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“No.” Then she was there, her hands upon his back, turning him to face her. “Look at me.” She curled her fingers into his lapels as she found his gaze with hers. “Listen to me.” With shaking fingers, she tugged him closer, regardless that the steady rain quickly wet her hair and spotted her gown. “Yes, I support a few charities and causes throughout London, and that will not change because people rely on me, on the coin I provide, but that doesn’t mean I can’t care for you with that same passion or intensity.”
He shook his head. “How can I be certain what you say is true?” For the moment, he was lost in the pain of the past as well as the uncertainty of the future. “Do you not think I’m a fit husband that you still seek security beyond what I can provide?”
“That is not true.”
“I am trying, Lavinia, so very hard to be the man you need, the father Deborah needs, but I cannot do it alone. I… I need you in my life, need the strength you provide, I need you.” To his mortification, moisture rose in his eyes. “More and more I’m coming to realize we are a team, and I rather suspect I am nothing without you to provide my moral compass, guide me into the path I most desperately need to take.”
“It is my pleasure, for that is what a wife does, yes?”
“I was so lost after Vivian died, but now it feels as if I’m coming out of that dark cave I previously walked in.” The tears that fell to his cheeks were warm, an odd contrast to the cooler rain. “This is a terrifying place to be, for it frightens me. That being said, I need you at my side, not only to strengthen my title, but to make this marriage everything it should be, everything I wish it to be, because…”
“Yes?” So much hope rode on that one word, he couldn’t hold back the wave of emotions any longer.
There was no point in lying to her or denying the truth to himself. In the process of letting go his hold on too much he’d gathered to his heart over the years, a weight slipped from his shoulders. Chains about his heart fell away. Vivian wouldn’t want him to pass his days as a prisoner to grief without the hope of finding happiness again. She’d always been concerned about that. “I think I’m beginning to fall in love with you.” He’d only needed to give himself permission. “Despite the odds, despite everything against us, none of it matters if I have you by my side.”
“Oh Percival!” With her own eyes luminous with tears, Lavinia gathered him into her arms and held him close. “I am not planning to leave you, no matter how broken either of us are, for when I said my vows to you, I meant them.”
Yet she didn’t say she might be coming to love him too. Did it matter, truly? Their union was still new with many pitfalls and opportunities to make mistakes, but those undeclared emotions in her eyes, the way she held his face between her palms, the expression on her face told him that the two of them were moving in the right direction toward something beautiful. He only needed to court his wife a while more before she’d begin that fall too.
Then she lifted on her toes and fit her mouth to his. It was such a sweet gesture and had the power to push away his immediate fears that he crushed her into his embrace, and with a groan of pure masculine victory, he set out to kiss her senseless right there in the rain and on the walkway where every sort of traffic on the street could see.
Perhaps there was something to be said to marrying a woman who was completely opposite of his first wife in every conceivable way and not proper at all.
“Papa!” The call from Deborah at the open door to the townhouse eventually penetrated his passion-fogged brain. “Papa, you silly man, come in here. You are as wet as a dog.”
He pulled mere inches away from his wife. “Somehow being silly isn’t the worst thing.”
“No, it’s not.” When Lavinia kissed him again, he ignored everything to return the embrace. For the first time in years, it didn’t feel as if he were drowning in grief or guilt and neither did he crave a drink, not when he could stay drunk on her.
Would that it lasted.
