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But those were shallow words to describe what he felt.
They were also the least important part.
“I don’t need you to humble yourself for me,” Amalia whispered fiercely. “That’s not who you are.”
“I find nothing humbling in this,” he told her, and was surprised to discover he meant that. “There is no weakness in surrender. You taught me that.”
Amalia studied his face as if she’d never seen it before. “You know that I love you. But I loveyou, Joaquin.It’s uncivilized. Unpredictable. Untamable. I don’t need you to surrender anything. I don’t want it.”
“You shall have it all the same.” He switched their hands, so that his were on the outside. He tugged her closer, so he could get her face close to his. The way he liked it.
“Don’t do this,” Amalia whispered. “It isn’t fair. If you knew how hard it was to leave you—”
“But you made it look so easy,cariño.Every time.”
Her eyes flashed. “It broke my heart. More every time. I doubt there is anything left. And if you think that you can—”
“Amalia,” he interrupted her. “Cariño.I love you.”
Amalia’s eyes, the color of the sea, went blank. Her perfect lips fell open.
“I love you,” Joaquin said again, with all the ruthlessness and tenacity that made him who he was. He could hear the murmurs all around them, andI love youfloating on the breeze as it was repeated and repeated.Good, he thought. Because this was different from long ago, when he had murmured endearments in bed and then shouted out hisI love youin outrage during that parting scene. This was better. “I love only you. I will never love anything or anyonebutyou. Not because you left me and so it is the only thing I can use as a weapon. Not as if loving you sometime in the past and losing you anyway is any kind of virtue. I suspect it makes me a damned fool three times over.”
“Never,” she whispered.
But he couldn’t stop now. He bent his head to hers. “You make me imagine that this world is fair. That the life I have led and the things I have survived are the price I must pay to deserve you. And I believe that. I do. I would willingly pay them all over again.”
And this time, his name sounded like a sob. That soft, small noise he hadn’t thought he’d get to hear again. He wanted to hoard them all.
“I will not be satisfied with a summer when you were twenty,” he told her. “A few months five years later. Or not nearly enough weeks in a rainy London summer.”
He lifted one hand to tug a tendril of her long black hair between his thumb and forefinger, then tucked the raw silk behind one ear. “I want them all. And I want all of you. No compartments. No rules. I want your body, but you know that. And Amalia, it isn’t enough. I want your heart. I want your dreams. I want your hopes, your wishes, your mad ideas. I want to take your life and entwine it with my own, so that we are as close to one as two people can become.”
“I want all of that,” she whispered, and only then did he realize that her eyes had welled up with tears, and they were making tracks down her face. “You have no idea how much. But Joaquin, you don’t want babies. And I want a family that no one can switch up on me. I want...” She took a deep breath. “I want everything, Joaquin. But you don’t.”
And a few months ago he would have agreed. Now he knew better.
He leaned his forehead against hers. “For you, my Amalia, I have learned how to be a man. You have taught me what it is to be human, and for that sin, I’ve broken your heart and blamed you for it. And still you kneel before me with tears in your eyes. Still you want me.”
“In my whole life,” she told him softly, so softly, when he knew he didn’t deserve her softness, “I have wanted only you. The moment I was free of the palace, even if that wasn’t what I had planned, I ran to you. I will always run to you.”
“You will not have to,” he vowed. “Because I will be right there beside you.”
Her eyes overflowed again and this time he wiped away her tears.
“For you, I will become a husband,” he vowed to her, there on his knees in the full light of day. “And a father. And you know who I am, Amalia. The gutters of Bilbao could not contain me. I have never accepted a single boundary that was ever drawn for me. Anything and everything I dreamed, I made real. And there is only one woman on this earth that I would ever consider marrying. Only one woman who I, on some level, must want to bear my child. For I have never been so careless. I never will be again.”
Amalia was crying openly now, but this was not the red eyes in the pool in Singapore. He knew she might feel many things, but she was not sad. She was not a ghost. She was right here, in his arms, where she belonged.
“This must be a dream,” she whispered. “I’ve had this dream.”
“If it is indeed a dream,” came another voice, “I’m very surprised to discover that I’m in it.”
Joaquin glanced to the side and saw another black-haired, blue-eyed woman before him, though she could not hold a candle to Amalia. No matter the dangerous-looking man at her side.
Next to them stood Queen Esme in all her glory, and he anticipated that she would look at him as if he was something stuck to her shoe. But instead, the Queen nodded her head, as if bestowing her blessing, and even smiled.
And when he looked back to Amalia, she looked as full of wonder as she ever had that first summer. She looked bright and wild, the way she should.
