She had never felt this before. She had spent three years convincing a man that she was barren to avoid this exact moment. And now she was here, in a house with a blue door and overgrown roses, and the man inside her was looking at her with green eyes full of wonder and love and the careful, trembling restraint of a man who would stop the instant she asked.
She did not ask.
“More,” she whispered.
He moved, slowly at first, watching her face. She watched him back. His jaw was clenched. The muscles in his arms were taut. He was holding back, she could feel it. The leashed power. The discipline. Twelve years of control straining against the need to let go.
“Don’t hold back,” she urged.
Something broke in his expression. The restraint snapped.
He slid deeper into her. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer. The sound she made was not quiet or polite or proper, but she did not care. She did not care about being proper. She cared about this. About him. About the heat and the weight and the rhythm and his mouth on her neck and his handsin her hair and the sound of his breathing, ragged and desperate and beautiful.
The pleasure built. His fingers found her pearl, and she came apart. Climax crashed through her in waves, and she cried out his name. He held her through it, steady and sure, and then he followed her with a groan that she felt in her bones.
He collapsed beside her. His arm across her waist. His face buried in her hair. Their breathing filled the room, fast and uneven, and the sunlight moved across the white sheets and turned their tangled bodies gold.
She lay still. She could feel his heartbeat against her back, fast but slowing. His hand spread across her stomach. Warm. Protective. The hand of a man who was already imagining what might grow there.
They lay there until the sun went down, the room went dark, and the only light was the fire he had built while she dozed. She watched the shadows on the ceiling and felt, for the first time in four years, completely and utterly safe.
Not the absence of danger, but the presence of someone who would stand between her and the dark and never, ever leave.
CHAPTER 34
They stayed in the townhouse for three days.
Three days of the house and the overgrown roses and the bedroom with the white sheets that they ruined and washed and ruined again. Three days of breakfast in bed, tea in the garden, and Edward attempting to fix the garden path while Valeria sat on the step and gave unhelpful instructions and laughed at his swearing when he dropped a paving stone on his foot.
She learned him. Not the spy. Not the Hound. But the man. She learned that he slept on his left side with one arm flung out. That when he cooked, he hummed a Scottish tune he had learned as a boy, something about the sea and the shore and coming home. That he could not abide dishonesty, but would tell the most elaborate lies to the cat from next door about where the fish went. That he read slowly, mouthing the words, because books had come late to him and he still treated them with the reverent attention of a man who knew what it was to go without.
He learned her. Not the duchess. Not the widow. But the woman beneath it all, the one Gordon had tried to bury. She told him about her mother, Portia, who died giving birth to Caroline. About her father, who never stopped being grateful for his wife and who carried the loss like a stone in his pocket, always there, always heavy, always a reminder of what he had been given and what he had lost. About Bridget’s quiet strength, John’s relentless humor, and Evan’s rigid propriety that masked a tenderness he would rather die than show.
He told her about the streets where he had grown up. About the Queen, who was stern and fair, and who had given him a title because she could not give him back his childhood. About Nathaniel, who wrote long letters full of advice Edward never took. On the third morning, she found him in the garden, kneeling by the rose bed and pulling weeds. His sleeves were rolled up, dirt staining his hands. He looked up at her and smiled. The smile was open and unguarded, and it entirely transformed his face.
“We should go back,” she said. “Caroline will have organized a search party.”
“Yer sister would organize a search party if ye were five minutes late for tea.”
“That is true. But I also want to see the children. And I want them to see us. Together. The way we should have been from the beginning.”
“Aye,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Thornhill was not the same as they had left it.
Caroline had been busy. The great hall had been scrubbed. The garden was trimmed. New curtains hung in the drawing room. And above the fireplace in the gallery, where Gordon’s portrait had hung for years, watching every room, there was a new frame. Empty. Waiting.
“For the portrait,” Caroline explained, patting her belly. “The one I painted. It’s still drying. But when it’s finished, it will go there. Where it belongs.”
Valeria looked at the empty frame, then at the spot where Gordon’s face had once watched her. The spot was clean. Bare. Free. Three years of his painted gaze gone, replaced by nothing, and the nothing felt like everything.
She turned to Edward. He was also looking at the empty frame, with an expression she had never seen before. Something soft. Something that looked like hope.
“Thank you,” she said to Caroline.
“Don’t thank me. Thank Richard. He nearly broke his back taking Gordon’s portrait down.” Caroline pressed a hand to her belly and winced. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I need to liedown. Your nephew or niece has been kicking since dawn, and I am fairly certain they are doing it deliberately to spite me.”
Richard appeared, offered his arm, and led her away. She was still giving instructions over her shoulder as they disappeared down the corridor. Valeria heard the words “flowers,” “unacceptable,” and “if anyone moves that vase, I will know.”
