Page 93 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
“Again.”
“I love you, Edward Langton. I love you, and I choose you, and I will keep choosing you every morning for the rest of my life. Even when you are difficult.Especiallywhen you are difficult. Which is most of the time.”
He opened his eyes. They were green and bright and full.
They said goodbye to the children. Horace pressed a beetle into Edward’s palm. Edward put it in his pocket without hesitation, the way he always did, because some rituals were sacred. Ruth waved from the window. William challenged Edward to a race, and Edward declined on account of his ribs, which John had bruised. John apparently became William’s favorite person on the spot.
He helped Valeria into the carriage. She had expected him to take the reins. Instead, he climbed in beside her, pulled her close, and held her for the entire ride, his chin resting on the top of her head, his arms wrapped around her, steady and warm and finally, finally still.
“Let’s go home,” he murmured.
“Where?”
“My house. The one Nathaniel secured for me when I received the title.” He paused. “I thought ye might like to see where yer husband lives. When he’s not sleeping in chairs in yer bedroom and breaking glasses in yer guest room.”
She smiled against his chest. “I would like that very much.”
His arm tightened around her.
The carriage turned north. Toward the beginning of everything.
CHAPTER 33
The townhouse had a blue door.
That was the first thing Valeria noticed. Not the stone walls or the overgrown garden or the smoke rising from the chimney. But the door. Bright blue, the color of a summer sky, the color of a door that had been painted by someone who wanted to see it from a distance and know he was home.
“It’s lovely,” she breathed.
“It’s a ruin.”
“I like ruins. Ruins have character. Ruins have been through something and survived.” She looked at him. “I have a fondness for things that survive.”
He unlocked the blue door.
The hallway was narrow and smelled of woodsmoke, dust, and the particular silence of a house that had been empty for too long. The wallpaper was faded. The floorboards creaked. There was a mirror in the hallway with a crack in the corner that caught the light and split it into fragments.
“Nathaniel found it,” Edward revealed. “When the Queen gave me the title. He said a duke needed a house, and I said I didn’t need anything, and he said that was exactly the problem and bought it anyway.”
“I like Nathaniel already.”
“Everyone likes Nathaniel. It’s infuriating.”
He lit a fire in the sitting room. The furniture was simple. A settee with worn cushions. Two chairs. A desk with nothing on it except dust. Bookshelves, half empty. A window that faced the garden, which was a generous word for the tangle of overgrown roses and weeds, and one determined foxglove that had somehow survived neglect and was blooming against the wall like a small act of defiance.
Valeria walked through the rooms. Touched the walls. Opened the curtains. Let the light in. She was doing the thing he had watched her do at Thornhill, the quiet claiming. Making a space hers with her presence. With her hands on the surfaces, her eyes on the windows, and the way she stood in the center of a room and breathed it in as though she could taste the history of the walls.
“There are four bedrooms,” he explained. “The kitchen is small but sound. The garden needs work. Everything needs work.”
“Four bedrooms,” she repeated.
She looked at him. He looked at her. They both understood what four bedrooms meant. Room for more than two. Room for the family she had asked for and he had promised.
“We could make it ours,” she said. “Thornhill was always Gordon’s. Even after he died, his portrait watched from the wall. His ghost sat in every chair. But this…” She looked around the sitting room. The worn settee. The dusty desk. The foxglove in the window. “This could be ours. A fresh start.”
“Aye.” His voice was quiet. “A fresh start.”
She crossed the room and stopped in front of him. Close. Her hands found his shirt. She gripped the linen the way she had at the altar, the way she had in his bedroom, the way she always gripped him when she was about to say something that mattered.
