Page 132 of Unlocked

She crossed her arms over her chest, which he recognized as the posture of a woman who was not yet ready to concede the argument, even if she was considering it. "How do you know I'll stay?" she said. "How do you know I won't walk back through that blue door and get on the first flight to Florence?"

"I don't," he conceded. "You might. You are the most stubborn person I have ever encountered in a life that has involved a considerable number of stubborn people, and if you decide to go, I cannot stop you. But I will go with you. I will follow you to the ends of the earth." He took a step toward her. "But I'm asking you not to go. I’m asking you to stay."

She raised an eyebrow. "You're asking."

"I am," he said. "Which is not something I do often, and I'd appreciate it if you took it seriously."

The corner of her mouth twitched. He watched it and felt the warmth of it move through him.

"Tatum," he said, then swore. “Kate,” he started again, then stepping forward he took her face in his hands, tipping it up the way he'd done a hundred times and had thought about ten thousand times since, looked at her directly and let her see everything he usually kept below the surface, all of it, without the careful composure or the managed distance or any of the hundred ways he'd spent twenty years protecting himself from exactly this. "I am never letting you go. I want you to understand that. Not now, not ever. You are mine, and I am yours, and I have been yours since long before I was ready to admit it, and I am done, completely and permanently done pretending otherwise." He paused. "You are stuck with me. I'm Irish, and I'm stubborn, and I own a pub, and I love you, and that is simply the situation."

She looked at him. Her eyes were bright, and her chin was tilted up. Her hands had come up to rest against his chest. She was fighting a smile and losing.

"That's the situation," she said.

"That's the situation," he confirmed.

"Declan," she said, and it sat differently in her mouth this time. Easier. Like something she was trying on and finding that it fit.

"Yes," he said.

"You are the most impossible man I have ever met in my entire life."

"I know," he said. "I'm working on it."

And then he kissed her.

Not gently. Not carefully. He kissed her the way a man kissed a woman when he'd thought he'd lost her and then she'd walked into his pub on a gray Irish afternoon and sat down at his table and looked at him with those eyes, the way a man kissed a woman when he was done being careful and intended to stay done.

She kissed him back.

EPILOGUE

“These scones are almost worth staying in this dreary country for,” Kate said, licking clotted cream from her fingers.

“Dreary, is it?” Declan asked, one brow lifting. “What happened to ‘the green is so beautiful’?”

“That was before it rained for an entire month. I need to see the sun occasionally to make this place worth it. But the scones are a good start.”

“Just the scones, then?” he teased, pulling her into him. After months back home, his brogue was much thicker now. “That’s all that’s keepin’ you here, is it?”

He kissed her, slow and indulgent.

“Mmm,” he murmured against her lips. “You taste like butter and clotted cream.”

Kate laughed softly. “I’m going to be the size of a house if we don’t start exercising more.”

“Oh, aye,” he said, voice dropping. He leered at her. “Let’s go exercise.”

He kissed her again, deeper this time, and she melted into him, arms sliding around his neck.

“Maybe there’s one other thing that makes it worth it,” she said, breathless, as he walked her backward toward the bedroom.

“Mmm. Let’s see if I can make it worth it two or three times.”

They had taken no more than two steps when a phone rang.

Not their usual phones. A different tone. Sharp. Unfamiliar.