Royal Weddings(31)

He shook her a little, but he daren’t do more, not knowing whether she’d broken anything. “You must wake up. I came to tell you—and if you don’t wake up, you’ll never know, because you’re shockingly obtuse. How could you not see? If I didn’t love you, would I care whether you’d be happy, married to me? Of course not. I’m the Juggernaut. I would have browbeaten you and overwhelmed you and seduced you into changing your mind again, and I’d keep you seduced until I got the ring on your finger. But no. I had to be a hero. I had to want you to be happy, infatuated sapskull that I am, even if it meant losing you.”

He pulled her closer. “Dammit, Barbara. Say something. Do something.”

He heard a sound. He eased his grip a little and looked down at her, not sure he’d heard what he thought he heard.

Snoring.

She turned in his arms and smiled up at him.

“You wretched female,” he said.

“You were going on so well, I hated to interrupt,” she said.

He made a harrumphing sound. “Then you’re unhurt?”

“I had the wind knocked out of me for a moment,” she said.

“You’d better let me check for injuries,” he said.

“I promise you, I’m no more than a little bruised,” she said.

“I’ll be the judge of that.” He proceeded to examine her so thoroughly, his big hands moving over every inch of her body, that she went hot all over.

Then he hauled her to her feet, dragged her up against him, bent his head and kissed her, slowly and with the same single-minded determination he’d applied to courting her. He worked his way from a chaste meeting of lips to something not at all chaste, that had the blood pounding through her veins and stirred up, low in her belly, a hot impatience for something she had no name for.

When at last he drew away, she was limp and nearly sick with wanting.

“Oh, my goodness,” she managed to say, in a strange, hoarse voice she barely recognized as hers. “If you’d done that before, I never should have jilted you.”

“I know,” he said. “But it would have been unsporting.”

“I thought my feelings were not returned,” she said. “I couldn’t bear the idea of a lifetime of being the only one in the marriage who was in love. But I couldn’t sleep last night, and all I could think of was you riding away, and I’d never see you again, and how wretched I should be. And so I came to tell you that I didn’t care if I was the one who did all the loving—and—and that I rescinded everything I said in that stupid letter.”

“And I rescind all my heroic self-sacrifice,” he said.

He straightened her bonnet, which had fallen to one side in the course of the shockingly delicious kiss.

She smoothed the front of his coat, though it wasn’t wrinkled.

He took her hand away, and clasped it in his big one.

“Shall we get married, then?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

And they did, the very next day after the queen married her prince, with a good deal less pomp, but as much love and more.