She didn’t reply.
Finally, she laid her head back down on his chest. She listened to the precious, steady thump, thump, thump of his battered, stubborn, vulnerable, flawed, foolish heart.
Her own foolish heart beat in time with his now.
After a moment, his arms closed around her instinctively. They lay together, naked at last in nearly every sense of the word, in silence.
His chest rose and fell in a sigh.
How odd it was, she thought, to feel safest with the one person capable of hurting you the most.
How odd it was to be willing to risk breaking her own heart for the chance to finally, at last, win his.
Because there were a few things left to say.
And he wasn’t the only strategist in the room.
The Earl of Montcroix, Magnus Brightwall, held his sleeping love in his arms.
No matter what happened to him in life, this moment was real, and he would have this memory forever: her warm, satin skin against his hands, her back lifting and falling with the soft tides of her breath.
His insides felt scoured raw, but the truth will do that to a person.
A wound had been exposed to the light of day.
Had he suspected the truth of what she’d told him? Perhaps he’d somehow suspected it all along?
He believed he had. He just hadn’t wanted to think of himself as a man so powerfully, desperately, selfishly afraid of being hurt, so terribly afraid that no one would love him, that he had nearly crushed her precious spirit in order to get what he wanted.
But he trusted himself to plan now, because the truth had been laid bare, and he could plan from a place of absolutely clarity.
It was suddenly simple:
In order to get what he wanted, he needed to give her what she wanted.
How ironic to realize that it was what he wanted, too.
He’d in fact spent the first half of the day preparing for a possibility, because she was right: he was a clever strategist.
Still. He might have once taken a bullet for General Blackmore.
But what he planned to do next would be the biggest risk of his life.
Chapter Seventeen
She awoke before the maid came in to build up the fires.
And somehow she knew. Because the difference between a room containing Magnus and a room that did not was like the difference between a fire in the hearth and ashes.
They had dozed for a time, then awakened and quietly made love twice more.
She knew she had slept in his arms. But he wasn’t in the bed; she slid her foot over to find that the sheets were already cold.
She sat up abruptly.
The pillow still held the indent of his head. She ran her hand gently over it.
She slid from the bed and opened the clothing press.