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The next day, Arabella was early and walked the cliffs alone, waiting for Caroline. She tried to breathe deeply to calm herself down—after all, if Inverley’s sea breezes were the healthful cure-all that the brochures claimed, then surely they could help calm her nerves?
It was time to admit to herself that her plan to woo Caroline was incomplete.
There had been more kissing, but Maeve had been right. She needed to think about what she wantedafterthe wooing was successful.
Her breath caught when she saw Caroline walking toward her.
“You’re not drawing today?” Caroline asked when she reached her.
She had often invited Caroline to sit with her while she painted, but that wasn’t why she had asked her here this afternoon.
“Too overcast.”
The skies were grey and the water was choppy. Arabella’s dress was whipping back and forth against her legs in the wind.
“It’s going to rain,” Caroline said, glancing up at the sky.
“That means there is no one around. Only us.” She took a deep breath. “It can’t just be me that has been feeling this way?”
Caroline’s eyes gleamed, and the corner of her mouth turned up into a sly smile. “What way exactly, Bell?”
Did she dare? No more excuses, no more meeting each other’s lips as if by chance. The crash of waves roared in her ears, or maybe it was the blood rushing through her, drowning out all other noise.
No one was here.
It was safe.
Except for her heart.
Chapter Thirteen
Arabella couldn’t deny herself any longer. She took another step forward, her body pressing against Caroline’s narrow frame, which she had hugged and held in so many circumstances over the years. Laughing. Whispering. Grieving. Celebrating.
And more recently, with the fierce pulse of pleasure beating between them.
She touched Caroline’s face with her fingertips, light and slow, moving from her temple down the hollow of her cheek, and brushed her thumb near her lip. She stood on the balls of her feet and pressed her lips against hers, and heat and warmth flooded her at the sweet contact.
The rain started suddenly, drenching them within a minute, and they jerked away from each other. The ribbons on Caroline’s bonnet drooped, and her dress was slick against her body, but there was a wild joy on her face. Arabella laughed, happiness welling up inside her, drops of rain collecting on her spectacles and making Caroline a blur of shapes and colors, but it didn’t matter. She knew it was her.
She wouldalwaysknow it was Caroline, sight be damned. She knew her scent, her pace when she walked, the feel of her body, the sound of her very breath.
Caroline eased the spectacles from her eyes and dropped them into her sodden reticule. She moved close and swept her into her arms, providing enough heat to ward off the chill of the summer storm.
Caroline dipped her head again and kissed her, then trailed a sweet succession of kisses along her jaw and down her neck, thecrown of her head bumping Arabella’s chin, but that was all right with her.
Everything felt all right now.
Caroline raised her head, and that dear sweet face that meant the world to her shimmered, a haze of woman and rainfall and all her fantasies blurring into one perfect moment.
The skin on her forearms prickled with the cold air, and her gown grew damper by the moment.
“Our first kiss when we were washing the dishes wasn’t an expression of celebration, was it?” Arabella asked.
“No, I suppose it wasn’t,” Caroline admitted. “Neither was the apology kiss. Or all the other kisses.”
“They trulydidkiss at King Arthur’s court—but perhaps not quite the way I kissed you that time,” Arabella confessed.
“Why have we never thought to do this before?” Caroline asked, and Arabella didn’t need her spectacles to know that there was a glimmer of humor shining in her eyes.
