Page 38 of Bryce

She paused. “What letter?”

“The letter I wrote you.”

Her face remained blank, the look of a person utterly at a loss.

“The letter I poured my heart into and needed four drafts to finally get right. I’d intended to give it to you in person, but when Mary sent me running off to take care of matters in our new location, I left it for you.”

“Where?”

How juvenile it sounded now, so long after the fact. “I slid it under the door to your room. I know I could have done better, but there was so little time. The boat was waiting for me.”

She blinked hard. “I—I never got it. I cannot understand it. I never saw any letter. We were all in a hurry, after all, running about. Trying to close the place up before any more of those thugs came and found us. So much urgency. For all I know, I might have gone in and stepped on the letter and never noticed.”

“You never go it? All this time, I’ve wondered why you ignored what I wrote! I’ve spent all these months telling myself to forget you. That if you were able to ignore what I admitted in that letter—writing it was no easy feat, as I’ve already mentioned—I must have been wrong about us from the start. I regretted writing it. Then, after several weeks passed, I thought I should have reached out to you. I blamed myself all along.”

“And I thought you left without saying goodbye. That I meant nothing to you.”

“Nothing?” I chuckled. “You couldn’t be further from the truth. You mean everything to me, everything.” I reached for her, just as I’d been longing to do all the time. Her face was warm between my hands, her hair just as soft as I recalled. In spite of the precarious situation and the less-than-ideal location, I couldn’t recall ever being happier.

Unshed tears sparkled in her eyes, and she smiled. “I’m afraid I love you,” she confessed in a whisper.

“I’m afraid I feel the same.” I leaned in to kiss her, wishing there was more time.

This moment deserved to be savored like a fine wine. I wanted nothing more than to take her in my arms, to carry her off somewhere we could be alone. Preferably for a week to ten days.

A kiss in the woods, with a dead body behind us, would have to do. Nothing about us had been easy, had it?

She clung to me for just a moment, long enough to convey the depth of emotion and need she’d been holding back.

“All right, then,” she whispered once the kiss ended, smiling and crying all at once. “We’d better be on our way. Gate is waiting.”

“That he is.” Though, heaven help me, he was the last thing on my mind before she’d mentioned his name. Nothing in the world mattered more than her. Us. Knowing such a stupid mistake had kept us apart all this time.

I had to get us out of this in one piece, because we deserved the chance to make up for that lost time.

---