She understood that they were here to find Bertram, but she couldn’t help but find delight and amazement in her husband.
He stopped touching her and stepped away. Lily turned to see him closing his eyes and clenching his jaw.
“Elias? What is it?”
He shook his head. “I just…I hate the thought of losin’ ye. It grows more…harrowin’ every day.”
Aye, she had thoughts of losing him, too. If they both felt it, it must be a common fear. What would she do without him? “I prefer not to think on it.”
He sat on the bed with his back leaned up against the head frame and raked his fingers through his hair.
She sat next to him and took his hand. “Elias, are you afraid?”
“Of what?” His glorious smile returned. “My fears are not the truth and I willna live as if they are. We will both come oot of this unharmed in body. Our hearts will grieve, but we will live.”
How could he be so certain that he could convince her? Of course, she wanted to believe him. Who wouldn’t? Who would prefer spending what was possibly the end of the world with someone who was constantly terrified and talking about dying?
There was no one she wanted to spend these days with other than Elias. In fact, she wanted hundreds of thousands, if there were such an amount, more days with him. She trembled and closed her arms around herself.
“Lass.” He sat up behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Areyeafraid?”
“Not of you.” She smiled to reassure him. “But this is so…like nothing I have ever felt before. When I think of you, my heart flutters and races. When I see you, I feel as if my breath has left me. Sometimes, I feel positively ill from the way my belly twists and flips when I am with you. I do not tell you because I do not want you to think I have the pestilence. I do not know what grips me.”
“Simon would say ‘tis love,” he told her softly over her shoulder while he ran his hands down her arms. “He might be correct, fer I feel the same way.”
She turned to cast her best smile on him. “Do you think you love me, Elias?”
“Aye, I do, my lady.”
She leaned in and he caught her face in his hands. He kissed her and then gently withdrew and pulled her to sit between his legs and lean back against him.
While he held her, they spoke for a little while about Bertram and Lily’s past. She told him her father named her Lily after the flowers, lilies of the valley. “He told me the flower is also called the May lily and means ‘return to happiness’.”
“Aye, ‘tis what ye do, my lady. Ye bring happiness back,” he told her, speaking into her ear while she nestled into his muscles. “Ye brought happiness back to me. Even in the midst of all this.”
“Aye,” she told him. “You have done the same for me. I feel like a silly fool sometimes, wondering how I can feel such happiness with all that is going on around me. But then I see you, or I hear your voice, and my heart sings.”
She had never spoken things like this to any man. She was surprised to hear them coming from her now, but it was easy. Elias broke down her walls. She wasn’t afraid to excite or entice him. After Bertram had tried to force himself on her and she had to do such a detestable thing to him, he never came back to her bed. Richard had never tried to be intimate with her, and he never asked her help with his impotency.
She was a widowed virgin. She thought she had more time to tell him. It was something he should have known before he married her. Would he forgive her?
“Elias? There is something I must tell you.”
“What is it, my love?”
“When you hear it, you may wish you had not married me.”
“Lily—”
“Though I was married for two years, I am a virgin. I—”
Elias sat up straighter, pushing her with him. She turned in his arms and gave him a worried look while he spoke…or tried to speak. “Ye are a—ye never—”
She shook her head. “No. Never. Poor Richard could not…”
His warm, intimate smile washed over her. ”And yet ye remained faithful to him.”
“I kept my promise.”