but he stopped, afraid he had revealed too much. Afraid he had not revealed enough.
She cupped his face. “I love you, too.”
He lost the ability to think. Or speak.
Instead, he could only act. Sin hauled Callie into his arms and took her lips with his. No kiss had ever been sweeter. She surrendered to him with a breathy sigh, her arms going around his neck as she rose on tiptoes to return his kiss with all the ferocity he had come to expect from her.
Their mouths sealed in perfect union, and never in his life had any kiss felt better. It was a kiss of reunion, of relief, of love. So much love. They kissed and kissed and kissed, until they were breathless. Until his next thought was that he was going to drag her to the bloody carpet and take her on a bed of the scattered pages of her unpublished manuscript.
Before he could do something so foolhardy, he tore his lips from hers.
For a moment, they stared at each other, two lost souls inexplicably found. And then she traced her finger down his cheek, trailing wetness he had not realized had been there before over his skin. Tears. His.
Fucking hell.
This woman had him in tatters.
This woman made him whole. She picked up the jagged shards of the man he had once been and sewed him back together into a new man. One who not only loved her, but one who was worthy of her love in return.
“I love you so much it hurts,” she told him, a sentiment he knew all too well. “Do you forgive me for doubting you, for letting my fears get the best of me?”
“I forgive you anything,” he vowed. “Come home with me, sweet. Come home where you and our babe belong.”
Her smile hit him in the heart. “There is nowhere I would rather be.”
Fate had an odd way of taking the worst of life—the heartbreaks, the losses, the ugliness—and fashioning them into something unbearably good, Callie had discovered. Sometimes, the road to redemption was long, winding, and perilous.
Sometimes, fate stole into your carriage and made you his captive. Sometimes, fate was named Sin, and he was wickedly handsome, and his kisses turned your knees to pudding, and he made you fall in love with him and all his battle scars.
Sometimes, you had to suffer to appreciate that goodness when it finally arrived.
Callie snuggled against her beloved husband’s chest. She could not help but to feel, this night, a new sense of rightness. A sense that she was exactly where she was meant to be, where she had always been meant to be.
In her husband’s big, tall bed. The one where he had first made love to her.
The one where he had made love to her again, with exquisite tenderness, not long ago. His heart was a reassuring hammer beneath her ear, the musky, citrus scent of him invading her senses. The smattering of crisp, dark hair on his chest was soft against her cheek.
She kissed his bare skin, inhaling deeply. His fingers stroked through her unbound hair. Callie hated to halt the sweet simplicity of the moment, but she had a question for him, one which had been troubling her ever since he had thrust the pages of her work into her hands earlier that day at Westmorland House.
“Why did you truly give me back the unpublished installment of Confessions of a Sinful Earl?” She tilted her head back to see his face as she posed her question.
From this angle, she was treated to the sight of his strong jaw and proud chin, shaded in whiskers. His full, sensual mouth, those wickedly sculpted lips that brought her so much pleasure, were swollen from their kisses and glistening in the lamplight. He was still and silent for so long she wondered if he had heard her.
But then, at last, the deep rumble of his baritone emerged.
“Because they are your words. You are an incredibly talented writer, sweet.” He paused, swallowing, and she greedily tracked the subtle dip of his Adam’s apple. “I had been keeping it since your publisher returned it to me. But the story is yours. If you want to complete it, publish the final volume of the serial, I will not object. Lord knows all London is awaiting it.”
Her husband was willing to allow her to further trample his reputation into the mud, and for no reason other than that he loved her. She absorbed that knowledge. And if she