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“No.”
She shook her head. “I have. It was easier to be your friend, so that was what I wanted more than anything else. I clung to that idea so hard because my life was easy so long as I stayed unmarried. I had you and my work. That was enough.
“Then we married and it was as though everything turned upside down. I began to understand that you were more to me than a friend, and more to me than a husband.”
He raised a hand to cup her cheek, his thumb stroking over the indent just below her lower lip. Her eyes fluttered closed and he reveled in the pleasure it gave her. He never thought he’d touch her again, and each night he’d broken a little more because of it.
“There are so many things I regret,” she said, “but the one thing I don’t regret is marrying you. I love you.”
Those three words filled his heart up until he almost couldn’t take it. For years he’d wanted to hear her say it without prompting or coercion. I love you. Not with a qualifying as a friend. Just those three words and nothing else.
Ina bit her lip, refusing to flinch or cringe in embarrassment as she watched Gavin. She loved him fully and without reservation. He should know, and if he didn’t feel the same way she needed to know now.
She’d thought she was prepared for him when she heard him on the stairs. Her hands had trembled terribly against the mahogany desk while she waited, and she’d feared he might see her sketches and simply walk out. When he’d come crashing through the door, her knees had almost given out in relief. Then he’d dropped everything and kissed her like a starving man, and she’d been lost.
But now everything was in his hands. All she could do was wait.
His hand traced down her arm until he reached her hand. His fingers danced over hers before pressing their palms flush against each other and lifting her hand to his lips. He pressed a kiss to the back of it, sparking her skin.
“I came back because I’m hopelessly in love with my wife.”
Her heart soared. Gavin still loved her. It hardly seemed possible after everything they’d gone through. After all of their time apart. And yet here he was, professing it to her amid all the sketches that were her way of showing him that he mattered. That she cared.
“I knew you were special from the moment I first sat down and talked to you, but it took me some time to realize I’d fallen in love. I became infatuated because you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but that was a superficial sort of love,” he said. “It wasn’t until we married that I understood what it was to really love you. Body and soul. I want you with marble dust in your hair. I want you sitting across a fire from me, distracting me when I’m trying to read. I want you in every way a man can want a woman.”
She blushed at that.
“I want you when I make you blush too,” he said with a grin before leaning in, his voice a whisper. “When you blush all over.”
“Gavin,” she said, pushing gently at him.
“I loved that you left because you were thinking only of what you thought was best for me,” he said, kissing the inside of her wrist and making her shiver with delight. “I loved that you came to Oak Park without question.” A kiss to her forearm. “I loved you on Daldour.” Her elbow. “I loved you on our wedding night so much I could hardly be in the same room as you for fear I’d reveal too much.” He edged her against the desk again, his legs pressing against her thighs. “I loved you the day I married you.” He kissed her neck. “I loved you the day you proposed to me.”
She laughed.
“You hold my heart in yours, Ina. You always have,” he said softly. “Is there any chance you might come to trust me once again?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” she said, her eyes brimming. “I was the one who left Oak Park. I was so frightened you’d come to resent me. Everything your mother said is true. My family is only just respectable and that’s only because of my father’s money. People still talk about my mother. I have a passion that’s not supposed to be fit for ladies. I’m ill-suited to run a grand house like Oak Park.”
“I don’t care a whit about any of that,” he said. “The truth is, my mother’s a horrible snob.”
“I should never have run. I thought I was absolving you of our marriage. I’d just found out about Grace and she was so much more suited—”
“She’d never suit me. She isn’t you.”
She couldn’t help the smile that touched her lips. “You truly don’t care that I make a poor baronet’s wife?”
“I’m a baronet and you’re my wife. That’s all I care about. I’ve been thinking about letting Oak Park as soon as I can make the necessary improvements to the land. I don’t want to live in that stodgy old house any more than I imagine you do.”
“It would give me great pleasure never to set foot in it again, but”—she drew in a deep breath—“if it’s important to you that we live there for part of the year, we can make arrangements.”
“Not at all. I was thinking that we might look at buying our house on Rothesay Place with the income from Oak Park’s rents. Or we could go somewhere else.”
“We’ll figure that out later,” she said. “There’s something else I’d rather do first.”
She pulled him down into a kiss.
This was where she was meant to be. With the man who saw her for who she was and loved her without hesitation. The sculptor and the writer. The Scotswoman and the Englishman. Ina and Gavin.
