Chapter Twenty Eight

It hadn't been the quiet dinner he'd hoped for, but there had been something enjoyable in it nonetheless. A sort of peace, Rafe thought, that he'd not experienced in years—despite the chaos of flying food, courtesy of Hannah, and at least four separate conversations taking place simultaneously. Here, at last, he did not have to guard his words or mind his expressions. All secret things had come to light, and he…he had stepped into that light himself. As if the fragmented parts of him had assembled into a whole once more. No longer was he relegated to the fringes of that life which he had always wanted.

It was here; it was now. At a long table stuffed with friends and family both. Those disparate parts that he had long kept separated at last reunited, however strange a company it had become.

Convention might dictate that once the dinner plates had been cleared away, ladies and gentlemen were to go their separate ways, but his family had never been particularly well-suited to conventional things. Instead they remained gathered round the table, and Emma's servants supplied a few bottles of port to keep the conversation going.

Emma, who had hoarded little Edward for most of the evening, elected finally to pass him along to her left, where sat her brother.

"Thank you, no," Chris said, with a feral grin. "I've already eaten."

Emma pulled a face, wisely passing Edward instead to Diana, who held out her arms to receive him. "Kit, do endeavor to be pleasant."

"This is as pleasant as I am capable of being," he said, and hefted the lovely, ornate cane that Emma had purchased for him in one hand, stretching it across the table to hook the handle around a bottle of port going spare, dragging it nearer in a flagrant and deliberate violation of etiquette. He had not yet learned that Rafe's family could not be scandalized by so minor an infraction—but Rafe was certain he would. "My leg aches like the very devil, and I'm out of a job, no thanks to you."

Rafe wasn't certain who Chris thought he meant to fool. The government paid a pittance in comparison to the fortune that he'd hoarded over his lifetime of illicit dealings. He had never wanted to be a spy to begin with. It had simply been his only option to avoid transportation.

"Out of a job?" Emma repeated the words as if they had not quite made sense, and her vivid blue gaze swung across the table to land upon Rafe. "The both of you?"

"Have you not been reading the papers?" Chris asked. "We were arrested on suspicion of treason. The cat is out of the bag, as it were. Some spies we would make now."

"Yes, well, I think it's for the best that those days are behind you," Marcus said, leveling a firm stare at Rafe—a warning courtesy of an older brother that they had better be. But then, he'd yet to lose the lines of strain in his face, as if the last week or so had weathered him by years instead of days.

Rafe had begun his career with noble intentions, of course. But the years and the sacrifices he had made to maintain himself within that world had worn upon him. Now, at last, he could put it all behind him. No more long journeys across vast oceans, no more hiding in plain sight or doubling back upon himself to shake would-be pursuers. No more eavesdropping for tidbits of information or rifling through the contents of some unlucky bloke's desk in search of secrets.

"Hannah, poppet, wherever are you sneaking off to?" Ben's gimlet eye had fallen upon his young daughter, who had been creeping steadily toward the door, a book clutched in one hand.

Hannah had the good grace to look abashed at having been caught out. "I was going to find Dannyboy," she said. "I brought my book of sonnets. We only got to read a few of them."

"Oh, sweetheart," Emma said on a soft sigh. "I'm afraid he's not here. He's got his own home and family to be with."

A sore spot, Rafe thought. It had been some days since either of them had seen the boy. He'd not come back for breakfast, nor either for the coin to be earned in running errands.

Hannah's lower lip quivered. "But I was teaching him to read," she said. "He's meant to be here."

By the fragile expression that briefly slid across Emma's face, he felt she must think so, too. And not only for a brief visit, whenever the occasion presented itself. He ought to have a place at this table, in this house, in their lives.

They would all be so much the worse without him.

∞∞∞

"Now that you've let them in," Rafe said, as he tugged his shirt off over his head, "you'll be lucky ever to get them out again. You'll have Beaumonts running up and down the stairs, swinging from the rafters, eating you out of house and home. And they're all terribly nosy, to a one."

"I beg to differ," Emma said as she perched upon the end of her bed, the handle of her brush held in the clasp of her hand. "I've had Diana and Lydia in and out of my house for years. They're perfectly amiable guests."

"Yes, but now—now you are practically family, so they're not truly guests any longer. All those pretenses of civility will go flying straight out the window. And there's nothing so nosy or meddling as family."

"Practically family?" She dragged the brush through her hair slowly, the sleek strawberry blond strands catching hints of the fire burning in the hearth with each slow stroke.

"It's the damnedest thing, really. You missed the chance to be born a Beaumont, so you'd have to marry in." He was mostly teasing, but in profile he could see the dimple that had appeared in her cheek and knew that she was amused.

"Would I, then? Are you asking?"

He gave a mock sigh and his arms beneath his head as he reclined upon the pillows. "It's no use. You swore you would never."

"I did say that," she said, and slowly her arm dropped to her side, brush strokes abandoned. "I suppose there was a time I meant it, even. One bad marriage can make a subsequent trip down the aisle seem like a death sentence, I'm afraid."

"I've had one of those. Wouldn't recommend it."

Her eyes widened. "What, marriage?"

"Death sentence."

Her mouth dropped open in horror, and in a jerky motion she flung the brush at him—too weakly to cause any damage, and he effortlessly knocked it away with a block of his wrist. "Emma," he chided. "One has to learn to laugh about such things. It means they've passed. That one survived them."

Still the trace of a pout lingered upon her lips as she crawled across the bed toward him, and she dropped down beside him with a weary sigh. It hadn't quite left her yet, that helpless fear. Still it was not uncommon for her to wake a few times each night in the grips of some wretched nightmare, tense and shaking until she heard his voice, felt the embrace of his arms. In time it would ease, but it was early days yet. He smoothed the last of her piqued frown away with the pad of his thumb. "Besides, you know I've not been married before," he said.

The fine arches of her brows scrunched together. "Had never," she said softly, almost to herself.

"Hm?"

"You said, ‘had never.' That you had never met a woman you wished to marry. I thought it was a bit of an odd phrasing. Have would have been more appropriate, given the context." Her palm settled upon his chest, a light touch, just over his heart—almost as if to assure herself that it was still beating. "Have would have implied a continuous, ongoing state. But had…"

Had implied that it had once been true, but it was no longer. "I never lied to you," he said. "It was just that we hadn't yet met. Not really." But he had always wanted to marry her.

"So you are going to ask." There was a sweet thread of satisfaction within the words, and not so much as a wisp of trepidation.

"Well, it would be rather nice not to have to sneak out through the terrace before sunrise for once—" His breath sailed clear of his lungs with the advent of her bony elbow into his solar plexus. "Yes, I will ask," he said on a wheeze. "But I'd prefer not to go to my wedding looking like I've come out on the losing end of a tavern brawl. God willing, I'll have but one."

"It does not bother you, then, that it will not be my first wedding?"

"No. God, no." In retrospect, with a sort of clarity achievable only with time and distance, he could see that each step they had taken had been leading them toward one another. On long and winding paths, no doubt—but ones that had brought them here, to this place, together at last. "So long as it will be your last."

Even Ambrose had had his part to play in it in the end, wretched arse that he had been. Much good had come of the wrong he had done, and the muck that he had cast across their lives had washed away clean. Everything had washed away clean along with it; years and layers of guilt and shame, of deception and lies. How, now, could he nurture regrets, when the end result had been all he had ever wanted?

"I told Josiah once," he said, "that where you have come from doesn't matter half so much as where you are going. That still holds true, I think."

"Oh? And where are we going?" She whispered the words with the smallest stirring brush of her lips on his.

"I'm afraid I don't count divination amongst my skills," he said. "It is enough for me to know that wherever we go, we go together." Because she had been the destination he had long despaired of reaching. He might have gone the rest of his life without hearing a word from her lips, feeling the touch of her hand.

And now it was clasped within his own, fingers intertwined—as their lives soon would be. How much more could a man ask for?

With a saucy smile, Emma loosed her fingers from his own long enough to grasp fistfuls of her nightdress and drag the whole thing off over her head, sending it sailing in a gauzy arc across the room to land somewhere upon the floor near the window. Naked and beautiful, she threw one long, smooth leg over his own, moved in a graceful shimmy to straddle his hips, and braced her palms upon his chest.

Ah. Well, there was always this.

∞∞∞

It had always felt like love, Emma thought, because it always had been love. Even when she had not known it, even when she had not yet felt it herself. This man, who looked upon her now as if she was the whole of his entire world, as if he could see nothing beyond her, had always loved her.

"I love you," she whispered, feeling the strong beat of his heart beneath the tips of her fingers. It overwhelmed her, the gratitude she felt for so simple a thing. A commonplace action, and yet so treasured now. That heart which continued in its steady beat, in its steady, faithful love. "I love you. And you are never permitted to risk your life—for any reason—ever again."

A hint of a grin tugged at the corner of his wicked mouth. "Is that so?" he asked as his uninjured fingers threaded into her hair and cupped the nape of her neck to pull her closer.

His lips touched the corner of her mouth, and she sighed, sinking into the kiss. "Yes," she whispered. "I will share you, if I must, with our friends and family."

"You'll have to, I'm afraid. They'll make right nuisances of themselves otherwise."

A joyful nuisance, she thought. A happy one. A loving one. "But I won't share you with anything else. Can you tolerate being only an ordinary gentleman, do you think?"

"I think ordinary will be understating it a bit," he said. "But I have long had my fill of danger. If the only hazard I risk for the rest of my life is an inconvenient tumble down the stairs, I shall count myself fortunate indeed."

Yes, she thought. They were both of them fortunate. She had never thought she would find herself eager to become a wife once again. But she longed for them already, those days that were still ahead of them, filled with a happiness that had at last fallen straight into the cup of her hands.

"I love you," he whispered against the curve of her throat, and she could hear the long-silenced truth of it as the words vibrated against her skin. And again, in just a murmur pressed to the curve of her breast. A raw, vulnerable sort of honesty that had been there all along, scrawled into the spaces between words, etched within longing glances, hidden within each kiss, every touch.

He hissed at the slide of her hand over the sleek muscles of his abdomen, a yearning sound dredged up from deep within him. A powerful man rendered helpless with only the lightest strokes of her fingertips. There in the cradle of her thighs he stood already at attention, the front placket of his trousers straining to contain him.

"Emma." Her name was dragged from his lips on a rough exhale. "For God's sake. Don't torture me, I beg you."

A laugh trickled up her throat; light, airy, unburdened. "You'll just have to suffer it," she said. "In your condition—"

His dark eyes flared with heat at the challenge. The world tilted abruptly in a dizzying spin, and there was the puff of sheets around her as her back hit the mattress. "Rafe! Your hand!" she cried, clutching at his shoulders.

"I'd have to be dead or dying to let that stop me," he said, as he wedged his hips between her knees. "My fingers are set and bandaged. There's not much else that can be done for them."

"But they must hurt something awful." She gasped as the fingers of his good hand slipped between them, sliding through the curls at the apex of her thighs to the hot, damp flesh hidden beneath in a slow, lingering stroke that sent a streak of fire through her veins.

He muffled a groan against the curve of her shoulder, and a fine tremor slid down his spine. "Right now—right now I can promise you that nothing aches even half so much as my cock," he said with such depth of feeling that she threw back her head and laughed.

At least until she heard the pop of buttons and the rustle of fabric. Until she felt the blunt pressure of him between her thighs, and the slow, heavy glide that followed provoked a sigh of satisfaction.

"God, I love you." It was a deep rumble of sound, half-stifled against her lips, and his hips moved in small, helpless nudges, as if he couldn't quite get close enough. The fabric of his trousers rasped the sensitive skin of her thighs, each tiny motion setting nerves alight with sensation.

Her hands threaded through his dark hair, and her lips clung to his between panting breaths. Her back arched, her hips catching the lunge of his, pleasure spiraling out from the lambent heat deep in her belly until it touched even the very tips of her fingers, her toes.

It had always been like this between them. But now they did not hold them back, those love words which had so long remained unspoken. They were traded now in whispers, in sighs, in long, luxuriating moans.

This was how it was meant to be, she thought, in those last few moments before thought deserted her completely. Tender moments shared with a man who loved her completely, who wanted her so desperately that he hadn't managed to spare the time even to remove his trousers. A man who would not maintain separate bedchambers and separate lives, but one who would hold her through the night, and in whose arms she would wake each morning.

A man who would likely debauch her on every surface, in every room of the house, if given half a chance.

Her very own happily ever after. No—their very own happily ever after. Because he would treasure it every bit as much as she would.