“Has it been there for almost a year?” he asked.
“Yes.” She laughed breathlessly. “It must have been. I am not a very tidy person.”
He glanced about him at the neat, uncluttered room. And he felt a quite unreasonable surging of hope.
“Why?” he asked her. “Why do you keep it there?”
She shrugged. “I…I don’t know,” she said foolishly. She could think of no reasonable explanation. How foolish he would think her. How humiliating if he should guess the truth. She smiled, her hand still outstretched for the letter. “I shall put it away.”
“Fleur?” he said.
She dropped her hand. She had told him just a little more than a year before that she loved him and always would. Should she be ashamed now that she had spoken the simple truth? Was pride to be guarded at all costs?
“Because it is not only the pianoforte that is my most treasured possession,” she said, fixing her eyes on the top button of his waistcoat. “That is too. I keep them together.”
“Fleur,” he said softly.
“I have nothing else of you,” she said. “Just those two things.”
She wished she could see that button clearly. She wished that he would not see her with tears in her eyes. But she was not ashamed of loving him. She had said she would and she did.
She watched the blur of white as he tossed the letter aside. She watched his waistcoat come closer. She felt his hands framing her face.
Her jaw was set hard. Her face looked as if made of stone. But there were the tears glistening on her eyelashes. And there were her words. And the letter, propped on top of the pianoforte almost a year after she had received it.
“My love,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. If she was to reject him, then so be it. But she would know that he had kept faith with her, that he still loved her more than life and would do so always.
He watched her bite at her upper lip, reach out with trembling hands to touch his waistcoat, withdraw her hands again.
“I love you,” he said. “Nothing has changed in the fifteen months since I told you that. And nothing will ever change.”
“Oh,” she said. She could find no other words and knew that she would not be able to speak them even if she did. She reached out to touch him again and found her hands to be as far beyond her control as her voice was.
But she did not have to find words. Or control. His head bent to hers and his lips touched her own and parted over them, and his hands left her cheeks, one arm to come about her shoulders and the other about her waist. She was drawn against the strength of him, and it did not matter that she was trembling.
Fleur. Soft and warm and feminine, her body arched unashamedly to his, her lips parting beneath his own, her mouth opening to his tongue, her arms coming up about his neck.
Fleur. He allowed himself the full luxury of hope.
“I love you too,” she whispered against his mouth. She kept her eyes closed. There could be no more thought to pride. “I have not stopped loving you for even a moment. And the letter is not always against the vase. Only by day. By night it is beneath my pillow.”
“On the assumption that the pianoforte is too large to put there?” he said with such unexpected humor that she burst into laughter.
He joined in the laughter and hugged her to him.
“Fleur,” he said at last against her ear, “this cannot really be the first time I have laughed in a year, can it? But it feels like it.”
She drew her head back and looked fully at him for the firsttime. “I thought I would never see you again,” she said. “When you broke every bone in my hands that morning and jumped into your carriage and drove away, I thought I would never ever see you again.”
“Well,” he said, smiling at her, “that should be no tragedy. I am not much to look at, am I?”
“I don’t know,” she said, tilting her head to one side. “Aren’t you? To me you are all the world.”
“A dark and scarred world,” he said.
“A beautiful world,” she said. “A face with character. The face I love most in all the world.”
He took her quite by surprise suddenly by bending down and scooping her up into his arms and sitting with her on his lap on a sofa.
