Then he kissed her, breathlessly, and she swore she heard their hearts beating as one in that moment.
He settled beside her on the bed. There wasn’t much room, but Lucy preferred it that way. They lay entwined, legs, arms, her cheek pressed to his chest.
Lucy hoped he felt as safe and content as she did. She lifted her head to ask, but he’d closed his eyes and was breathing in the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.
He looked peaceful, and there was the slightest hint of a smile on his lips.
Lucy smiled too. Stubborn, wonderful man. She didn’t just want to save him. She wanted to love him for the rest of her days.
Chapter Nineteen
For the first time in his life, James woke languidly. Not gasping for air to escape a nightmare or jolting awake as if he’d heard some ominous noise. His mind and body were at peace in a way he couldn’t ever remember experiencing before.
Lucy lay half splayed atop him, her leg over his, her arm draped across his chest, and her long flaxen hair tickling his chin.
This is where I’m meant to be.
He had felt this feeling before, back when he was at the pinnacle of success with Pembroke Shipping. There was a day when he realized his bank accounts were overflowing, he was turning away new customers, and friends wanted his company while colleagues respected him. Anything he wanted to buy could be his.
He recalled the moment with vivid clarity, because it was the only time he’d given more than a second’s contemplation to how he might secure those things in life that one couldn’t buy—happiness, contentment, love.
And he’d dismissed the thought.
Happiness came from his success, he’d reasoned. Contentment was found in financial security. And love was what he felt for his business—a kind of unwavering commitment that brought him true satisfaction. Back then, he couldn’t imagine needing more.
And then Lucy came along.
A pair of bold peridot eyes and an inner strength that shone through in every choice she made, and he was never the same. Somehow, he’d known, even after that first glimpse of her gaping wide-eyed at King’s Cross Station, that he wanted her in his life from that day forward.
If he’d examined the impulse, he would have rejected it out of hand. There was no strategy in it. No payoff that he could imagine. A fanciful noblewoman? A lady determined to chuck propriety aside and be blindingly hopeful that society would accept her exactly as she wished to be?
For a man who’d done his best to build himself up in the eyes of society, at least London’s commercial milieu, he would have run in the opposite direction if someone told him that such a woman would beguile him completely.
And yet she had. And he was.
Not even when he’d been at the peak of his success had he felt as lucky as he did now, lying in a ramshackle cottage under a quilt made of scraps with the most determined, extraordinary woman tucked against him.
He couldn’t let her go.
Selfish? Perhaps. Impossible? Considering his current financial situation, possibly.
But he had to try, even if that meant employing unusual means.
James stroked her hair, letting his fingers dance across her shoulder, stroking the soft, warm skin of her back. Lucy made a little mewling sound of contented sleepiness and nuzzled her cheek against his chest.
He waited until her breathing settled into a slow, steady rhythm and gently lifted her arm, then slid out from under her leg and out of bed. Holding his breath, he prayed he hadn’t roused her, but she merely resettled under the covers, scooping the pillow into her arms where she’d previously held him.
Waking her would likely be the better choice. In fact, he suspected he’d hear about this choice later and have to explain himself.
He dressed quickly and quietly, glancing at his pocket watch.
There was no more time for delay, or even stealing another second of the truest contentment he’d ever known. He had to go.
Looking around the cottage for something to write on, he settled on a scrap of paper in a crumpled ball near the fire that looked as if it had been intended for kindling. In a bookcase with a fold-out desk, he found a nearly empty fountain pen.
Minutes ticked by as he searched his mind, but he had no eloquence to offer her. Making promiseswasn’t fair either. Instead, he scratched out a single line, then another, and signed with an inelegantJ.
Little Athena, who had Artemis’s love for archery, looked now like a slumbering Venus, her hair spread around her, limbs stretched across the bed, face flushed.
