the truest thing in me. They are… the sweetest, most tender kind of violence because they have broken me down and shattered everything I thought was the truth.
“I know I said that you were mine but… I don’t want to possess you.” He held up his hand. “No, that’s not true. I can’t help but ache to make you mine. Because you are mine. Even if you decide that this isn’t to be. My heart. My body. My protection. My life. It’s yours. I am yours. Even if you gave your future to another. You are still mine, because you are a part of me. The only part of me I can stand.”
When he looked up, she was not the only Goode sister with tears streaming down her cheeks.
She covered his hand with hers, turning her cheek into his palm and pressing a gentle kiss to the pads beneath his fingers. “Gabriel. Your past doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care what man you were. Only the one you are now. The one you will choose to be.”
He stepped closer, his eagerness too apparent. “I could be good, if you taught me how.”
“She’s the only Goode sister who actually deserves the designation,” one of the men said in a caustic tone.
Prudence slapped her husband’s arm and a chuckle washed the room of some of its gravitas.
Gabriel gathered her hands in his own, and did something he’d never done for man nor God in his entire life.
He knelt. “Marry me? I have no title to offer you—”
“But he’s as rich as Midas,” Raphael interjected helpfully.
Gabriel shot his brother a withering look. “If you do not mind that I cannot make you a lady, that we will belong in very few ballrooms, I’ll do my best to give you a good life. I’ll treat you like a queen. I’ll worship you like a goddess. Even though I am broken, I—”
Felicity astonished him by sinking down with him. “You are not broken… you are beautiful,” she insisted. “You have become everything to me in such a short time, my entire world seems filled with you.” Her lashes swept down as he held his breath, waiting for the answer she seemed ready to give.
“I… only feel safe when I’m with you. But I don’t need you to worship me, Gabriel, I don’t want to fall off this pedestal I’m on. Because, I’m the broken one. And I have no real reason to be. My fretting will drive you mad, if my snoring doesn’t first. I have those fits— those spasms of helpless terror that make no sense and reduce me to nothing without warning. My greatest enemy is often my own mind, the one thing you can’t protect me from.”
“But I can,” he interjected. “I will. I will hold you when you’re terrified. I’ll remind you that you’re safe. I’ll help you battle your nightmares, and I’ll dig in the garden next to you until they abate. I’ll face the world when you cannot. Because, Felicity, the only thing I fear is living a life without you in it.”
He couldn’t say if he bent to her or she surged up to him, but their lips met in an ecstatic clash, their arms encircled each other with the exuberance of two people finding treasure they’d never even dreamed to possess.
When Gabriel had decided that his heart couldn’t expand beyond his encompassing love for the woman in his arms.
He opened his eyes and looked across the room and realized immediately how mistaken he was.
Because he’d have to make room for the entire Goode family.
His family.
Epilogue
Felicity woke Christmas morning vibrating with the anticipation of a child. Cosseted in her sleeping husband’s grasp, she was torn between squirming away from it, or delving deeper into the warmth and letting the presents be unwrapped without them.
A layer of lacy frost impeded her view from the window, but a steady whistle of wind told her the morning was deliciously stormy, just as predicted.
Oh, sod it. She had to get up. Breakfast would be decadent, and someone had to see the tree lit.
Besides, Gabriel and Raphael said they never really celebrated Christmas, and she’d spent hundreds of hours and a small fortune to make certain this was the most festive holiday in the history of Christendom.
Slipping her fingers around his wrists, she lifted his heavy arm with no small amount of effort and with the agility of an acrobat, slid from beneath it.