Page 156 of The Seven Rings
“Shut up. Just shut up.”
He turned to pace again. She might have slapped back if she’d had words, or just walked away if she hadn’t been frozen in place.
“Just shut up and listen. There are other walls in this house.” He flung a hand toward the portraits. “Other walls that can hold paintings of murdered women. She’s got no reason to stop, Cleo’s got that right. I’m damned if you’ll be number eight.”
“I never thought I’d say this to you, but you need to calm down. I’m not a bride.”
“That’s right, and that’s a problem for me. As long as things are the way they are, as long as they are and you live in this house, you can’t be.”
“That would come under the category of my problem.”
“And the stupid continues.”
Her spine snapped as straight as a steel pole. “I’m not going to stand here while you call me stupid.”
Turning her back on him, she strode to the doorway.
“I’m in love with you. Words matter? There they are. I started sliding the first time I saw you, standing out front in the snow. Wonder all over that face. That face I can’t live without now.”
She’d turned, and now stood in the doorway with her heart in her throat. “Trey—”
“I’m not finished. I haven’t said those words because they matter. Because I knew once I had—”
“You’d make me so happy I’d actually feel stupid?”
“Sonya.” He shook his head, shoved his hands through his hair again.
She could actually see it happen, could see the calm slip over him again.
“I haven’t said them because once I had, it stopped there. I couldn’t move on to what I want, what I believe you want. I knew that, I’ve been dealing with that, but tonight?”
He looked back at the portraits. “It just hit harder, that’s all. What Cleo said—solid manor logic—Dobbs won’t stop. You’re an annoyance, an obstacle, so she harasses you, threatens. She could hurt you. But you can’t become a competitor, Sonya. You can’t give her the reason, the excuse, the power, whatever it is, to make you number eight.”
He came to her now, took both her hands. “I want a life with you. I want you to marry me, for us to start a family because I love you. And because I love you, I can’t ask you. I won’t. And we can’t have that life or that family.”
“But you would, and we could, if I walked away from the manor?”
Shaking his head, he brought her hands to his lips. “No, that was wrong of me, and I’m sorry for it. I’d hate myself, and if you didn’t resent me straight off, you would down the road. And you’d be right to, that’s the goddamn kicker. You can’t walk away from this. From them.”
“I can’t, no, I can’t walk away from them. But I can want what you want. I do want a life with you, children with you. I want to fill the house with them.”
Now he smiled a little. “There’s a hell of a lot of rooms in this house.”
“Well, maybe not every one. Trey, it’s so much more than enough for me to know you love me, you want that with me. I can wait, because you love me.”
She fell into the kiss, into the love, the promise. She held on to it, and him, while Clover serenaded them with Adele and “Make You Feel My Love.”
She felt his, tasted it on his lips, knew it in his heartbeat, in the arms that kept her close.
And held her still when her head rested on his shoulder.
“We’re in this together,” he promised. “Whether it takes a day, a month, a decade. We’re in it together.”
Together, she thought. She looked at the women on the wall in their bridal white and made her own promise.
They’d find a way, the way, to free them, reunite those who wished it. And she and Trey would build that life together, right here in Lost Bride Manor.
Chapter Twenty
