He snorts, cuddling close, his head resting against mine. “Thank you,” he says.
“You’re very welcome.” I smile at him, and he looks bemused.
“I tell you the worst thing—the thing I’ve hidden for so long—and you just smile at me?”
After I nod, I kiss him, loving the warmth of his lips against mine. When I pull away, I trace the curves of his full lips with my fingertip. “I’m smiling because you’re amazing. And now I have you, and I amneverletting go.”
“Please don’t,” he says gruffly. “I couldn’t bear that. Not now.”
“Not going to happen.” I kiss him again because I can’t help it. I always want one more kiss. “Do you want to know what is going to happen now, Reuben Langley?”
“Oh, have you been given the gift of foresight? How super.”
His customary sarcasm warms me better than the blanket around us. “It was given to me at birth.”
“I thought that was excessive snark and wilfulness.”
“Hey, there’snothingwrong with lots of birthday gifts. Remember that in the future. Anyway, the fairies liked me. I must have been impossibly charming even as a baby. Don’t knock it.”
“So tell me.”
My smile is impossibly large, and he echoes it, his face looking suddenly young and vulnerable enough to make my heart clench. “Someone told me once that the people who are most haunted are those who can’t let their ghosts go. The wind’s blowing out to sea now, love. Let his ghost go free and remember him as he was in life and not in death.” He kisses me. “And thenwe’re going to move onward together, and we are going to live. But there’s a catch before that can happen.”
His arms tighten. “What is that?” he says as prepared as ever to fight my battles. “I’ll do anything.”
“We have to live happily ever after, Reuben.” He opens his mouth, no doubt to offer a blast of reality, but shuts it when I smile at him again. It’s tender and wild and filled with all the love I’ve always had for him but tried so hard to push away. Not anymore. “Oh, I know it won’t always be peaceful, and at times I’m sure we’ll be sad or mad or both at the same time. We’ll fight and bicker and slam lots of doors. You’ll whinge about my packages, and I’ll grumble when you want to go on a sixty-mile route march and still call it a fucking gentle stroll. But all those things are part of being happy with you, and at the end of my life, I want to look back with you and say, yeah, we did that. We lived our own version of happily ever after. Can we do that? Can you leave these ghosts behind and choose me in the light?”
He considers me, his eyes liquid in the starlight. “I would do fuckinganythingfor you, Xavi.”
“Then let’s start that now. I know there will be other nightmares. They’re a part of you—the part that brought you back to me. Just don’t shut me out.”
“I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. You’ve carved out a place in me that will always be yours.”
He hugs me tight, and I cling to him, hearing the sighing of the grass and the roar of the sea. We started in the shadows, hiding and dancing around the simple fact that we’d fallen in love at first sight. Two men who couldn’t have been more different yet found something in each other that we wouldn’t find in anyone else. Then we lost each other in war and bloodshed and anger and hurt.
Now, our time together on this island has given us back the most important thing—us. It won’t always be easy, but if there’sanything I know about Xavier Conway and Reuben Langley, it’s that we’re stubborn bastards and we hold on so fucking tight when the rest of the world would just let go.
A faint red line appears on the horizon over the black shapes of the trees. Then slowly a pearlescent light bathes the bay and the Sound beyond, warming and lighting them in pale ivory and pink hues. A bird calls, its song sharp and true. I bury my head in Reuben’s shoulder, and when I next look up, the sky is a true winter blue as if it’s been washed clean overnight, and the bay sparkles as if a thousand sparklers are burning.
I kiss Reuben, and the wind buffets us as we get up and arms around each other, still covered by a blanket, we make our way back to the cottage and the warm, soft bed that waits for us. The wind howls loud and free behind us, but neither of us looks back.
epilogue
. . .
Xavier
Five Years Later
I lean back in my chair and stretch. “It’s done.”
“Really?” Pip gives his customary wide grin that’s touched with a great deal of wickedness. “Can I see?”
“Of course.”
I grab the mirror and hold it up as he stretches to look at his back, where there’s now a huge watercolour rose inked onto his shoulder. “Fucking hell, Xavier, that’s gorgeous.”
I feel myself flush. “You like it?”
