Page 78 of Her Heartless Duke
But then, instead of hitting the leaf-strewn ground, she felt strong arms support her from behind her shoulders and knees. She was feeling quite dizzy already, but she could feel herself being swept up, could feel the warmth that cradled her frail body.
Most of all, she could smell that familiar clean, masculine scent that she only ever associated with one person.
I must be going crazy, she laughed to herself.Imagining that he is here with me now.
“Why are you out here all alone in this condition?” a low voice growled at her ear. “Do your servants not know any better than to let their sick mistress go wandering off into the gardens alone?”
Olivia stiffened and blinked, willing her vision to return. Even in all her most desperate fantasies, she could never come up with what was happening at that moment.
“Isaac?” she hazarded a guess, her heart leaping at the possibility that he truly was with her. She placed a trembling hand upon his chest. “Is that really you?”
“You know who I am?”
She smiled and nodded her head. “I do. Even when I cannot see very well, when I am deaf and blind and mute, I would know youanywhere.”
She heard him breathe a sigh of relief. “Good. I was afraid I had found the wrong person,” he chuckled wryly. “Your… your hair, you colored it brown?”
She giggled back at him. “As I do once every year when I return to Yorkshire. It was the color of my mother’s hair.”
“Ah. You do make it look quite lovely. From afar, I thought you had tried to change everything about you to distance yourself from the past. I don’t know what I would have done if you had been expecting somebody else.”
That statement was so ludicrous that Olivia could not help but burst out laughing. How could there be anyone else?
It was always him. It hadalwaysbeen him.
She pushed weakly at his chest, feeling the solid muscle beneath her palm.
“You can let me go now,” she told him as she gently dropped to her feet. “There is a stone bench over there. We can sit there and talk, if that is what you came here to do.”
“I suggest you do not move that particular appendage of yours, my dear,” he warned her when she started to withdraw her hand. “I am very partial to having it on my personatall times.”
She gaped at him. “Now, you are being exceptionally silly, Your Grace—”
“Am I?” he drawled, his voice low and dangerous. “But I suppose I am—falling in love with both my dance partner and the mysterious lady responding to my letters under the guise of another. I suppose one could be considered silly for falling in love withtwowomen at the same time.”
“You… love me?” Olivia could not help the frown that threatened to split her face apart. Nor could she stop the tears that had started to trickle down her face. “You loveme?”
“Why do you sound so incredulous?”
She sobbed, shaking her head as she covered her face with her hands. “How could you love me?”
He took her hands away from her face and kissed the tears that streaked silver down her cheeks.
“How could I not?” he told her softly, tenderly. “You are all that is good and kind and beautiful in this world. Without you, there would be no light, no laughter.”
She gasped when she recognized the words he spoke to her. “Daniel—he gave you my letter! But I told him to give it to you when I was gone…”
“And he should have done so much earlier,” he lightly chided her. “Are you so cruel as to subject me to the fate of living in a world without you, Olivia?”
“But I thought you hated me… you did not look too happy at the ballroom…”
He sighed. “I was unhappy when I first learned about it, I admit. I had been going insane thinking how I could love you and Lady Vivian at the same time. And when I finally got over that, I was angry that it took you until the last letter to sign your own name.” He reached out and clasped her hands in his. “I love you, Olivia Bennet—and there will be no one but you in this world or the next.”
His lips crashed on hers, fueled with all that he had kept hidden in him, as his hand held the back of her head. Olivia answered with a soft moan, eagerly returning his kiss, drinking him all in as she pressed her body to his. Her hand wandered down his chest, down to the familiar hardness between his thighs, delighting when she found him just as greedy for her as she was for him.
He laughed hoarsely as he pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. “My love, I would love to carry on with whatever you have in mind, but we have to hurry along now. There is a ship waiting to take us to France.”
Olivia pulled back a little and blinked in confusion. “France? But why are we going to France?”