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“And I will love you,” I whisper back. “Every day I’m breathin’.”
Ellen closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she has chosen me. Plain as that.
She lifts our bound hands, presses a kiss to my knuckles the way I did to hers—clumsy, determined.
“I take you, Ellen, for my wife,” I say, my voice rough.
Her chin lifts. “I take you, James Sinclair, to be my husband.”
Her thumb moves over my knuckles where our hands rest between us, soft enough I might have imagined it.
Then her mouth curves into something wicked and unfamiliar, and my pulse loses its rhythm.
“Well?” she says.
My brows lift. “Well, what?”
“Ye’ve got me,” she says, trying for boldness, though the pink in her face near ruins it. “Ye’ve got what you came for. Are ye gonna stand there starin’ at me, or are you gonna kiss yer wife?”
The word wife hits me like a shot of whisky, and I have to master the sudden, possessive urge to haul her against me and kiss her senseless.
“Aye,” I murmur. “Come here to me.”
I pull her in carefully, mindful of our bound hands, but Ellen has never been gentle when she wants something. She rises onto her toes and meets my mouth like she means to brand me with it.
Her body presses to mine, and my hands—still tied to hers—shift instinctively, aching to touch what I have spent months forbidding myself to want.
Ellen’s breath stutters against my mouth, and a small, helpless sound slips from her when I drag my thumb along the inside of her wrist.
I feel it then, how easily this could tip from sweet into something far less innocent.
She pulls back just enough to look at me, colour high in her cheeks and mischief sharpening through the haze.
Her attention catches on my throat, on the cravat already worked loose, and her mouth curves as if the sight of me coming undone pleases her more than it should. It makes my blood roar.
“James Sinclair,” she purrs, “I have been proper for the entirety of my life, and I think I’m tired of it.”
A rough laugh escapes me before I can stop it, low and disbelieving, because Gods help me—I understand exactly what she’s saying.
“Are you?” I murmur.
Ellen’s fingers tighten around mine.
“Aye,” she says, voice steady even as her pulse betrays her. “So if you’ve got any more speeches planned… ye’d best keep them to yerself for now.”
I stare at her—at this woman who has held the line for months, who has fought herself harder than she’s ever fought me.
And now she’s standing here asking me to cross it.
Not shyly. Not carefully.
But asking with the kind of certainty that says she knows I’m hers now.
I lift our joined hands and press a slow kiss to her fingertips, my mouth lingering long enough to make her breath hitch.
“Tell me what you want,” I say, practically begging to hear the words aloud.
Ellen doesn’t hesitate.
