Page 82 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Would I, then? Are you asking?”
He gave a mock sigh and his arms beneath his head as he reclined upon the pillows. “It’s no use. You swore you would never.”
“I did say that,” she said, and slowly her arm dropped to her side, brush strokes abandoned. “I suppose there was a time I meant it, even. One bad marriage can make a subsequent trip down the aisle seem like a death sentence, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve had one of those. Wouldn’t recommend it.”
Her eyes widened. “What, marriage?”
“Death sentence.”
Her mouth dropped open in horror, and in a jerky motion she flung the brush at him—too weakly to cause any damage, and he effortlessly knocked it away with a block of his wrist. “Emma,” he chided. “One has to learn to laugh about such things. It means they’ve passed. That one survived them.”
Still the trace of a pout lingered upon her lips as she crawled across the bed toward him, and she dropped down beside him with a weary sigh. Ithadn’t quite left her yet, that helpless fear. Still it was not uncommon for her to wake a few times each night in the grips of some wretched nightmare, tense and shaking until she heard his voice, felt the embrace of his arms. In time it would ease, but it was early days yet. He smoothed the last of her piqued frown away with the pad of his thumb. “Besides, you know I’ve not been married before,” he said.
The fine arches of her brows scrunched together. “Had never,” she said softly, almost to herself.
“Hm?”
“You said, ‘hadnever.’ That youhad nevermet a woman you wished to marry. I thought it was a bit of an odd phrasing.Havewould have been more appropriate, given the context.” Her palm settled upon his chest, a light touch, just over his heart—almost as if to assure herself that it was still beating. “Havewould have implied a continuous, ongoing state. Buthad…”
Hadimplied that it had once been true, but it was no longer. “I never lied to you,” he said. “It was just that we hadn’t yet met. Not really.” But he had always wanted to marry her.
“So you are going to ask.” There was a sweet thread of satisfaction within the words, and not so much as a wisp of trepidation.
“Well, itwould be rather nice not to have to sneak out through the terrace before sunrise for once—” His breath sailed clear of his lungs with the advent of her bony elbow into his solar plexus. “Yes, I will ask,” he said on a wheeze. “But I’d prefer not to go to my wedding looking like I’ve come out on the losing end of a tavern brawl. God willing, I’ll have but one.”
“It does not bother you, then, that it will not be my first wedding?”
“No. God, no.” In retrospect, with a sort of clarity achievable only with time and distance, he could see that each step they had taken had been leading them toward one another. On long and winding paths, no doubt—but ones that had brought them here, to this place, together at last. “So long as it will be your last.”
Even Ambrose had had his part to play in it in the end, wretched arse that he had been. Much good had come of the wrong he had done, and the muck that he had cast across their lives had washed away clean. Everythinghad washed away clean along with it; years and layers of guilt and shame, of deception and lies. How, now, could he nurture regrets, when the end result had been all he had ever wanted?
“I told Josiah once,” he said, “that where you have come from doesn’t matter half so much as where you are going. That still holds true, I think.”
“Oh? And where are we going?” She whispered the words with the smallest stirring brush of her lips on his.
“I’m afraid I don’t count divination amongst my skills,” he said. “It is enough for me to know that wherever we go, we go together.” Becauseshehad been the destination he had long despaired of reaching. He might have gone the rest of his life without hearing a word from her lips, feeling the touch of her hand.
And now it was clasped within his own, fingers intertwined—as their lives soon would be. How much more could a man ask for?
With a saucy smile, Emma loosed her fingers from his own long enough to grasp fistfuls of her nightdress and drag the whole thing off over her head, sending it sailing in a gauzy arc across the room to land somewhere upon the floor near the window. Naked and beautiful, she threw one long, smooth leg over his own, moved in a graceful shimmy to straddle his hips, and braced her palms upon his chest.
Ah. Well, there was alwaysthis.
∞∞∞
It had always felt like love, Emma thought, because it always hadbeen love. Even when she had not known it, even when she had not yet felt it herself. This man, who looked upon her now as if she was the whole of his entire world, as if he could see nothing beyond her, had alwaysloved her.
“I love you,” she whispered, feeling the strong beat of his heart beneath the tips of her fingers. It overwhelmed her, the gratitude she felt for so simple a thing. A commonplace action, and yet so treasured now. That heart which continued in its steady beat, in its steady, faithful love. “I love you. And you are never permitted to risk your life—for any reason—ever again.”
A hint of a grin tugged at the corner of his wicked mouth. “Is that so?” he asked as his uninjured fingers threaded into her hair and cupped the nape of her neck to pull her closer.
His lips touched the corner of her mouth, and she sighed, sinking into the kiss. “Yes,” she whispered. “I will share you, if I must, with our friends and family.”
“You’ll have to, I’m afraid. They’ll make right nuisances of themselves otherwise.”
A joyful nuisance, she thought. A happy one. A loving one. “But I won’t share you with anything else. Can you tolerate being only an ordinary gentleman, do you think?”
