But instead he’d been cursed with me.
I am a wretch. Selfish. Hotheaded. Now broken beyond repair by what I’ve done and almost forgotten. A new vase with no cracks…or one whose cracks who are only now coming to light. How can he love me? How can he so ardently love someone who has taken something so dear from him?
This…thisis the memory that has clogged the road from my heart to my brain, the one from which my mind has tried desperately to protect me. But truth works its way to the surface, hard, splintered reality that cuts whoever grabs it.
AJ grabbed it. Embraced it—embracedme.
And now, here we are again, returned to the very edge of the world where I once pitched over and was lost to him.
Now the scales are falling from my eyes. I see clearly. He isn’t the one who lost me, but the one who came and found me, sweeping me up and loving all the broken pieces of me, holding me gently together while the shattered pieces mended.
No one can make you do anything, Merryn Winthrop.
He waited for me to remember everything. To love him again, however my brain and heart saw fit. To come around to being any sort of wife while he went about throwing everything he had into being my husband. The one I’d had before…but more—the one I’d longed for.
Waste time on me, AJ. Let’s have adventures. Be poor. Travel the world and just be together.
Sometimes we miss love because we don’t recognize it in its purest form. We’re too busy searching for what we believe it is.
I close my eyes and see the man on the beach, watching me with such affection. That image splits into two—Rupert andAJ, one with the admiring look of an artist, the other with the longing, tender look of a husband—then they slide back into one and it’s AJ, brimming with life and enthusiasm and the deepest, most ardent love I’ve ever witnessed. He’s standing on that shore, my shore in Cornwall, loving me wholly and completely. Whether or not I return his affection, it’s cast my way freely, offered and waiting for me to accept it…or walk away.
Love is invaluable because of what it has cost someone.
Cecil has moved toward AJ, and AJ kneels with open arms to sweep him up, holding him close. Oh, how I long to be swept up again. Nothing compares to this man’s embrace.
I don’t deserve it, though.
It wasn’t AJ I sought rescue from when I’d landed in Rupert’s arms. It was myself, and all that AJ reminded me of.
He rises, anchoring Cecil to his side and looking me over, emotion flickering over his haggard face. “No Rupert Covington,” he says, his gaze questioning.
I shake my head. “I couldn’t.” I sweep my blowing hair off my face. “I never married him in the first place. That day, I remembered something important and ran away. I took the train…to Gloucester.” Tears cloud my vision of AJ’s face.You are my forever.
Oh, how his face brightens. “Did you, indeed?”
I grieve the idea of my perfect self, the one who had any reason to reject this man. But mostly…I grieve for William. For the loss of his life. I can never repair what I’ve broken. I stare out over the cliff, down to the water as tears thicken. “How can you stand me?”
He stands alert and almost…hopeful. “You remember.”
“A bit.” The tears fall. “I’m broken, Ansel.”
His expression collapses. “As am I.”
He doesn’t tell me it’ll be all right. Or that it wasn’t my fault. Because it was. He only closes the distance between us in fourlong strides and wraps me in his arms. Second chances are not earned…they’re granted.
This is love. A relentless, intentional pursuit. The restraint to wait for permission, and the loyalty to never give up. A laying down of one’s own life and desires for the sake of another.
Then he slides his hands up my arms and brushes his lips along my cheek, silently asking for permission, allowing me to stop him. I lean in, and he folds me close and kisses me with dizzying sweetness, the nectar of honest affection on his lips. Then he tucks me firmly in the space I fit so perfectly—the space I’ve always belonged.
“What if I strike my head another time?” It has been reinjured once already, with a greater loss of memory, just as the doctor warned. “What if I forget all over again?”
“It's likely.”
“And then what?”
He tips my head back, his hands framing my face as the wind whips tendrils across it. “I suppose loving you is one of those things. It’s part of me, because I keep doing it. I shall go on doing it, even on the days you don’t want me to. And this time we shall write down every little thing in that notebook of yours so that if you do forget…I’ll have proof of what we had.”
I laugh and touch my forehead to his. “Oh Ansel. If I manage to pursue you evenhalfas hard as you have me…we’ll be all right.”
