Page 79 of How To Tempt A Bodyguard

"You said you'd tell your friends the truth. About our marriage. That it's a fiction."

"Yes."

She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to feel less.

She heard him sit up behind her. The blanket rustled. The canvas creaked.

"Florence. Look at me."

She didn't move.

His hand found her shoulder. Firm but gentle. He turned her onto her back.

She stared up at him. In the darkness, his features were shadows and angles. The hard line of his jaw, the glint of his eyes. His expression was unreadable.

"I will tell them the truth," he said slowly. "Because we should marry for real in Scotland."

She furrowed her brows. The words didn't make sense. She heard them, but they wouldn't arrange themselves into meaning.

"What?"

"Marry. For real." He said it like he was explaining something obvious. "In Scotland."

She pushed herself up onto her elbows. Her heart was hammering against her ribs.

"I don't understand."

"If I marry you first, Carrick can't." His voice was steady. Measured. The voice of a man laying out a battle plan. "There's a place where a dozen or more of my friends live and train together. Some have wives. We go there, we say we've been in Scotland for three weeks as the law requires, and they vouch for us."

She sat up fully now, the blanket pooling around her waist. The cold air bit at her skin, but she barely felt it.

"You're proposing."

"I'm telling you how we can protect you legally. Permanently." He paused. "With my friends as witnesses, the marriage would be binding. Carrick couldn't touch you."

A proposal. He was proposing marriage.

Though it sounded like a military strategy.

"I'll talk to Brennan, Tam, and Duff. Explain the situation. They'll help."

He was still talking. Still planning. Still treating this like a logistics problem to be solved.

Florence's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs to still them.

"What about love?"

The words scraped out of her. They hung in the darkness between them—raw, exposed, impossible to take back.

Matthew went still.

"Do you love me at all?" She hated the tremor in her voice. Hated how vulnerable she sounded. Hated how much she needed to hear the answer. "I know you are a man of few words. I've accepted that. But this marriage… it's not nothing. It's not a strategy. And I need to know if there's something more. Something real."

The silence stretched. One heartbeat. Two. Three.

She could hear him breathing. Could feel the weight of his gaze on her face, even in the darkness.

"I don't touch women I feel nothing for."