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All I can do is sob. Again and again.
“The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that he loved your mother so much that her loss destroyed him,” Taio says. Maybe he has said it before, but this time I hear it. “That doesn’t excuse him. It only offers some kind of explanation. Maybe he simply gave his heart away once and couldn’t again. I don’t know.”
Still I sob.
“Look at me.”
He tilts my chin up as he looks down at me, and I watch those dark eyes of his soften. He makes a low noise and then his thumbs are brushing away the moisture beneath my eyes.
Then he kisses me. One cheek and then the other. My forehead. The tip of my nose.
I’m used to wildfires and explosions, but this soft, tender heat is new. It moves through me like warmth. Like sweetness.
It’s beautiful.
“You have dedicated your entire adult life to solving problems, answering questions, telling truths.” Again his thumbs move beneath my eyes. “And there is no doubt that you are the best.”
I make a snuffling sound that would embarrass me at any other point. But somehow, it doesn’t now. Not with him.
“As long as I’m the best,” I say. “I like that to be acknowledged.”
And he smiles, this man who has been with me far longer than I imagined. Isn’t it funny how his confession makes me love him more? Because it isn’t a momentary lapse of reason. It isn’t a flash in the pan.
When he says he loves me, I think then, he means it.
And I feel something deep inside shiver, but this time, as if it’s finding its way into settling. Clicking softly into place.
“But I can’t help but notice that the way you do this thing that you’re so good at, the very best at,” he adds, his eyes glinting, “means you must always play a part. You must always be alone. You dig around in human relationships, yet have few of your own.”
“I think the same could be said for the Eighteenth Marquess of Patrias,” I point out. “Long may he prosper, etcetera.”
“It absolutely could be said,” he agrees at once. “I have often said it. You investigated me, did you not?” Because he’s smiling, I nod. “One might even call that…stalking, yes?”
And somehow, even though I feel as if I might still like to sob a bit more, I smile. Maybe because with him, I don’t have to be one thing or another. I can be…whatever I am.
Whatever that looks like.
“I’m actually a licensed private investigator,” I tell him loftily. “So, no. Not a stalker.”
“You and I are the same,” he tells me, and he is serious. I can see it all over him. “And I do not understand how this can be so, but it is. I love you, Annagret. I have been in love with you for years, though the version of you I made up in my head is a cardboard cutout in comparison to who you really are. The mother of my child. The lover of my fantasies. Everything I have ever wanted in a woman, a partner, a wife. A marchioness.” He slides his hand around to cup the nape of my neck, giving me his heat. “I feel as if I tricked you into marrying me, and yet I can’t even claim that I’m sorry for it.”
“If it’s a trick, it’s a good one,” I tell him, and that thing inside me clicks again, like this is the lock. Like he is the key. “I tried so hard to keep from losing myself on our wedding day. When really that was all I wanted. The way you kissed me. The way you held my hands. Taio, I love you. I have been yours from the start.”
He moans a little at that, or maybe I do, and our lips touch.
And it’s a kiss but it feels like magic. Like a new beginning.
Like us made fresh and new.
“Cosita,”he murmurs. “Te amo tanto. Eres mi sol, mi luna y todas mis estrellas. You are my sun and moon and all my stars. I love you so much.”
He puts his arms around me and I slide mine around his neck, and then we hold each other there, almost like we’re dancing.
But the only music is the way our hearts beat for each other.
Together. As one.
“You always call me that,” I say.“Cosita. I don’t know what it means.”