Epilogue
For all her talk, Clio learned that she did have an upper tolerance level for half of Society watching her kiss her husband, and that level struck after about six seconds.
But she was not done kissing him, so she grabbed him by the hand and said, “We’re leaving.”
There was surely something comedic in her broad-shouldered mass of a husband letting her pull him along like a pup on a leash, but Clio was too full up of bubbling happiness to worry about any such thing.
He loved her. He wanted a life with her.
She wanted those things, too, but she also wanted to be kissing him immediately, if not sooner.
Their coachman had been leaning against the carriage casually, eating an apple with an intense focus. He jolted with surprise when Hector and Clio approached the carriage where it was parked in the queue, rather than summoning it from the front of the house, as was conventional.
“Ah—good evening, Your Graces,” he said, chucking the apple into the nearby bushes and wiping his hands discreetly on his pants. “I’m sorry that I didn’t realize you would be leaving so early; I would have—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hector said, offering a casual gesture of recognition that was not at all de rigeur for dukes. It made Clio want him even more desperately. He wasn’t some perfect, polished gentleman, and she didn’t want him to be. She just wanted him to be him.
“Just get us home,” Clio added, and Hector turned to beam at her at the word home.
He hauled her up into the coach with urgent, grasping hands.
They closed the door behind them, and, after that, Clio noticed little that wasn’t the man before her.
They kissed like they’d been starving for it, like they would drown without it.
Her hands wandered everywhere she could reach, traveling over his cheeks and down his jaw, over the breadth of his shoulders and down his arms until their fingers laced together.
“I hate these bloody clothes,” Hector grumbled as he yanked at his cravat. An inch of throat was exposed, and Clio kissed that, too.
“I love them,” she said. “Or, I loved seeing them on you before. Now, I’m coming around to your way of thinking.”
“You liked how I looked?” he asked, and there was a tiny thread of vulnerability in there. It was a question straight from the boy who had always been called a monster.
She gripped his face between her palms.
“I always love how you look,” she told him matter-of-factly. “I promise you that one of the very first things that annoyed me about you was how handsome you are. Do you know how hard it is to get angry with someone when they are so lovely to look at?”
He gave a pointed look at her, not that he could see very much from where she was perched on his lap. Her skirts were goddamn everywhere.
“I have some idea,” he said.
She kissed him. “I love that you tried,” she said, not quite removing her lips from his. “I love that you did it for me.”
“I would do anything for you,” he vowed.
Except, he quickly proved himself a liar by saying like we can’t get naked in this carriage, Clio, and I couldn’t figure out how to get us back in these damned outfits if I tried. He was not to be moved, not even when she gave her most expressive pout.
“I’m not going to carry you in from the street without your clothes, princess,” he argued, which she supposed was rational except for all the ways that rationality itself seemed idiotic right now.
They finally made it home, and barely soon enough, as Clio felt that she was about to catch fire and burn the clothes off them if they didn’t move quickly.
Again, she half-dragged him, the distance between the front steps and their bedchambers—or his study, or the library, or anywhere with a reasonably private flat surface—seemed far too long. It was made even longer when Hector stopped allowing her to drag him and said, “Wait.”
She pinned him with a look.
“Hector,” she said, and even though she said it as pointedly as she could, he smiled. It made it very hard not to smile back. “If we wait, I will die.”
He only smiled more at this very serious threat.
“Come on, princess,” he said, this time tugging her toward a parlor at the front of the house. “I have something to show you.”
“And then you will take me to bed?” she demanded.
His fingers tightened briefly around hers.
“Yes,” he said, sounding a bit strangled. “Lord, woman, you’re killing me. But yes. Just … let me show you.”
He crossed to a shelf and produced …
“It’s a toy train,” she said, accepting the item with careful fingers. Because it wasn’t just any toy train, it was one that triggered a memory. “The one that I broke, in the shop.”
“Aye,” he said, reaching out to touch a place where the toy had been patched over with plaster and paint.
It wasn’t perfect—it wasn’t as though it had never been broken—but it was clearly fixed.
“I fixed it. I had a devil of a time getting the shopkeeper to find the thing. But he still had it lurking around, and I offered to pay full price for it, so he didn’t have much reason to argue. ”
“But … why?” she said, tracing her fingers over the faint scars on the toy from where it had been damaged.
Hector’s hands came to cover hers.
“This is what I do,” he said. “I fix things. But …” He cleared his throat. “I do not know how to fix a marriage alone. I want to. But I can’t do it by myself. So, I was thinking … perhaps, if you agreed to be by my side, we could fix it together.”
A happy shudder went through Clio, so fierce that she nearly dropped the train again. But she wouldn’t—she wouldn’t let something precious slip from her fingers again.
“I want that,” she said, her eyes prickling with tears. “I choose you. I choose us, together. Hector, I love you.”
For a moment, he didn’t respond. He took the train from her hands and set it very carefully on the shelf. Then he picked her up around the waist, whooped, and spun her in a circle.
“Hector, your leg!” she protested, laughing.
“Bugger my leg,” he said. He put her down only long enough to get an arm under her knees, so he was cradling her in his arms. “My leg will be fine. What was the point of swinging that damned forge hammer all those years if I can’t do this, hm?”
“I thought it was fixing things,” she said, delighted, as her arms went around his neck and he strode toward the stairs.
It wasn’t necessarily a picturesque moment.
Her skirts were still trying to get everywhere, and there was a decided hitch in his step now that he’d abandoned his stick and added her weight.
But it was their imperfect moment, and she wouldn’t have traded it for the world.
He kicked the door to his bedchamber to let them in. Clio was torn between kissing him and looking around at this room, which she hadn’t seen before.
Or, rather, she was very, very briefly torn, and then Hector kissed her on a sensitive spot beneath her jaw, and she decided that looking at the decor could wait.
“I know you don’t like to hear it,” he said into her skin, “but you really are so beautiful.”
“It isn’t that I don’t like to hear it,” she said—unnecessarily, probably, because she could feel herself blushing. “I just don’t want it to be the only thing you like about me.”
“Oh, princess,” he said, and then threw her onto the bed. “I like many things about you.”
Clio had just been tossed like a sack of flour—she would not admit to having adored it—so she felt entitled to challenge him a bit. “Oh, yes? Like what?”
He crawled across the bed to her. It was a sight she would never forget.
“I like your smart mouth,” he said, kissing it as his hands finally started to work at her clothing. “I like that you love your family, even when they are clearly driving you insane.”
“You laugh,” she said between kisses, “but they’re your family now, too.”
“I like that you can be as prim as anyone, but that you also laugh at Ramsay’s dirty stories.”
He was making fast work of her gown, impressively fast. She moved her hands to his buttons so she could catch up.
“I like that you blush all the way down to here.” He’d gotten her bodice completely undone now, and he kissed the spot on the upper curve of her breasts where her blush finally faded away.
“And I like that actually,” he said, “I don’t like any of those things at all. I love them. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, and for a few moments, they couldn’t speak around their kisses.
Eventually, they had gotten all their clothing off, and they were pressed, skin to skin. Hector, leaning on his elbows above her, let out a little groan that didn’t precisely sound like the throes of passion.
“There’s one more thing I love about you, princess,” he murmured, pulling back enough to look into her eyes. “It’s that you have never looked at me like I am a monster. It means that I can admit to you now … I think I have rather overdone it on my leg.”
He grimaced, and Clio, alarmed, scrambled from under him, pushing at his shoulder until he laid flat on his back, then fluttering her hands over him—the curve of his hip, down the muscles of the one leg that were visibly less defined than the other, to the strong bones of his shin.
“Where does it hurt?” she asked, heedless of her own nudity as she observed him keenly. “What can I do?”
Hector’s jaw was clenched tight, as if he was fighting pain. “You can—” He tugged on her arm, dragging her across his body, until she was atop him. She placed down her weight on either side of him, careful not to put pressure on his leg, and—
Oh.
He grinned up at her, and the expression of discomfort vanished.
“Was that a trick?” she asked, incredulous and not certain if she wanted to laugh or smack him. “Did you trick me? Again? I am going to stop falling for this, you know.”
He shrugged, unrepentant.
“I couldn’t have put weight on it for much longer,” he admitted. “But I confess that I was rather looking forward to this result.”
He punctuated this statement with a lazy roll of his hips, which ground his hardness against the place where Clio was sensitive and waiting for him.
“You are a cad,” she said, but she was smiling.
He was smiling, too.
“I’m your cad,” he corrected.
“Oh, very well,” she said, rolling her eyes just to make him laugh.
From there, it was all too easy for her to lay the rest of the way atop him, to go back to kissing, to letting their hands explore. She found herself transfixed by the smattering of hair on his chest, and he got lost in tracing up and down the line of her spine.
Their bodies were already aligned, and when the need for one another became too great, it was the easiest thing in the world for Hector to reach down and slip himself inside her, slow and unhurried as though they had all the time in the world.
Because they did, she realized as they moved together, a patient slide that grew faster and more purposeful as the heat between them mounted. They had the rest of their lives to do this, to build something together—to fix things together when they got broken.
Because, she thought when she erupted, when she was the one shattering with pleasure, sometimes things got put together better after they’d fallen apart. And as long as Hector was right here with her, every break might be as lovely as this one.
The End?