Was he really going to allow her to do it?
All she had to do now was shimmy out of the whole dress and let it pool to the ground at her ankles.
She stopped.
The tension, and the silence, stretched like a drawn-back bowstring.
Of course she couldn’t do it.
But he’d already known that.
He’d done a magnificent job, however, of making his point about the folly of testing him.
All she wanted now was to make sure this extraordinary man felt safe to tell her the truth.
His eyes widened as she slowly moved over to the settee.
His breathing seemed suspended as she gingerly lowered herself to sit next to him.
The silence stretched.
She could hear the in-out rush of his breath.
“Gabriel...?” she whispered.
“Yes, Guinevere?”
She was very nervous. “You win.”
“I beg your pardon?” But he didn’t sound surprised. His voice was so gentle.
“I’m afraid I can’t... I can’t do this.” She swallowed. “Not like this. And I understand now. Why you can’t. And... why... we shouldn’t.”
“Oh?” The word was so tender. He was hoarse. “Tell me why, Ginny.”
He was going to make her do it.
Oh, she was scared to death.
But what choice did a leaper have but to leap?
And so, joyously, recklessly, she did just that.
“Because I love you, too.”
He stopped breathing.
She witnessed her words utterly transform him. Soften him. Illuminate him. Until it seemed to her that he glowed in the firelight like a painting of a medieval saint.
He drew in a long, shuddering breath, as if he’d at last been released from a locked box.
“Yes.” His voice was graveled. “I love you, Ginny.”
For a moment they merely sat in the presence of this glorious, hopeless thing they had inadvertently created. Ginny had never realized that love was an atmosphere. It felt like infinite peace bound with wild joy.
She watched the play of light and shadow over his face, committing the way he looked in this moment to memory.
She could feel the cool air of the room against her back, which was still exposed by her loosened laces.
