Page 60 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

“You’re intense.”

“Am I ever not?”

“No,” she said. Then she smiled. “You aren’t. So, I don’t know what I’m worried about. Or why I said anything.”

“I missed you,” he said.

She stopped walking and stared at him. He couldn’t read the expression in her fathomless blue eyes. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“Thank you,” she said.

But it wasn’tI missed you too.

They continued on into the ornate building, and down the VIP hallway to the box seats. They had a private balcony to themselves with rich red curtains and plush seating. There was a fruit platter waiting for them and two glasses of champagne.

“This is beautiful,” she said.

He was glad she thought it was. He wanted to take her out. He wanted to leave her in no doubt that for him, this was not the same as it had been. That there was no holdover to the guardian-ward relationship. She was a woman, and he was taking her on a date. She was his woman.

He didn’t watch the opera, he watched her. As the notes soared, and the drama onstage built, he watched as her eyes filled with wonder. Watched as emotion took hold of her. Watched her throat work as it became clear the lovers in the play were doomed. Watched as her eyes filled with tears and one slipped down her cheek. And that was when he reached out and grabbed her hand.

She looked at him, and he felt pierced, all the way down to his soul.

She was the only person that he had ever intentionally built a relationship with. He had chosen to do right by her because he wanted to. And he had chosen to know her because he didn’t think there was another choice. She was singular in his life. He and Cameron had been forced together by the whims of life, and he would have said that he and Hannah were much the same. Her parents had died. She hadn’t chosen that, neither had he.

But in this moment, he had to wonder if this, this connection, was inevitable. If they would’ve always found themselves sitting here in this opera box. He would’ve had to explain to her father that things between them had changed. That it was different than he had planned. That of course he had never taken advantage of her when she was young, and never would have. But that he was rather blindsided by the connection between them.

Perhaps he could have talked to her mother about the ways that you tried to manage the scar tissue left behind by the sorts of wounds they had endured. It was something he could see clearly in that moment. That no matter the road they’d walked on, it would’ve ended up here. Unless he had chosen normal. Unless he hadn’t ever sold his body.

If he would’ve chosen that quiet life in Edinburgh, then no. He wouldn’t be here. He never would’ve been to New York. He would never have experienced world-class opera, least of all from a plush VIP private box seat.

And that was the tragedy. Because the only way to be with Hannah was to come to her broken. And the only way to be whole would have been a life where they never met.

He felt nothing but deep, profound sadness and regret. But he was going to ask her to be his anyway.

When the play ended, a sob rocked her shoulders and he leaned in, kissing her on the mouth. Softly.

“Are you all right?”

“It was very good,” she said. “A reminder, though, that sometimes things are doomed. No matter how much she wished they weren’t.”

Did she mean them? He didn’t like that. He gripped her chin. “I think things are only doomed if you allow them to be.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think there are forces at work that are simply too strong.”

It was adjacent to what he had just been pondering. Fate. The fact that had he taken a different road he would not have ended here.

That the cost of this moment had been nothing less than his own hideous trauma.

And yet he was here. He could do nothing about that. He couldn’t go back any further. He could only be here.

“I brought you out tonight because I wanted to show you how life can be. How things could be between us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I spent these past days without you and I was miserable. I don’t like being by myself anymore. I don’t like going to cafés and not having you across from me. I don’t like going to bed and not having you beside me. I want you in my life. I don’t want for this marriage to be temporary. I want for us to stay together.”

“What?”

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