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Instead, the weight of what I’ve been asked to give up hits me all over again, sudden and sharp enough that I know it shows.
Her smile falters almost at once.
“Today happened,” I say, my voice stripped bare. “And now it feels wrong to give you half of what I meant to give, only to walk away from you after. It feels wrong to move forward and dress up whatever time we have left, as though it’s some kind of distraction from what comes next.”
I tighten my hold on her hands.
“You’re not an escape for me. I want you to have all of me. Not just the easy parts. I want you to have the stubborn parts, too. The frightened parts. The parts of me that are trying hard to stand here like the man you need and not show you how badly the thought of leaving you is cutting me open.”
“Maybe I should have courted you proper sooner, but our situation was never going to be simple. Still, I want to make it clear you are not some passing thing, or some comfort taken to forget that this world is a cruel bitch.”
I keep going, because now that I’ve started, I think I’d sooner bleed than stop.
“If this road I’m about to walk beside those fools doesn’t swallow me first, I’m coming back, and I’m doing right by you. Properly. Because you mean far too much to me for anything less.”
Her fingers tighten hard around mine.
“I mean to remain an honest man with you,” I tell her. “So let that begin with the plainest truth I know. I love you. I loved you before I had any business loving you. I came into your room earlier to tell you that. I lost my nerve the minute I saw you.”
I draw a breath, then give her the rest of it.
“When I leave, I leave as yours. When I return, I return to you.”
She looks at me for a moment, bewilderment flickering through her face as though she scarcely knows what to do with the man kneeling in front of her. Then one tear slips free and tracks slowly down her cheek.
Her hand rises, unsteady and tender, and she rakes a lock of hair back from my face.
“Where is my Alex, and what have you done with him?”
I smile then, helpless to fight it. “He was always here. You took too long to corner him. Though near stabbing a man in Ellen’s defence helped matters along.”
That pulls a broken little laugh from her. She’s crying outright now, and somehow smiling through it, which feels like the harshest and loveliest thing I’ve ever seen.
I lift her knuckles to my mouth and kiss them.
“I’m yours,” I say against her skin. “Entirely. If you want me. Say you want me, Rosie.”
“Want you?” she says, and there’s wonder in it. “Alex… Of course I want you. After that, I’d be a fool not to.”
Her hand comes up to cup my face, thumb brushing my cheek like she’s trying to soothe us both at once.
“I love you too, you bloody fool,” she whispers. “And that may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, so well done. Ye’ve thoroughly destroyed me.”
Then her expression shifts, softness giving way to heat.
“Now get off your knees,” she commands, her voice dropping low in a way that has my trousers tightening. “I know ye’re trying to be honourable. I know you think it wrong to take me and leave me while I’m not yours in the proper sense. But you turned me into a hungry little beast for more of you when you ate my cunt the way you did. I need more.”
If I were not already on my knees, that would have put me there.
I feel half faint with the force of all my blood rushing south. The way she talks—so freely, so shamelessly—and tells me what she wants, like she is unravelling only for me, makes something dangerously possessive flare.
This tiny red-headed, green-eyed vixen, spitting out the word cunt like a weapon forged to break me. Gods, it works.
“For tonight, I want you to forget what Mannie told us. Forget where you have to go tomorrow. Forget everything but me. For one night, can we pretend we have forever?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
RÓISÍN
