“Thank you. There are other ways to prevent you falling with child in the future. And in any case,” he paused to stroke her cheek, “should those other ways fail, our babe would have us to guide and love them. Your father should have helped and guided you, not pushed you away.”
This morning, Lucas’s eyes were the colour of grey mist, but that vapour was transient and fleeting. His gaze was anything but: it was intense, earnest and longing.
In that gaze, she saw that he accepted her as she was, just as she accepted him.
“I love you, Lucas. So very much.”
“Then, as I have said before, and I have no doubt we will need to remind ourselves again, nothing else matters.”
She raised a hand to his smooth chin and realised she missed that rasp of stubble. “Did you never think I was that little girl from the nursery?”
“A few times I felt a strange familiarity, but I truly thought Rosie dead, and we have both altered rather a lot in the last eighteen years. But I never forgot her, Rosalind. Never.”
“I thought that little boy was wonderful.” She looked shyly up at him. “I think the man is magnificent.”
“If you keep saying things like that, we will never leave this room, and I have promised to take things slowly.”
Rosalind snuggled into him as they both leaned back into the pillows. She relished the shimmering warmth that flooded her body at the thought that this same magnificent man wanted to be hers.
“Lucas, that dream I had the night before…”
“What was it about?”
And just like that, it suddenly seemed so easy.
