Page 110 of The Devil in Her Bed

Before she could retaliate, he pulled her up and lifted her into his arms, kissing the wits right out of her. Once they were both breathless again, he pressed his forehead to hers.

“Is this what life with you is going to be like? You always one leap ahead of me and me trying to clean up the chaos?”

“Probably.”

“Good. I think that anything else for us would be boring, don’t you?”

“We can’t have that.” She pressed her ear to his chest, sliding her hands inside his coat and around his middle as she listened to his heart.

Their smiles collapsed as they looked out over the place that had forged them in fire.

“What would you like to do with Mont Claire?” he asked. “Do you want to rebuild?”

Francesca listened to the birdsong and watched a bunny disappear into the bramble that was once a well-manicured maze. The ivy-choked fountain still mirrored the sky, and the arborvitae lined the edge of the abandoned drive.

Was this home?

She looked at Ferdinand’s tree and could have sworn she saw a little leg swinging there. Her heart ached, but not with the pain it once had.

“There’s a big world out there, a great deal of which I still haven’t explored,” she said. “So many places that hold no memories or sadness, nothing but potential.”

“Where would we go?” he asked.

“I would like to take a dogsled and touch the northern lights one day, and to race Arabians over the golden sands of the desert. I want to visit pirate wrecks in Antigua and volcanoes of Hawaii.” She looked at him. “What about you?”

His expression was carefully blank, and then a look of wonder stole some of the cynical age from his bones. “I never really thought in terms of the future, but all that sounds like an extraordinary life we might have.”

“So… we will sell this place, then, so we never have to look back, and let it finance a great many of our adventures.”

He nodded, bending over to select a silver rock from the fireplace and slipping it into his pocket.

She tilted her head “A memento?”

“A keepsake.” He pulled her to his side and led her toward the hallway they’d once used as an escape. “I love you, Francesca. But I want a reminder of Pippa,of that wild, willful little girl who promised me she’d steal my heart someday.”

“You’re never getting it back, me hearty,” she said in her terrible pirate accent.

“Good. It’s yours. Forever.”