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Hal remerged, shirt less, his hair wet, scrubbing at his face with a towel. ‘Now. Talk to me.’
‘I went because you cannot,’ she said, her hands knotted in the sheet as he stood there watching her. ‘I went to convince him that Wardale was innocent, and he believes it. I want help to find out who tried to kill you. But you arrived before I could talk to him about that, or your father, and the letter fell into the fire and is gone.
‘He kissed me,’ she said, talking doggedly on in the face of Hal’s lack of response. ‘He kissed me because he can no more help himself than a cat can stop teasing a mouse it has caught. He did not hurt me and he did not frighten me. I told Richards that if I had not come out in an hour, he was to go and fetch you.’
Hal turned his back and walked to the window. ‘I thought he had taken you. That he would…harm you. And then, I thought the fire…that you…Julia, have you any idea the hell it is, loving someone and knowing they are in danger? Perhaps dead? And feeling so powerless. I love you so much, and I saw his hands on you, saw the fire—’ He laughed, a short, harsh sound with no amusement in it.
For a moment, she hardly under stood the words or their meaning. Then, when he stayed with his hands braced against the window frame, head bowed, she climbed off the bed and walked to him, laying her hands, and then her cheek, against his naked back.
‘Yes, I know what it feels like,’ she said, schooling her voice so it would not shake. ‘I fell in love with a soldier and I saw him go to war. And then he did not come back and I thought he was dead. So I went to find him, and I watched over him, thinking he would die and that my love would not be enough to save him. Yes, it is hell, and I am sorry I put you through it.’
Under her palms, she felt the muscles tense, and then Hal turned, catching her by the shoulders so he could look down into her face. ‘You love me? I thought…I knew you wanted to marry someone and you liked me, perhaps wanted me—a little. But I knew you should not marry a man like me, a man with my past, my reputation. I wanted you to stay innocent, to find someone worthy of you. I knew I should go and never see you again. And then you were compromised—’
Hal closed his eyes, a man confessing. He was unable, she realized, to believe this would be
all right. ‘I felt guilty. I had what I wanted, what I desired, although I did not realize then that I loved you. I have never been in love before,’ he added ruefully, opening his eyes to smile at her. ‘The one thing I wanted and should not have and yet I was forced by honour to take it.’
‘I’ve loved you for so long. I realized at the Review,’ Julia said, putting up her hands to frame his face, rubbing with her thumb at a last smudge of soot on one sharp cheek bone. ‘And I love you now, with all my heart. And I like you very much, when you aren’t cross with me. And I want you all the time, cross or not. And I cannot imagine what I have ever done to be worthy of a husband like you.’
Hal’s mouth on hers was simply bliss, simply comfort and excitement and loving and friend ship and relief, all together, all at once. She cried a little, wriggling close into his embrace and he must have felt the tears, for he lifted his head and touched them away with gentle fingers.
‘Love me, Julia? Now?’
‘Yes. Yes please. Bread and butter loving so I can feel the weight of you and look up into your eyes.’
He laughed and lifted her and laid her on the bed, smoothing away her clothes with the expertise that had once so shamed him. He shed the remains of his uniform and came to lie over her, and she curled her legs around his narrow hips and felt him press intimately close, wanting her. ‘Yes,’ Julia murmured, her fingers tight on his shoulders. ‘Yes, now Hal.’
And he stroked smoothly into her as she sighed and arched up to take him, matching his rhythm, reading his eyes and listening to his voice as the words of love became gasps and he groaned and stroked higher and deeper into the yearning heat of her. The bliss began to ravel and build, and she read his in his face and in the tension of his body, and she matched him, urgent now until he went still, gasped for breath, surged one more time and she went with him, tumbling into the light.
Julia came to herself held tight in Hal’s arms. She wriggled until she could sit and look at him sprawled in elegant, indecent abandon amidst the wreckage of the bed clothes.
He put up a hand and stroked it down the side of her breast, making her shiver. Then the thing she had not been wanting to think about came and dug its claws into her heart, and she felt the chill touch the warmth of her happiness. ‘You were wearing your uniform when you came for me,’ she said.
‘Yes, I had been to Horse Guards.’
‘You have a posting then.’ I will be brave about this.
‘They said if go back in a month they will tell me.’
‘I see. We have a month together: that is more than I feared.’
‘You will not insist on following the drum?’
Julia reached out and brushed the still-damp hair back from his forehead. ‘No. It would worry you and distract you. You were right. I married a soldier, I must accept all that it means.’
‘You will not have to, my love.’ Hal caught the hand that was stroking his hair, pulled it to his mouth and kissed it. ‘I am selling out. I will breed horses in Buckinghamshire and we will buy a Town house so we can be frivolous and sociable when it suits us—and you must tell me how many bedrooms we must look for.’
‘For the children?’ she asked. Oh, my brave, wicked rake. You are going to make such a perfect father. And he was not leaving her. He wanted to stay of his own free will.
‘I had this daydream as I was riding down Whitehall,’ Hal said. ‘Max was looking over his stable door at a brood mare with a long-legged foal at her side, and I was watching my wife and my child playing in the long, soft spring grass. And I thought, that was what it would be to be happy.’
‘Oh.’ En chanted by the vision, Julia smiled down at him. ‘A baby for next spring? Hal, there is no time to lose.’
‘That is what I thought, my love,’ he agreed, serious except for the wicked sparkle in his eyes as he pulled her down and kissed her. ‘There is no time to lose—and all the time in the world for loving.’
