“Mmm.” She slides her arm around my waist. “Whatever happens going forward, I really enjoyed tonight.”
“Me too.”
“I hope you don’t regret it.”
My heart aches at the hope in her statement, and I squeeze her shoulders. “Of course not. Quite the opposite. I was out there thinking I wish we’d done this a lot earlier. If only my father hadn’t intervened.”
She rests her chin on my shoulder. “To be fair to him, I’m not your equal in that sense.”
“If you mean you don’t have as much money as I do, that’s true. But he married my mother because she was from a good family and was considered his equal. And they’ve had a relatively unhappy marriage, and are now getting divorced. Their relationship skewed my view of marriage for most of my adult life. I thought that was what happened. But I don’t want to live like that. More than anything else, I want to be happy. And you make me happy.”
Her face lights up. “Really?”
“Really. I think maybe it’s occurred to my dad now that money can’t actually buy happiness.”
“Kingi Davis,” she mocks, “did you really just say that?”
“I know. What the hell’s wrong with me?”
We both laugh.
She snuggles a little closer, and I tighten my arms.
“I need to talk to him,” I admit. “About Mum. I’ll go and see him tomorrow.”
“What if he mentions our engagement and advises that you could do better?”
“I’m my own man now. I make my own decisions.”
“You make your own mistakes.”
“You’ll never be a mistake,” I tell her fiercely, cupping her face. “Seeing you in the gardens that day was the best thingthat has ever happened to me. I’m not religious anymore. Or I didn’t think I was. But looking back, I feel as if that meeting was destined. It’s like…” I hesitate, struggling to put my feelings into words. “I don’t know… as if I was on a train, and I missed the station years ago and went sailing past you. But whoever is watching over us changed the tracks so I could come around again and have a second chance. And this time I took it and leapt off.”
“I’m so glad,” she whispers.
“Me too.” I bend my head and give her a long, lingering kiss.
“I should go,” she says when I eventually lift my head.
“Okay.”
“Maybe just a few more minutes.”
“Mmm.” She’s warm and soft in my arms, and I kiss her again, in no hurry to say goodnight.
*
In the end, she stays with me until the early hours. We make love again, slowly and sleepily, and then she dozes off for a while afterward. But eventually, when the moon is high above us, she gets up and makes her way to her own room, just in case Thea rises early and comes to find her.
Usually, when I’m with a girl, I’m kinda glad when she goes so I can have my own space. I enjoy my own company, and I rarely get lonely or bored by myself. But tonight I curl up with the pillow, feeling an ache inside at the loss. I want her here. I want to hug her again. I want to sleep with her in my arms and wake to see her bed hair and the creases on her cheek from the pillowcase. I want to smell her warm, sleepy body and wake her with my mouth.
But soon I fall into a heavy sleep, and when I wake it’s light, and I can hear the girls talking in the kitchen, and thena high-pitched bark. I get up and pull on my track pants and a tee, and go out to find Bearcub sitting watching the girls cooking breakfast.
“We’re making you a bacon and egg sandwich,” Thea announces. She’s kneeling on a stool, breaking eggs into a dish and picking out the shell before Chessie pours them into the frying pan.
“Fantastic.” I start making a coffee. “You can be my full-time chef if you like.”
She giggles, and Chessie winks at me before concentrating on frying the eggs.