He looked down and saw their audience. “It would be just us,” he inched himself closer to her. “I would be outrageously charming,”
“That would be a first,” Quillon muttered.
No one disagreed, and for good reason. The lad wasn’t wrong.
“I had no reason to be charming until you, Fleur,” Hart called.
He reached the end of the branch but not her; his ladder, inside which failed him by four feet.
“Ta beauté m’a séduit, mais c’est ton esprit qui m’a fait tienne pour toujours,” he said huskily.
Your beauty compelled me, but your mind has made me yours forever.
His whispered avowal brought Fleur’s eyes sliding shut, just as they had done when he spoke them to her the first time. But then, there had been a mask between them. Now, they had both been stripped bare—Hart in every way.
“Je ne dormirai plus, car je penserai à toi, ici et maintenant,” he murmured.I will not sleep again, for the thoughts I’ll carry of you, here and now.
Fleur perched her hip onto the edge of her sill and leaned against the jam. “Je suis certain que vous dites cela à tout le monde, monsieur.”I am certain you say that to everyone, good sir.
The teasing lilt of her voice carried him back to that night he had first fallen in love with her—there had been so many times since.
Tears burned his eyes. “Toi. Toi seul, mon amour.”You. Only you, love. He opted to omit the naughty parts he had whispered in between that night.
“Si seulement c’était vrai,” she whispered those same words—If only that were true—of then.
The past melted into their present. Hart abandoned the French talk they’d shared that fateful night.
“It is true,now, Fleur,” he said solemnly. “If you will let it be. I love you.”
Fleur touched her mouth to quivering lips.
“You love me?”
“I—”
“Of course, he does, Fleur,” Oleander shouted in exasperation. “The fellow is naked in a tree to get to you.”
“What is this about being naked?”
There came squawking as the Countess of Abington shouldered her way into the scandal at the back of her house—at the entire back of her house.
And given he was shirtless at her window, and there was family about, Hart reached inside his pocket, and risk of life and limb be damned, got onto a knee.
The McQuoids gasped.
Fleur cried out. “Henry!”
He held the ring up. It turned out even the clouds, and the moon were on Hart’s side this night; for the clouds shifted and the full moon cast a full glow. Prisms played from his fingers, and he moved those radiant shimmers of light towards her. “It was you, Fleur. It was always you. I want to step into the rainbow with you.”
“The r-rainbow ring I picked out.” Fleur caught a happy sob in her fingers.
At least, he believed it was a happy one. It needed confirming. “Are you happy?”
“Outrageously s-so.”
His heart was buoyant in his chest. He tucked the ring back into his pocket. Now, he had to get it onto her finger.
He started calling out to her to ask for permission. “Fl—”