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She stared at him for the shortest of seconds before her gaze went back to the ceiling. “Yet, maybe what you saw was a lie, just the same as all of yours.”
“No.” He charged forward, water droplets flying and he grabbed her face between his palms, dragging her look toward him. “No. There were lies, yes. And then there was what happened in-between those lies. Do not mistake one for the other.”
“How can I not?”
“Because I know you can feel it in me. In the blood that pumps through my veins.” He leaned in, his face only a breath away, the ferocity of his words echoing in her ears. “I want you. I want you today and tomorrow and for the thousands of days after that. I want you in my bed and by my side on the street, in a carriage, in a home. I want you waking up to find me watching you. I want you to carry our children in this glorious body of yours. I want whatever you can give me. Whatever you can forgive. Even if it’s only a small slice of your heart. I’ll take it. Happily. Whatever you can give me. Whatever it takes.”
She drew a trembling breath. “And if I cannot?”
“Then I will continue to love you. Near, far, wherever. I will be there. Forever.”
“Don’t promise me forever, Rune.”
“Then I promise you tomorrow. Take tomorrow from me.”
Her stare locked in his, his copper-green eyes holding the world out to her, and she lost all sense of resistance. All sense of anger and the burning hurt of betrayal. She lost it all, for better or worse.
Forgiveness…forgiveness would just have to come.
For she loved this man, loved him to her toes, to the bottom of her soul. And he was only asking for tomorrow.
She could do that. Love him for the next day.
And every day that came after that, one at time…that, maybe she could do.
An exhale whispered past her lips and she nodded, not breaking his stare. “I’ll take tomorrow.”
His lips crashed into hers.
Tomorrow, forever.
He didn’t care. She didn’t either.
{ Chapter 27 }
“You are ready?”
Rune looked at the Box of Draupnir cradled in the center of both of Elle’s hands as she held it up to him. A fat drop of muddied water dripped from the ceiling and landed on her right temple.
Her mouth quirked to the side with a chuckle that echoed in the hollow chamber that stretched far back into the earth. She wiped her temple against the sleeve of her upper arm and then smiled. “As I was saying, you are ready?”
Rune looked at the tree to the left of them in this cold dome of grey rock. That the tree—gnarled with age and grey-green leaves that crinkled at the touch—grew here, cracking up through the rock below into the sunless cave was unfathomable.
That they had found the tree was a miracle.
But there it was, nestled in a cove of the Icelandic coast. The thirty-third cave that they had searched in on these shores during the last three months.
His father had been right to have his dream. He’d been right to pass it down to his son.
This was where the box belonged, there was no question.
At the center of the tree at the height of his waist, a rectangular gash sat in the wood, a hole that had never healed over, never forgot.
It wanted its heart back.
Rune’s gaze shifted to the glow about his wife’s eyes. She’d come to want this just as much as him—more so even. Since that day in Weston’s drawing room, she’d never wavered. Never wavered in her faith in him. In her faith in this goal.
Never. Not once since she’d surrendered, heart and soul to them, to the future. A future that was no longer just a whimsical possibility, but now a reality they could grab a hold of and craft into whatever they wanted it to be.
