Page 99 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin

“She has yer stubbornness,” he remarked.

“She has your jaw.”

“Poor girl.”

“Lucky girl.” Valeria tilted her face up.

Edward looked down, and the flower crown slipped to the side.

“She has a father who lets her put flowers in his hair and does not flinch. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how many children in the world would give anything for a father who would sit still and wear a crown of daisies and look at them as though they had handed him something precious?”

He kissed her. Slow. Tender. The kind of kiss that came after the urgency had passed and what remained was deeper. Quieter. More certain than anything he had ever known, including the weight of a pistol and the certainty of a mission and the cold, clear purpose that had driven him for twelve years.

“It has been an honor, Duchess,” he murmured against her mouth.

“The honor is mine, Duke.”

She kissed him again.

His hand found her belly, and the baby kicked against his palm. He smiled. The smile that was only for her. The one that nobody else in the world had ever seen, because it belonged to her the way the beetle belonged in his pocket, the way the blue door belonged in their house, the way the flowers belonged in his hair.

Outside, the children were laughing. The sun was warm on the front step. The roses, which Edward had pruned and trained and coaxed into wild, abundant bloom, climbed the walls and filled the air with sweetness.

“I want another dog,” Valeria said, her head on his shoulder.

“We have a dog.”

“Beetle needs a companion. He looks lonely.”

“Beetle ate my boot last Tuesday. He is not lonely. He is destructive.”

“He ate your boot because you left it by the door, and he thought it was a gift.”

“Valeria, no one gives a dog a boot as a gift.”

“Horace would.”

Edward opened his mouth. Closed it.

She was right. Horace would absolutely give a dog a boot as a gift, and he would do it with the solemn sincerity of a boy who believed that boots were among the finest treasures the world had to offer.

“Fine,” he acquiesced. “One more dog. But if it eats my other boot, I’m blaming ye.”

“Agreed.”

He kissed the top of her head.

She leaned into him, and the baby kicked again. Eleanor shrieked with joy somewhere in the garden. James was building something that sounded like it was about to collapse. Beetle barked. Caroline yelled instructions about color theory to no one in particular.

The house was in chaos. Beautiful, loud, messy, paint-stained chaos. The opposite of everything Edward had known for twelve years. The opposite of silence and shadows and the cold efficiency of a man who had been built to be a weapon.

He was not a weapon anymore. He was a husband. A father. A man who wore flower crowns and carried beetles, and who had, last week, attempted to braid Eleanor’s hair and produced something that looked like a bird’s nest after a windstorm.

Eleanor had worn it proudly for the rest of the day. Valeria had sketched it. The sketch looked nothing like a braid and everything like a mushroom, because Valeria still could not draw. But she kept it on the desk beside the letters, the inkpot, and the small pile of beetles that Horace delivered weekly like clockwork.

This was his life now. Not the Hound’s life, but Edward’s life. The life he had chosen when he lowered his fist in a barn and walked away from the last piece of his old self. The life Valeria had shown him was possible when she stood at the top of the stairs and looked at him and did not flinch.

He would not trade it for anything in the world. Not the Queen’s missions. Not the thrill of the hunt. Not the cold certainty of a man with a pistol and a purpose.

He would take the chaos. The noise. The paint-stained fingers and the boot-eating dog and the woman who laughed with her whole body and who had taught him, slowly, patiently, and stubbornly, that love was not a weakness.

It was the strongest thing he had ever known.

The End?