meant to be together.
“It just took us some time to see it.” She spoke that thought aloud. Snapping her notebook shut, she returned it to the valise she’d set up in the crook of an enormous curved branch.
“I’m sorry.” About so much. For betraying her. For not seeing her as she’d deserved to be seen.
“I’m sorry, too. For the lost time,” she murmured.
“I don’t want to lose any more with you,” he said, his voice hoarsened by the tears stuck in his throat. “I’ve wasted so much . . . and yesterday, today . . . thinking I’d lost you—” The agony of that brought his eyes shut. As every ugliest nightmare and possibility battered him. “It was as though it were happening again, and I was hopeless to stop—”
“Shh,” she whispered, and her palm stroked his cheek, the tenderness of that loving touch making it possible to look at her once more. “I didn’t doubt you’d find me.”
“I feared I wouldn’t.” His voice broke as he, at last, surrendered to the pressing fear that had gripped him since they’d been separated and since he’d set out after her. “I just rode, imagining all the while that I would be too late. That you were lost to me, and I didn’t . . . I couldn’t live if you were.”
Emma pressed a finger against his lips. “I didn’t doubt you would be here.” She glanced the eight paces below to the blockage in the road.
“Your work?”
She lifted her head in proud acknowledgment. “Of course. But I had my reticule and was prepared to walk if I needed to save myself.” She paused, a twinkle sparkling in her eyes. “Completely, that is.”
He chuckled, his chest rumbling, that mirth coming more from the relief of knowing she was here with him.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
He hesitated. “Olivia came to see me. She . . . learned of her brother’s intentions and came posthaste. She was . . . is . . . devastated by his betrayal and believes herself responsible.”
“No! I would never—”
“I assured her as much. Guilt, however, isn’t always rational.” He knew that from all he carried about Camille’s struggles, a remorse that would always remain with him, no matter how much Emma had helped him see that he wasn’t to blame.
“You were right about him,” Emma murmured, her voice soft and sad, and he set aside his own tumult because it didn’t really matter. She did. What she felt and what she’d suffered, and the hurt of a lost friendship that had been important to her.
“I am so sorry,” he said quietly, and finished his climb until he’d found a seat directly next to her. “I wish I hadn’t been.”
“Me too.” She lightly swung the leg she’d hung over the side. “For not listening to your warnings. My pride,” she muttered, and her face pulled in a grimace. With a sigh, Emma rested her cheek against his shoulder.
Charles placed a lingering kiss upon her forehead. “So how’d you handle the pup?” he asked, and Emma’s smile was back in place.
“He underestimated me.”
“Of course he did. Foolish man.”
Emma turned so she sat facing him, her knees drawn up to her chest, with an ease but also a precariousness that sent another swell of panic cresting. “The Duke of Wingate taught the Mismatch Society some clever skills in putting a man to sleep.” She lifted her right hand, angling it. “You just hit with the edge in this portion of the neck”—Emma demonstrated a slow slashing movement toward the upper portion of Charles’s neck—“and it puts a man to sleep.”
He ran his gaze over her face. “My God, you are breathtaking.”
She laughed. “I swear, Charles Hayden, you are the only man in London who’d be impressed by a lady knocking out a gent, and not absolutely horrified.”
“You are a glorious warrior, Emma Gately, a woman that I would be honored to spend the rest of my days attempting to make gloriously happy.”
Emma stilled, then let her legs fall so they hung over the side of the branch. “What?”
She didn’t know? How could she not know every wish he carried for a future that included them two together in it? Lowering himself onto his stomach, he scaled back down. The moment his feet hit the ground, he dropped to a knee. “Emma Gately,” he called up. “Will you marry me? Will you give me the gift of living only for your happiness?”
There came the rustle of leaves, and a moment