Page 114 of In Need of a Duke
“I was afraid.”
“Let me be afraid with you,” she said. “Every day, I want to stand next to you and live together, to share the good and the bad, to share the mundane and the simple. I want to laugh with you. I want to have a family with you, and truly not because duty dictates so, but because I love you, and there’s nothing more I want than to have a son or a daughter with your eyes, and to feel their little hands squish my cheeks together, to hear their laughter. I want to be standing there next to you as we watch them run about causing mayhem. I want that, however imperfect that is. I’m here because I want that with you.”
“There’s no time like the present then.” He smiled and then leaned down, pressing his lips against hers and kissing her as if it were the night they met all over again.
Pure reverence.
And hope.
EPILOGUE
Three Years Later
The fireflies flickeredover the lush garden blooms. The sky was a brilliant August sunset, all flushed with orange and purple as the nightingales trilled along the hedges at Stonehurst.
Charlotte smiled, ducking her head to press a kiss against the puffs of dark hair on top of Adam’s head as he drowsily lay in her arms.
The poor babe was cutting more teeth and had been fussy. So for the past week, after dinner, Charlotte had plucked him from the nursery and rocked and fed him outside as the sun sank into the horizon and the cool grass licked the bottoms of her feet.
And it was pure heaven.
To feel his weight rest against her body. To inhale that amazing smell babies possessed, so sweet. The way his pudgy hand clutched onto the end of her plait, so strong.
His eyelashes fluttered against her neck until they closed one last time as she swayed among the daisies.
It was a far cry from the freezing February day he was born on in London six months prior.
“I think it’s time for bed, my prince.”
And yet, Charlotte couldn’t shake the feeling that this moment was everything she had wished for once. And somehow, more at the same time. She remained outside for a few minutes before looking up at the windows, finding only a dim light in the nursery.
Quietly, she slipped inside with Adam in her arms and walked up to the nursery, pausing in the doorway at what she discovered.
Everything and more.
Ian was asleep on his back, his reading glasses slipping down his nose with a book beside him on the bed, and their two-year-old daughter Rose soundly asleep on his chest. Her wavy honey-blonde hair draped across them both, her little mouth parted, and her full, round cheeks flushed from the warm summer heat. In the morning, when the little girl raced after their dog or plucked daisies up from the field, she would have the most perfect dark-brown eyes of her father.
Charlotte smiled to herself and blinked hard, trying her best to commit the moment to memory. Every day, she wished to remember some small detail, and too fast, they were fading, slipping into one big realization that her children were growing far too quick for her liking.
She softly padded across the nursery and laid Adam down in his crib, then turned for the bed to do the same with Rose when Ian opened his eyes, and a small sleepy smile spread across his mouth.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said. “We were pretending.”
“Hmm.” Charlotte crossed her arms. “If it’s one thing our daughter loves, it’s pretending to sleep.”
“Sleep is her worst enemy.”
“My point exactly.”
He reached over with his free hand and tugged at Charlotte’s skirt, drawing her closer. “I’d kiss that smug look off your face if only I could reach.”
His hand wrapped around the back of her thigh and inched his fingers upward.
She grinned at her husband, knowing full well what his intentions were. “I take it that she put up a fight.”
“Well, I won.”
“Obviously,” she whispered.
