To Have and to Hold (Finders Keepers #4)

Chapter Twelve

Percy stared at his wife. Four years of heartbreak, and now he was hearing the words he’d spent so many hours dreaming on her lips.

I love you .

He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it.

He sat heavily, and although Cecily appeared almost ghostly pale in the single flame of the candle, he thought he saw her smile. Dazed, he slid the hand on her chin to cup her face. “Do you mean it?”

“I thought love was—” She frowned as she looked away, eyes distant. A little lost, even. “I thought it was how I felt when I met William. But it’s not like that with you. Well, that is, sometimes it does feel like I’m floating—it did when we . . .” Her throat tightened with a swallow, and he stared at it, knowing it was almost unseemly for a man of his age to have so lost himself to desire, but here it was. His wife undid him in every conceivable way. “But then I felt other things.” Her eyes, shockingly dark in this light, returned to his. “So many other things. I thought love would be simple, but there is nothing simple about this. I’m only just discovering these parts of myself. And I’m afraid.”

He knew the fear that came with love; he’d been feeling it every day for years.

He took the hand that rested on his stomach and brought her knuckles to his lips. “Love is not always easy, and it is not always the beautiful, pleasant thing you read about in novels. Sometimes, it is the very darkest parts of ourselves, the worst pieces, brought to the light. With you, I am hungry, and I am jealous, and I am always scared—not of losing you, but of never having you the way I always dreamt.”

Her gaze slid downward, to where he twitched, already half hard again. Perhaps he was an old man compared to her, but his body made him feel young again—or perhaps she did.

Even so, he wanted her elsewhere, not here.

“Not yet,” he said, kissing her knuckles again, then leaning in to kiss her soft lips. She responded with more enthusiasm than he’d been expecting, and he hardened fully. “Let’s wait until we’re home and in my own bed.”

She raised her brows. “Isn’t it customary for a gentleman to visit his wife’s bed?”

“Perhaps.” He drew her down beside him, tucking the covers around them both. They were on their way home, and his wife loved him. The tension he’d been carrying since he’d lost control eased into relief. “But I would rather have you in my bed. And then, you see, I would rather have you remain the rest of the night with me.”

After a moment, she relaxed into his embrace. “Is that customary?”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

This time, when he kissed her, she gave up on any attempt at conversation.

In the morning, certainly for the first time in a long time, Cecily awoke with her husband beside her, his body pressed against hers. At first, she felt nothing but contentment. Then, as she remembered the previous night—the things she had done and the way she’d behaved—panic flooded her. She tensed, remembering the wanton way she’d gasped and moaned and rubbed herself against him. The way she’d come apart in his arms.

If her mother only knew how little she had behaved like a lady . . .

His arms tightened around her. “Don’t even think about running,” he said, his voice still rough from sleep.

Heavens above, she had told him she loved him. And she’d meant it. All this worrying about what love meant, what it felt like, and when the realisation had come, it had been a quiet knowing. An understanding of the world that, until then, had been denied to her.

Love, at least with Percy, was not the wild, unrestrained thing she’d imagined it to be with William. It was not found in overblown compliments and insincere flirting—it was here, pressed against her husband’s chest, his breath in her hair, and a sense of contentment that soaked through her like her warm bath.

“Cecily?” Percy’s hand moved up her arm. Then down. “How do you feel this morning?”

“Mm. Good.” She touched the arm that banded around her stomach. “You?”

“Mm.” She heard the smile in his voice. “Good.”

“I do have a question.”

“Oh?”

“Can we do that again? When we return home?”

He eased her around, turning her until she lay with her head on the pillow inches from his. In this light, his eyes appeared more green than brown. Just like hers. His hair, tangled and messy, fell across his forehead, silvery strands catching the light, and stubble grazed his chin. He was as imperfect as her in the morning. A new revelation, and one she delighted in.

His body did not resemble that of the Greek statues she’d seen, but she found she preferred the lack of chiselled perfection. He was human. Delightfully so, his skin occasionally rough but always warm, with arms that made her feel safe and eyes that saw straight through her.

“That depends,” he said with the ghost of a smile, hand still resting on the curve of her hip, right where she knew her hipbone jutted out. “Have you changed your mind about loving me?”

“Can one change one’s mind about that so soon?”

“Not if they meant it to begin with.”

“I did,” she said, with more confidence than she’d initially felt, but the more she reflected on it, the more right it seemed. “This is new for me. I’ve never been in love before.”

“Not even with William Devereaux?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I thought I was, but I was mistaken.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.”

“What about you?”

“This is my first time being love, too.”

“Truly?”

He smiled. “Truly.”

“Oh.” She pressed a hand to his heart once more. “So you won’t leave?”

“Would you like me to?”

“No,” she said, too fast.

“Well then.” He bent to kiss her, and she marvelled at the feeling of his mouth against hers—the certainty that this would become more familiar to her than breathing.

“Well then,” she said, and kissed him back.

Considering this was not the first time Percy had lain with a woman, he rather suspected his eagerness was unseemly.

Then again, was there anything more indicative of youthfulness—a rarity at his age—than unseemly eagerness to remove one’s wife’s clothes? He thought not, and so he took no pains to hide his impatience, only submitting to dine when they arrived at Holyhead because the cook had been good enough to provide a large meal.

Cecily, for her part, picked at her dinner like a baby bird, declining most courses. He ate heartily, as he often did—though he found that with age there was a far more direct correlation to the amount he ate and the size of his waist—but his mind was elsewhere. Partially upstairs, and partially consumed with the distance between him and his wife.

At the beginning of their marriage, dining at opposite ends of the table had felt like a necessary formality. He could not entirely rule out the possibility that she might choose to hurl a knife at him and begin her life as a fugitive.

Now, he flattered himself, such an event was unlikely.

She cocked her head at him. “You’re staring at me.”

He raised a brow. “Should I not stare at my wife?” His gaze dropped to her plate. “You haven’t eaten very much.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“No?” He met her gaze. “A shame. I am very hungry indeed.”

Her eyes smouldered. To think this was the same girl who had never once reached her climax with him, no matter how patiently he applied himself to her. Truly, things had changed. Though, he reminded himself, he should keep in mind that he should go slowly with her, no matter her newfound enthusiasm.

He pushed back his plate. “Shall we retire?”

“Do you not intend to meet with your steward?”

Usually, that was one of the first things he did on reaching his estate. And, no doubt, his steward was even now expecting a summons. Quite possibly had put his work to one side in anticipation of a meeting.

Yet, all these things seemed less pressing than seeing to his wife.

“I can do that later,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

Her cheeks turned rosy. “Tomorrow?”

He nodded at the footmen that lined the walls. “Thank you. That will be all.”

They bowed and left the room, and finally they were alone. Perhaps under other circumstances, he might have been tempted to have her against the table, but they had not progressed so far yet; he did not want to push things.

“Let me be clear,” Percy said as he rose, approaching her. She pushed back her chair and stood to meet him, though he stood tall enough to look down into her face. He secretly loved the size difference between them, and the way she could control him with just one look. “I intend to take you upstairs, and I do not intend to relinquish my claim on you until the morrow. Will that be a problem?”

Her eyes glittered with too many emotions for him to read. Freckles scattered across her nose, and her fiery curls bobbed as she nodded her head slowly. “I have no objection.”

“I’ll be gentle,” he promised as he left the room, her hand tucked firmly in his arm.

“You do not need to be.”

“Yes, I do.” He glanced down at her. “This is new to you. Is it not?”

She glanced down. “It is.”

Relief spiralled through him that she had not been intimate with anyone else. That this time—now—would be her first time.

She turned her attention to the paintings on the walls. Her expression turned contemplative.

“Do you know, I think I finally feel at home here.” She smiled a little as she nudged him with her shoulder. “Before, I would come here in the summer and count the days until we could return to London.”

“And to all your engagements, my social butterfly?”

“You must confess the country is sadly devoid of company.”

“A sad thing for a husband to hear.”

She laughed, the sound airy and light—so different from any of the laughs he’d heard her give over the past four years. “None of my married friends, you know, rely on their husbands for company.”

“Perhaps they married the wrong gentlemen.”

“Perhaps,” she conceded. “I suspect neither party has any desire to spend time with the other. Save Arabella, of course. She dotes on her husband. I always thought it odd.”

“And now?”

“I suppose I can see the appeal.” Her voice was so warm that he looked down at her. Beautiful, vibrant, alive, she watched him with amused affection. “And I am fortunate you dote on me, too. Another man might have given up on me for good.”

“I was about to.”

“I know. I think that was what spurred me into realising I wanted you. That, and knowing how it could be between us when I was not so caught up in the past.”

They finally reached his bedchamber, and he pushed the door open, guiding her inside and closing it behind them. Want pounded through his body, too potent for words.

“Let me kiss you,” he said gruffly.

She tilted her head so he looked down into her face. Then she reached up, removing the pins in her hair until her curls tumbled down her back, loose and a little tangled. Her eyes looked like the sunlit ocean in the fading light from the windows, holding untold depths. If he tried, he could swim forever and never reach the bottom.

“Percy.” She smiled, soft and slow, and the last of the barriers around his heart, the ones he had erected to keep himself safe, cracked into dust. He was irrevocably, irrefutably hers, and there was no pretending that he could save himself now.

“You have my heart,” he told her, sliding his hand along her jaw, his thumb coming to cup her cheek. “Forever, Cecily. Until the tides turn back on themselves and the moon outshines the sun. Until the earth crumbles into the sea. There is no world in which I don’t love you, and no lifetime in which I ever stop trying to be a man who deserves you.”

She placed her finger against his lips. “Until my last breath.”

“Until my last breath,” he vowed, and kissed her.