“I meant it then. I mean it now.” He crossed the room and stood behind her. His hands settled on her hips, and his chin rested on her shoulder, and they looked out at the moonlit grounds together. “How do you feel?”
“Terrified.”
“Of what?”
“Of everything. Of being responsible for a life. Of becoming my mother, who cries at everything and measures nurseries before engagements are announced.” She paused. “Of loving something so much it frightens me.”
“You are already very good at that.”
She turned in his arms and looked up at him.
“Hugo.”
“Mm?”
“I want you to know that if our child stammers, I will love them exactly as they are. And so will you. And no one in this house, in this family, will ever make them feel as though they are less than whole.”
His throat closed. The words landed in the place where his oldest wound lived, and instead of hurting, they healed. Not completely and not all at once, but slowly, patiently, and irreversibly.
“I know,” he said. And then, because the tears were coming and he had learned, from Lily, that tears did not make him weak, he repeated, “I know.”
She reached up and cradled his face in her hands. Her thumbs traced the lines of his jaw, and her palms were warm against his skin, and she looked at him with no performance and no reservation and nothing but the simple, devastating truth of a woman who had chosen to love him and intended to keep choosing.
“Come to bed,” she whispered.
He kissed her. The kiss began gently, a brush of lips, a question asked and answered. Then her fingers slid into his hair, and the gentleness gave way to something deeper and more deliberate. He tasted her mouth, her lower lip, the soft gasp she made when his hands moved from her hips to the small of her back and pressed her against him.
“Hugo.” His name in her mouth, half whisper and half want.
He lifted her. She wrapped her arms around his neck. Hugo carried her to the bed and laid her down and looked at her, spread across the pillows with moonlight in her hair and the curve of new life beneath her nightgown.
He lay beside her. His hand found the hem of her nightgown and drew it upward. His fingers trailed along the skin of her calf, her knee, and the inside of her thigh. Each inch of contact left warmth in its wake, and as Lily’s breath quickened, her fingers tightened in the sheets.
“Slowly,” she murmured.
“Always.” He pressed his mouth to her collarbone, to the hollow of her throat, and the place behind her ear that made her arch against him. “We have all night.”
“We have longer than that.”
“We have forever.” He lifted his head and looked at her. “I intend to spend every night of it reminding you that you are the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.”
“That is a great many nights.”
“I am a very resolute man.”
She laughed, and the sound melted into a sigh as his mouth found hers again. He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, as though they had never done this before and he intended to memorize every second of it.
His fingers found the tie of her nightgown and loosened it. The fabric parted, and he drew it from her shoulders. His mouth followed the path of the silk, pressing kisses to her collarbone, the swell of her chest, and the soft skin between her breasts.
Lily’s fingers moved to his shirt. She pulled it over his head and traced the lines of his chest, his stomach, and the ridge of muscle above his hip. Her touch was familiar and unhurried, the touch of a woman who knew this body as well as her own and still found it worth exploring.
Hugo lowered his mouth to her stomach.
The curve was small, barely visible, the earliest architecture of a life they had made together. He pressed his lips against it and held them there. The warmth of her skin and the knowledge of what grew beneath it filled his chest with something so vast he could not speak for a moment.
“Hello,” he whispered against her belly. “I am your father. I am terrified of you already.”
Lily’s fingers threaded into his hair. She felt the warmth of his breath against her skin and the tremor in his voice and reverence in the way his hand cradled the curve, his palm spread wide, his thumb tracing a slow arc.
