“They’ll be all right,” she said. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to reassure him or herself.
“They will,” he agreed. “The Ravenscrofts are a force to be reckoned with. Alverthorpe doesn’t have the stones to try.”
She laughed shakily, and then looked up at him. “I’m sorry. Peter, I’m so sorry.”
He drew back, holding her shoulders in his hands. “What the devil for? You shattered him like a porcelain teacup, sweetheart. It was spectacular.”
“Oh God,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t seen that. I wish—”
He waited for her to finish, his heart in his throat.
“I wish you didn’t have to do any of this.” Her voice softened. “You should’ve let me leave, Peter. I’ve only made things harder for you.”
He wanted to scoff or shake her. But her eyes were downcast, her dark lashes heavy over her eyes, and so he squeezed her shoulders. “Come here.”
She came, not quite eagerly, into his embrace.
“I won’t leave you,” he said. “I won’t stop loving you. Even if I have to watch a dozen jackasses call you names and somehow not strangle them. Even if you and your erotic books end up in newspapers across the Empire.” He pressed his hands into her hips. “Even if we do not get the children.”
“Butwhy?” She looked up at him then, fierce and uncomprehending.
“I didn’t marry you for that. I didn’t want you because you could make me respectable or fix my cursed house or take care of my siblings.” He touched the line of her lips with one finger. “I just wanted you.”
She said his name. Her lips moved against his skin. “Thank you.”
“For wanting you? I promise you, it’s no hardship.”
She laughed, a little damply. “No. For this brazen, impossible plan.” Her eyes flicked to the bookshelves around her and then back to his. “I would not have thought of anything like this, Peter. But if this works—perhaps it’s the only way I can have you and the children and Belvoir’s as well.”
“It will work.”
She searched his face. “If it works, it is because of you. Because of the way you turn what could be a crisis into a victory. A flaw into a strength. You see this world and imagine it better, Peter, and I—I think you are remarkable.”
His heart battered itself against his rib cage. He wanted—he wanted so much to be what she believed he was.
“I love you,” she said, a breathless rush of words. He felt a slow dizzy revolution in his chest.
“Good,” he said. “Now can I kiss you?”
She laughed a little, and nodded, and he found her mouth with his.
He felt a little drunk when he finally pulled away from her. Shaky with relief from the afternoon, his body loose-limbed with desire.
“Do you want to go upstairs?” she asked.
He was mad for her, for the flushed pleasure on her face and the eager responsiveness of her mouth, and his desire was shot through with love for her clever brain and her courage and her enormous heart.
“The hell I do,” he said. “This time we’re finding a bed.”
She hummed a little sound and came up on her toes to kisshis ear. He tried to remember why he shouldn’t drag the pins out of her hair and spread the dark-blond waves across her shoulders.
He thought of how she would look, naked in their bed, her hair tangled, her eyes heavy with desire, and groaned into the curve of her neck. He bit her, gently, and she made an approving whimper, tipping her head to the side.
“I am going to make you so happy,” he said. It was a promise, a whisper, a kiss. He eased back from her and tugged her toward the back door of Belvoir’s. He congratulated himself on resisting the urge to press her up against it.
He pushed open the door, pulling Selina’s body full-length against his own. They tumbled into the alley behind Belvoir’s, and Selina gave a startled laugh that broke suddenly into an audible squeak of alarm.
They were not the only couple in the alley behind Belvoir’s. Peter’s eyes fell first on the man, a sturdily built fellow, then the woman, plump and graying. His arm was locked around her back, his face bent over hers, a hairbreadth from a kiss.
