Page 78 of Duke of Storme
“For us.” Lightning struck again. “For the possibility that we might be happy instead of just... enduring each other.”
Finn’s hands tightened at her waist, pulling her closer despite every instinct screaming retreat. “Diana, if we do this… I don’t know how to be what ye need.”
“You don’t have to know,” she said, unwavering. “We can figure it out together. But I need you to want to try.”
The honesty in her voice, the hope in her eyes, and the way she looked at him like someone worth saving – it shattered his last resistance like glass against stone.
“I do want to try,” he said. The confession was torn from deep in his chest. “God help me, Diana, I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anythin’.”
Her smile was sunrise through storm clouds. “Then stop fighting it.”
“It’s not simple–”
“Yes, it is.” Diana touched his face and her fingers trailed across his cheek. “It’s the simplest thing in the world, if you’ll let it be.”
Thunder crashed overhead, but neither flinched. They stood like two people who had finally found something worth fighting for.
“Diana,” Finn said, her name a vow. “I need ye to understand. I’m not good at this. At feelings. At lettin’ people close. I’ve spent years keepin’ everyone distant.”
“Then learn,” she said simply. “Learn with me.”
Finn stared down at her. This woman had become essential to his breathing. She had transformed from quiet obligation into the center of his world. Diana was the woman who had refused to be dismissed despite his best efforts.
“Aye,” he said finally, rough with emotion. “I’ll learn.”
When he kissed her this time, it was with reverence instead of desperation, promise instead of panic. Diana melted against him.
The rain continued falling, but it felt like a blessing. Like the world was washing them clean for whatever came next.
When they separated, both breathing hard, Finn kept his arms around her while Diana’s hands remained in his hair.
“Nothing is the same now,” he said quietly as he pressed his forehead against hers. “And it can never be again.”
“No,” Diana agreed. “It can’t.”
They stood together in the storm, two people who had stopped running from love. The Highland wind howled with renewed fury, but neither moved. They had crossed a line from which there was no retreat. Together, they had acknowledged feelings that could no longer be denied or dismissed or safely contained.
And as they finally walked toward the castle entrance, hands intertwined and hearts beating in rhythm, both knew that everything had changed.
There would be consequences to face, questions to answer, a future to navigate that looked nothing like the careful arrangement they’d started with.
But for the first time since their wedding day, neither of them was afraid of what tomorrow might bring.
They had each other. They had truth. They had love, raw and new and all-consuming in its intensity.
It was enough. It was everything.
It was the beginning of something neither had dared to hope for and the end of everything that had kept them apart.
And as the castle doors closed behind them, shutting out the storm but not the electricity that crackled between them, Diana and Finn finally understood what it meant to stop merely surviving and start truly living.
Together.
CHAPTER 24
“Finn, might I have a word?”
Diana’s voice carried across the study’s silence as she stood in the doorway with a leather-bound package clutched against her chest like armor. Two days had passed since the storm, since their kiss in the rain that had changed everything and nothing all at once. Two days of Finn retreating behind walls higher than any she’d yet encountered.
