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To trust him again.
Her eyes closed, her world stilling around her as her chest tightened.
For all of Morton’s faults, he had loved her. Unequivocally.
The air in front of her prickled and she could feel Wes moving before her.
She opened her eyes.
He had knelt before her, his dark eyes level with hers.
“The time was finally right?” The question whispered from her lips.
He nodded. “When I found the letter at your townhouse, it was too early. I wasn’t ready. You weren’t ready. We both would have fought it if we both knew what Morton’s wishes were.”
“Yet you kept the letter with you.”
His wide shoulders lifted slightly. “Even in that turmoil, even though I didn’t want to admit it…I had hope. Hope I refused to admit to. Hope I refused to let into my heart.”
“And now?”
“I’ve seen the world, Laney. Drifted aimlessly. Expelled untold amounts of anger. Tasted everything I could find. And none of it compares to the taste of your skin. Your heart beating next to mine. Your soul within reach where I can touch it, feel it.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “Nothing?”
He shook his head, his look fixed on hers. “I never told you, Laney, but you need to know—I did choose you.”
Her eyebrows drew together. “What? When?”
“Our betrothal. The one that was set in place when you were twelve and I was thirteen. I could have gotten out of it. My father offered that very thing to me on his deathbed—your father was years dead and my father even encouraged it. He said he didn’t want promises of the past to interfere with my happiness in the future.”
She reeled slightly backward. Wes had never told her this, never even hinted at it. “Your father didn’t like me? I always thought—”
“No—he adored you, always. Yet he didn’t want me to suffer as he did with my mother. They had a grand love affair, but he was supposed to marry another, and that was the mess of it all—he loved my mother but didn’t break off his engagement, didn’t do the right thing and marry her until it was too late, until after I was born. They couldn’t elope to Scotland fast enough. And for as much as he loved her, for as much as he missed her when she died, he was always broken at how he’d failed her in that time. He didn’t want me to suffer the same path as his, if fate had it that by some chance I loved another. Not you.”
“And?”
Wes looked downward for a long second, his hands moving to her knees, his fingers clutching her thighs. “And I told him you were my future. You were my happiness. And you always will be. I decided that when I was thirteen and we were betrothed. When I was seventeen and my father offered to null the engagement. When I was nineteen and about to marry you. And I have never veered from it. You are everything, Laney.”
Her throat collapsed on her, her body swaying.
He was real. Real and here and ready for her. Waiting.
Dropping the letter to her lap, her hands lifted, sliding along the line of his jaw to cup his face. “And you have always been my happiness.”
A smile broke wide on his face, so foreign, but so familiar for it was the same smile she remembered from their youth. Innocence and hope at its core, but now laced with heartache and recognition of all the suffering the world could devise.
His left hand moved to clamp the back of her hand on his face and he turned to kiss her palm, his look piercing her. “So we can wait for the banns, or we can wait for Des to arrange a special license for us—he already asked me if he should start arranging it.”
Her chest flooded with something so unfamiliar—pure happiness—that she almost didn’t recognize it.
She nodded. “I think…I think I would like to have you as my husband sooner rather than later.”
Love, so unmistakable in his dark hazel eyes, stole her breath away. “I was hoping you would say that.”
{ Epilogue }
Stepping off the end of the dock, Laney’s foot landed on solid ground, mucky though it was, and Wes had never been happier to see such a sight. The solid, unmoving ground had to help—help his wife steady herself for he didn’t think he could stand another minute of looking at the sweat on her brow, her sunken cheeks, and the grey pallor that had been permanent on her face since they’d boarded theFirehawkto travel to America.
