Page 113 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
“I want you to love me.” She glanced down at his buttons, wishing she’d not admitted it. Wishing she didn’t suddenly feel so vulnerable.
He made that devilish sound she’d come to recognize as his amusement. He tucked a finger beneath her chin, dragging her gaze back up to his. What she read there lifted her soul more than words ever could. “Every word Iever said to make you doubt my love is now a blasphemy to me. I meant it when I told you that I should have said it twenty years ago, before I left… I should have said it the moment I returned.”
A tear slid unbidden down her cheek, and he thumbed it away as he was wont to do. “Why didn’t you?” She wasn’t reprimanding him. She truly desired the answer.
“As a boy, I was afraid that the sheer, unmitigated power of my love for you was wrong, somehow. You were so young. So innocent. And I… I always knew I was this—this monster. Even though I had no memories, there were scars on my soul that were even more ugly and distasteful than those on my body. I couldn’t bear to reveal them to you, especially when I couldn’t remember what made them.”
“And you remember now?” She shaped a hand over his unshaven jaw, her heart welling with a warmth and light she’d not felt since their childhood.
He nodded, swallowing down an emotion that didn’t seem to be easily grappled. “When I came for you, I truly thought myself incapable of love. It was a selfish act. I know that. But I couldn’t admit that what I felt for you was that exact thing. I thought it merely need. I had a void, not only in my memory, but in my soul. That void was you, Lorelai. I’ve always known that.”
“I missed you, too, Ash. Every day for twenty years, there was a hole in my heart that belonged to you.”
“You don’t understand.” He growled as though angry, though with her or himself, she couldn’t be sure. “It’s not that I merely missed you… You are not a holeinmy heart, you are the wholeofmy heart. When I think of a life without you, it is like a life without breath. I’m notmebut for you. I exist, but I’m notalive.You said that when you met me, my eyes were dead. They were dead. I wasdead. And if I lose you, they will be again. I know I don’t deserve you. I know I’m a thief, a killer, a pirate, and worse. There’s a darkness in me, Lorelai, one I’m afraid will consume your light. But, God help me, I can’t let you go.”
Lorelai drew his forehead down to meet hers then turned both of their heads to regard the pillar of late afternoon sun filtering into the cave. “That isn’t how light works, is it? Darkness is easily overcome. Not light. The smallest hint of illumination can chase away the heaviest gloom, can slip through the most infinitesimal crack. It is never the other way around.” She kissed him softly, and her lips came away salty as a barrage of emotion overwhelmed them both. “There has always been light in you, my love, and no matter how many have tried to smother it with their black deeds and blacker souls, it resides within you, still. I can sense it, even now.”
He folded into her, his magnificent body sinking against hers in a gesture of submission. To her, but to fate, to them, to the inevitability of their connection.
He cupped her face between his rough, tender hands and captured her gaze with his own so as to punctuate the fervency of his words. “All that is or ever was good in me begins and ends with you,” he breathed. “Every time I said you were mine, I meant thatIwasyours. Always.Always, Lorelai, I’ve been yours. I’d go through everything I’ve suffered in my nearly forty years on this earth if it brought me to this moment. If it meant that I’llneverspend one more night of the next forty years apart from you.”
The capitulations of joy coursing through her were tempered by a dread wrought of too much loss and tragedy. “A lot can happen between now and never.” When she’d said it before it had been a declaration of hope, now it was a caution.
“Yes, a lot can happen between now and never.” Hekissed away a tear that held no pain or sadness, but joy and hope and the fear that once found, it could be lost. “But time will end before I stop loving you.”
“Truly.” She sighed. Could this be real? Could the love she bore him actually be returned, not once but a hundredfold?
“I love you,” he whispered, pressing his lips to hers, enchanting her with soft drags of his mouth. “I could be—I have been—sent to the other side of the earth, and it doesn’t even matter, because I’ll always find my way back to you. I etched the ebony wings on my back years ago because I have always been your raven. Your mate.”
She understood now. He’d never truly beentheRook.
He’d always been…
“Your Rook.”
EPILOGUE
Six Months Later
“My, would you look at those handsome men.” Lorelai clutched his arm as the gangplank lowered in order for them to disembark the steamship.
Ash scowled. “Don’t look too closely. We’re still newlyweds, or need I remind you?”
Her merry laugh still invoked a strange tickle low in his chest. “Don’t worry, darling,” she soothed. “I just find it amusing because from this distance, those men look more like pirates than peerage, what with the eye patch and the other with a metal hand. Perhaps if they give me a peg leg and you a parrot, we’d complete the set.”
Ash smiled down at her with infinite indulgence. “Whilst we are guests of the Duke of Trenwyth and his lady wife, I’ll thank you to remember that I’m not a pirate anymore,” he rejoindered with a bit of haughty melodrama. “I am His Grace, Ashton Weatherstoke. Duke of Castel Domenico, Comte de Lyon et de Verdun, Earl of Southbourne, and so on and so forth.”
“I suppose, as your wife, I should be impressed, but allthose flashy titles still seem like such a demotion from the King of the Seas.” She flashed him a teasing pout.
“No.” He tucked an errant curl back beneath her cobalt traveling hat. “Not if you’re at my side.”
Ash kept her steady as she leaned on him down the unstable gangplank, silencing anyone who might remark upon her tedious progress with an evil glare.
She was swept into Farah Blackwell’s awaiting arms the moment they touched solid ground, and introduced to Lady Imogen, the Duchess of Trenwyth.
“Your Grace,” Blackwell greeted him, and Ash had to give his old friend credit because he said the title with much less wry humor each time. “Allow me to introduce His Grace, Collin Talmage, the Duke of Trenwyth.”
They exchanged pleasantries as though the entirety of the surrounding society were not gawking at them.
