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“You can start by taking that ring off.” And he was not an uncertain man. As far as he was concerned, all he need do was think it and it became law, but this was Timoney. He cleared his throat, then forced out the unfamiliar plea. “Please.”
It was distinctly unfamiliar, and uncomfortable, to admit to himself that he had absolutely no idea what she would do next.
Timoney blinked. Then she looked down at her own hand as if it surprised her to find it was connected to her. She frowned for a moment, then she wrenched the diamond off her finger. Then, holding his gaze again, she simply...tossed it.
Crete had never heard a finer music than the faint clatter the ring made as it hit the floor, then skidded out of view beneath one of the trees.
“Did that feel good?” he asked.
And she smiled at him. That beautiful smile that had knocked his whole world askew the first time he’d seen it. And every time since.
“As a matter of fact,” she said. “It really did.”
So while she was still smiling, brighter than all the lights on these trees he’d put up just for her, Crete did something he had never done before in the whole of his life.
He sank to his knees before her. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring he had acquired by waking up London’s foremost jeweler at the crack of dawn. On Christmas. And then making it worth the man’s while to come here, bearing boxes lined with velvet, so that Crete might make his selection.
And no matter what happened next, it would be worth every last penny the man had wrung out of him for that service—simply for the look on Timoney’s face as Crete knelt there before her.
“I wanted to give you Christmas because I want to give you everything,” he told her. “I want you to do every one of those great many things that you dream about.”
“Crete.” His name was a whisper. “What are you...?”
But he couldn’t think too much more about what he was doing or he wouldn’t do it. He would retreat back behind his bars and live a life of cold steel and concrete. Darker and darker all the time. He might end up there still.
First, though, he would try to walk out of his cell, once and for all, and reach for the things he’d always told himself he didn’t want or need, because they slowed everyone else down. Love. Companionship. The vulnerability of it all. The longing and the need and the perfect happiness of lying next to her in the dark, close and whole.
He had stopped holding out his hands when he was still a child. But hadn’t his childhood taken enough from him? Two families. His name. His heart.
Crete held out his hands now.
And for the first time in as long as he could recall it, he let himself hope.
“I want to give you light,” he told her, as if he was carving the words he spoke into the stone beneath them. “And I want, more than anything, to give you love. And all the hope you can handle. But I think you know how little I know of each. Light is one thing.”
He couldn’t look away from her. He didn’t want to look away from her.
She stood before him, her hands over her mouth as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Wet hair and bare feet. Her face scrubbed clean. His boxer briefs.
Crete had never beheld more beauty. It filled him up. It coursed through his veins.
It made him believe.
“All I know of light or hope is you, Timoney.”
He had never knelt before because it had always seemed like surrender to him, but he knew better now. He had never been more powerful than when he dared to do this. To hand over his heart to this woman, knowing full well that she could hurt him more, and more critically, than he had ever been hurt before. She could destroy him. But he did this anyway. “And any belief I might have in love, is you.”
Crete held out the ring he had chosen, because it had reminded him of her. It was a precious moonstone, large and almost iridescent, surrounded by enough diamonds to sparkle the way she did.
“Are you...?” Her hands were still over mouth, so her words were muffled, but her eyes were bright. “Is that...?”
“I want to marry you, as I said last night,” he told her. “But not to wait out your uncle or your money or whatever other nonsense I might have spouted. That was me trying to hide. But I do not wish to hide any longer, Timoney. I... I love you.”
He thought she whispered his name.
But he pushed on, his voice growing rougher with each word, because he had said it. And now he needed to say the rest. “You make me imagine that I am a man. Not a mystery or a monster or an alien creature set down amongst these humans I cannot understand. With you I am only a man, flesh and blood and capable of loving you as you deserve.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I don’t know if I ever will, but I know that I will start by setting aside all this anger, all this pain I have long tried to pretend was only fuel to me. I will let it go, Timoney. This I promise.”
This time she said his name. He heard it perfectly.
