“If anyone ever tries to hurt you, I will end them,” he said calmly. “One way or another.”
“Likewise, Lord Kirke.”
He smiled, and his chest rose and fell beneath her in a contented sigh.
She propped herself up on her elbows and gazed down at him. “Lady Wisterberg told me about... how you paid the footmen. She found out through a sort of chain of gossip.”
She felt him go still. And then he gave a soft, rueful, not entirely amused laugh. “She is quite something, Lady Wisterberg is.”
Her eyes were so soft. Her hair was coming down, the ends of it brushing his chin. The pleasure of it. She completely undid him. He felt incinerated by love and need. Humbled and made absolutely new. He was the bloody phoenix, rising right out of the ashes of a burned house.
To look at her was to crave her.
“I suppose,” he said softly, his voice husky and careful, “it’s because I loved you from the first.”
She kissed his right eyebrow because he was hers, and because she could.
He’d long wondered whether he’d deserved to ever love or be loved again at all, but it seemed to him her love was proof that he was worth loving. That she loved him was a miracle, and yet he believed in it, while he didn’t, for instance, believe in genies that lived in lamps, because he knew her heart was honest and true. It was simply who she was.
And if it seemed unlikely a beautiful young woman would choose a complicated life with a man like him, he understood that something in her craved those inhospitable crags and treacherous peaks that were part of his character, just as he craved the soft, green slopes and surprising, hidden, wild rivers in hers. They both were part light and part shadow and this had given their moments together a rare dimension from the first.
Love would be the new terrain they built their life on. They would have a lifetime to explore its perils and glories.
He noticed her gaze roving about the empty room, as if she was filling it with imaginary furniture.
“Do you know anything about decorating? Because I fear that I don’t. As you may have noticed.”
“Oh, I think we can make our house lovely and not spend a good deal of money at all,” she said confidently and comfortingly. “And I think we should have blossoms in a vase in our room, don’t you?”
Ourhouse.Ourroom. He loved the word “our.” He loved the word “we.” He loved the word “wife.” He decided he was going to use them with such obnoxious frequency that from now on this was what people would quote to him when he encountered them at balls and in sitting rooms.
“Precisely what I was thinking,” he agreed, softly.
Epilogue
His bearing was regal. His expression somber. His eyes were very intense, but then, they usually were.
His hand was cold in hers.
This was the only way anyone would have been able to tell that Lord Kirke was nervous. She knew the echoes of an old fear reverberated in him. She squeezed his hand.
“He will love you,” she reassured quietly.
His mouth quirked at the corner. “Well, naturally. I’m easy to love.”
She laughed softly. “Ilove you, and he’s a lot like me. If all else fails, just use a lot of words with ‘r’s’ in them, and he’ll be too enchanted to say no.”
He laughed.
He pulled in a steadying breath.
And so into her father’s study he went to ask for her hand in marriage.
Dominic liked doctors, on the whole, because little impressed or shocked them. Few people understood better that humans were all the same underneath the skin. And, as Catherine had noted, doctors see alot.
And so even when confronted by a somewhat legendary orator in the flesh, Mr. Keating eyed him with bemusement, amusement, and not a little surprise glinting in his blue eyes. His white hair gave him something of a saintly nimbus.
The study in which they sat was pleasantly lit byshafts of pale sunlight through the windows, and stuffed full of books and papers. Dominic always felt instantly at home in such rooms.
