A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,58
isn’t just him. That is, it’s me. But also him.”
“I don’t understand,” she croaked, fighting tears of hope and disbelief.
His smile could have eclipsed the sun. “I can’t say I do, either. All I can tell you is…when we, you and I, met at the Bainbridge ball all those years ago, I wanted you then. But I’d already planned not to marry because I didn’t have a heart nor a soul to give to a woman, and you deserved everything of that and more.”
Johnathan de Lohr, the Earl of Hereford lifted his face to the sky once again, allowing snowflakes to gather on his eyelashes as if he enjoyed the sensation for the very first time.
“I was born empty,” he told the clouds. “It would scare my mother to look into my eyes. She said she didn’t think I had a soul. It was why she never had more children. And I felt it too…”
“And now?”
He captured her with his gaze. “Now, I think I was always a vessel. I am Johnathan de Lohr. Perhaps was meant to be him—me—whatever. I still have my memories.” He gave her a hot look that threatened to scorch through her trousers. “I have his memories, as well.”
She tried to believe it, though her mind couldn’t seem to grasp just what was happening, and then she realized. “I never told you my first name.”
“Vanessa. I am the man you spent solstice with. You showed me photographs of locomotives and of what I now understand to be gas lamps. You stood with me in the Chamber of Sorrows and made love to me while a tempest raged around us.”
A tear slid down her cheek as the marvelous truth of it slammed into her with all the power of that locomotive at full tilt.
Vanessa’s entire body stilled. Her lungs froze in her chest and her heart forgot to beat as one word settled into her soul, looking for a home.
Made love.
Love… Dare she hope?
His expression was so full of tenderness it threatened to melt her into a puddle of pure, blissful sentiment. “It’s as if for one hundred and fifty years, one hollow note was playing in my ear, driving me mad, and then you blew in on a blizzard and brought with you every symphony I could hope to hear. You are my match, Vanessa. I never needed more than a moment to know it with unquestioned absolution. And I want to see the world with you, if you’d let me.”
He captured her hand and held it to his lips, pressing a worshipful kiss into her palm before he continued. “Like I said, I am that Johnathan de Lohr, and this one, who also lived an entire lamentable life without you. Since the moment I met you, you haven’t been far from my thoughts. I might not have the same body you became acquainted with, the same scars or history. I don’t have the hands that touched you. The mouth that tasted you, not exactly. But I have the soul that adored you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”
Eyes. Ye gods what immaculate and incandescent light beamed at her from those eyes.
What life.
“I like these hands,” she whispered, fondling the ring, then she lifted it to her own lips to return his kiss, before peeking up at him from beneath coy lashes. “I would not mind acquainting myself with the rest of you. It is not as if my reputation can’t handle going into your castle unaccompanied.”
“Wait.” He stopped her, held her back from marching toward Lioncross. “I would invite you in only with the understanding that my intent is to carry you across the threshold as my Countess as soon as possible. I would defend your honor, Vanessa, and restore your good name.”
A smile engulfed her entire being, even as snowflakes landed on her heated cheeks like chilly little blessings from heaven.
“Let’s start with tea and see where that takes us,” she teased, knowing that the moment he proposed properly, she’d have no other answer for him but yes.
Yes. Forever yes.
“Kiss me, Vanessa,” he growled, dragging her against his inflamed body. “Kiss me because it’s Christmas and you’re in my arms. Kiss me because I’m the luckiest soul to ever live and then live again.”
Yes, she thought as she was swept away by the potency of his kiss. Entranced by the same magic she’d experienced that first time in the Highland storm.