it, palm up, between her hands. Fresh sobs welled up and she pressed his palm to her cheek, shaking and praying and hoping for all she was worth.
“Don’t…cry.”
His lips barely moved, but Bess heard him. “Nathaniel? My love, my heart, wake up. Come back to me.”
“No more tears,” he commanded, low and halting. “Hurt worse than…fire.”
His beautiful eyes blinked slowly open. Bess had never seen anything better in her life. She threw herself across him, laughing and crying at once. “I make no promises. If you insist on running into burning buildings, you must suffer the consequences of the woman who loves you having feelings about it.”
“Love,” he whispered, the word as raw as his poor throat probably was, after breathing in all that nasty smoke. Bess could still smell it when she leaned up to press her lips to his.
“Don’t talk, my heart. I’m here,” she told him once more. “And I’m never leaving your side again.”
His strange, light eyes were fixed on her, unblinking and adoring. Bess couldn’t believe she’d thought she could live a whole life outside the glow of Nathaniel’s regard.
“Promise?” he rasped, his hand smoothing at her tear-stained cheek.
“You are my heart,” she told him fiercely. “I will be whatever I must be to stay with you, and the rest of the world be damned. I will not lose you again.”
“Wife.” He stared at her, the full force of his indomitable will behind that single word, and Bess turned her head just far enough to kiss his palm without taking her gaze from his.
“Yes,” she said, and it felt like a vow, here in the back room of this tiny London bookshop. “I’ll marry you. I’ll be your wife, and you will be my husband, and we will have a life. Together.”
He made a sound deep in his chest, and before she knew what was happening, he had used the hand she still held to haul her up and over him to blanket his body. Bess squeaked in surprise but settled almost at once, the feel of his strong, hard frame under her so comforting, so perfect, so longed for.
Urging her up, he wrapped that broad hand securely around the back of her neck and drew her to him for a kiss that sent a spill of shivers down her spine. He groaned as she mapped out his mouth with her tongue, tasting and delving and stroking and reminding both of them that they were alive and together.
A thought occurred to her, and she pulled out of the kiss to stare down at him seriously, her hands tightening in his sooty hair. “Promise me you will never, ever risk yourself like this again. I survived losing everyone I loved once before, though it nearly broke me. But you are my heart—and that means, you must take care of yourself, for me. Because a person can’t live without a heart, Nathaniel.”
She had never seen his face blown wide open with emotion like this. She could read every expression, every feeling in the flicker of his eyes and the twist of his lips.
