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“But I want to stay with you!” Isabella pleaded.

Frederick chuckled. “Really? Even if I was to tell you that I expect to see you later covered in dirt… with scratched hands from a day spent climbing. Anything short of such a thing and I will be disappointed, for it means that you have not been playing as you ought.”

Isabella baulked. “You want me to…” She looked to Miss Dunn for confirmation. “I am allowed to climb trees?”

“You can do whatever you wish,” he said with a smile that was as genuine as it was loving. “Truthfully, after what has justhappened, all I want from you, Isabella, is to know that you are happy. Now, can you do that for me?”

“Yes!” she cried joyously. “Thank you!” A quick hug, one that had Frederick groaning, and then she took his grandmother’s hand and practically dragged her from the room.

“Who would have thought,” Miss Dunn laughed once they were alone. “A near death experience is exactly what you needed.”

“What Isabella needed, you mean?”

“No, I do not.” She was sitting beside him, gazing upon him with that same look that had been the cause for his dismissing his daughter and grandmother.

Feeling his heart begin to race, Frederick leaned forward and kissed her full on the lips for what was the first time in only a few days but felt a lifetime in the making.

Kissing the woman he loved, knowing that the past was behind them, and the future was one to look forward to, he moved a hand to the back of her head and held her there, feeling life pour into him as if his wounds were healing on the spot.

He did not care that Miss Dunn had lied to him.

He did not care that it had almost gotten him killed.

He did not care about much of anything, save for the woman whose lips he kissed passionately, the woman he loved, the woman he would continue to love for as long as there was breath left in his body. Despite nearly dying, Frederick, in that moment, was as happy as he had ever been, and with the way that Miss Dunn kissed him, he sensed the same could be said of her.

The End?