Panicking, he bolted upright, ready to flee.
“Dorian, no!” Farah shocked him by flinging a long, smooth limb over him, wrapping her body around his so tightly he’d have to hurt her in order to disengage. “Do not run from this.”
“Farah,” he croaked, the warning lost in the barrage of emotions crowding his throat.
“You are mine, Dorian Blackwell,” she said with savage possession so foreign to her angelic face. “Only mine.”
He tasted salt on her tongue when he kissed her, felt a cold wetness on his cheeks as she took him into her body, fusing her limbs around his trunk.
He gripped, she clung. Their hands roamed and explored. It didn’t take long before pleasure bloomed and blood sang. A simultaneous culmination so sweet and prolonged peeled away any barrier left between them, fusing their souls and their voices into an archaic song of pulsating bliss.
Dorian kept her body wrapped about him as he maneuvered them beneath the covers.
Once they were settled, he kissed her eyelids. “I love you.” Her cheekbones. “I love you.” Rooted in the soft curve of her shoulder. “I love you.”
She lifted her head, a luminous smile baring her small, even teeth. “I’m glad you’re getting used to the phrase.” She kissed his jaw. “You’ll have to say it at least once a day. For the rest of our lives.”
He’d already planned on it, but lifted his brows in mock surprise, enchanted that she’d swung back to being playful. “Every day, you say?”
“And much more often on the days when I’m cross with you,” she warned sagely.
“Why are you going to be cross with me?”
She slanted him an imperious look. “Trust me, there will be occasion.”
His laugh sounded foreign, even to his own ears. “Fairy?” he mumbled, a drowsy languor stealing through his bones, her tiny body warming him.
“Mmmmmm?” She struggled with her own heavy lids, apparently unable to open them wide enough to see him properly.
“I love you.”
Her yawn cracked her jaw and she patted his chest. “So you said.”
“I said it as Dorian. But I must tell you once per day for Dougan, as well.”
Her chin wobbled, but this time the tear that rolled down her cheek contained no sadness, only joy, and so he kissed it from her cheek, and moved to roll her over and leave her to sleep.
“Sometimes you watch me sleeping, don’t you?” she asked, more alert now.
Dorian didn’t answer her.
“Couldn’t you do that tonight, but hold me, as well?”
“I really shouldn’t…”
She put a hand to his chest, imprisoning his back to the bed. “Stay.”
“What if I hurt—”
“You won’t,” she insisted, and dropped her cheek against his chest, her legs still split over him. She was asleep in the space of an instant, just like when they were children.
Dorian did stay up and watch her. His fear melting into true realization. She wasn’t his weakness. Through his entire godforsaken life, she’d been the source of his strength, and now that they were reunited he could conquer anything. Even the past.
Especially the future.
Dorian closed his eyes, identifying the space in his soul as peace and—hope.
Before sleep took him, he whispered the vow into her ear that he would repeat every night until time claimed its due.
I make ye my heart
At the rising of the moon.
To love and honor,
Through all our lives.
May we be reborn,
May our souls meet and know.
And love again.
And remember.
EPILOGUE
“For God’s sake, Blackwell, quit pacing and have another drink!” Murdoch slurred, swatting at a shushing Tallow. “Ye’re making the room spin with yer to-and-fro. If you doona quit, I’ll be seasick.”
“I t-t-think that’s the whisky making the room spin.” Tallow took the bottle from Murdoch and handed it to Frank Walters who, in turn, handed it to Christopher Argent.
“Lady Blackwell ordered that ye had to be at least one or two sheets to the wind afore she lets ye in to see her. I’m upholding my end of the bargain,” Murdoch bellowed.
Dorian paused in pacing across Ben More’s gallery hall only to scowl at his drunken steward. He’d picked this open space to await Farah’s labor as the tapestries on the walls muted her distress. “Since when did everyone in this bloody castle start taking orders from the wrong Blackwell?” he snarled, still infuriated that he’d been tossed from the birthing room by his wife and a gaggle of bossy women.
In the way, they’d called him. Making things worse with his glowering and ordering them about, they’d said.
He didn’t fucking glower.
In a smooth movement, Argent poured them each a crystal glass of liquor and handed one to Dorian. “This is Laird Ravencroft’s best Highland vintage,” he said in a voice as dark and rich as the scotch in their glass. “He sent it to you for just this occasion. Now stop glowering and have a drink.”
“I don’t fuc—”
“I’m all done!” A powerful voice echoed through the great hall, and had each of the former Newgate convicts averting their eyes as quickly as they could, studying the tapestries or their boots with great interest.
Dorian tossed back his drink and set his glass down as a bundle of sable ringlets and sticky hands barreled into his arms.