The Last Time We Met - By Lily Lang Page 0,37
were on hers, the perfect, precious familiarity of his mouth pressing upon hers, of his hands in her hair, moving down her jaw to skim her throat, and then once again along the side of her face. She could not breathe, but when she was with him, she didn’t need to breathe; she simply needed him, needed the touch of his fingers upon her skin, the sound of his voice shaping her name.
When he finally lifted his head, she stared up at him in a daze and whispered, “Jason?”
“I just spoke with your brother,” he said in a low, ragged tone. She had gone boneless, and he held her to him now, one big hand resting on her waist, the other supporting her spine.
She blinked up at him, warm and stupidly content in his arms, wondering if she had finally and truly lost her mind. “You spoke with William?” she echoed.
He gave her a little shake.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth about what your father did, Miranda? Why did I have to hear it from your brother? Why have you kept us apart all these years?”
She felt her entire body go numb. “What did William tell you?” she asked through lips she could barely seem to move.
“What you should have told me years ago—you never sent me away, your father acted without your knowledge, he locked you away to keep you from going with me—did you not think I would come for you? Did you think any force of heaven or earth could have kept me away?”
She could no longer bear to look him in the face. Tearing her hands from his, she stepped away from him and sat back on the edge of the fountain.
“For so long I thought you were dead,” she said. “I had heard what happened to men in the hulks. Seven years ago I sent someone to find out what had happened to you, and no one could tell me. You vanished. I believed you were dead, Jason.” She closed her eyes. Even now, the memory of that time made her catch her breath on a throb of pain. “When your name began appearing in the papers as the owner of Blakewell’s, I finally learned you were alive. I wanted to find you, but I didn’t know if you would still want to see me. And then Father was thrown from his horse. I could not leave him.” She swallowed and looked down at her furled fingers. “He was a difficult man, and he could be unjust,” she said softly. “But he was my father.”
“But after he died—”
“Ten years had passed, Jason,” she said in a low voice. “We were so young then. It did not seem possible to me you might still love me.”
“What of when you came to the club to ask for my help? Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“William came first. I needed your promise to help him. And then, after we had—” She flushed. “After we had—I didn’t want you to marry me out of guilt. I didn’t know what good it would do to bring up the past again if you didn’t love me anymore.”
The touch of his hands on her shoulders was not gentle this time. “I kept myself alive on the hulks by thinking about you,” he whispered. “Even when I hated you, you were the only reason I went on living. But the real hell—Miranda, it wasn’t the hulks at all. It was living without you.”
She tried to smile through her tears. “Then it’s a good thing we’ll have the rest of our lives for me to make it up to you, then,” she whispered.
He stared down into her eyes. Then he made a low, hoarse sound in his throat, drawing her to him again so her head nestled against his shoulder, and she pressed her face against his throat.
“I love you,” he said. “I have always loved you.” His expression was utterly vulnerable, utterly defenseless as he gazed into her eyes. “Be my wife, Miranda,” he said. “Live with me. Bear my children. Grow old with me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I love you,” she whispered between kisses. “I have always loved you.”
He wrapped her cloak around them both and gathered her into the warmth of his embrace. She held him to her, and they remained there thus, until the midnight snow began to fall, and blotted out the world.
Chapter Five
“It is absolutely out of the question,” said Miranda, glaring at Jason from across the supper table