Epilogue
The village, being highly attentive to deviations of habit, remarked upon the undeniable softening of his lordship’s countenance.
The fire had burned low in the study by the time Lucien found the words.
They had been sitting together for the better part of an hour, he in the armchair and Verity on the settee with her legs tucked beneath her, a cup of tea cooling in her hands.
The wolfhounds had arranged themselves about the room with the proprietary ease of animals who considered all furniture to be theirs by ancestral right.
Braccus occupied the hearthrug. Eirin lay beneath the window, one eye open and tracking Verity’s every movement.
And Ronan had abandoned all pretense of dignity, stretched across the settee with his head in Verity’s lap and his long legs dangling over the armrest.
Last night, Verity had chained Lucien for the final night of the full moon, albeit reluctantly, muttering that they needed to create a less demeaning situation for him before the next cycle arrived.
Her concern had touched him deeply, and he had agreed that they could discuss improvements to the chamber but insisted the chains were a necessity.
The prior day had been long and full of death, and Lucien had spent the last hour trying to arrange three words into the correct order. His struggle was finally over, at least for this month.
He had rehearsed them in the bath. He had rehearsed them over breakfast after a final night successfully chained in the cellar, which they had taken in the morning room.
He had rehearsed them walking the corridors after checking on his mother, who had fallen asleep in her chair with a look of such peace that he had not had the heart to wake her.
Three words. He had commanded the wolfhounds, managed an estate, and survived four years of transformations. Surely, he could manage three little words.
“Verity.”
She looked up from her tea, her green eyes soft in the firelight, and the sight of her undid every carefully constructed opening he had prepared.
“I love you,” he said. It came out raw and unvarnished, without preamble or poetry.
“I love you, and I am asking you to be my wife. Not because duty demands it, or because propriety requires it, or because I robbed you of your virtue, or because my mother has been declaring you my mate since you set foot in this hall. I am asking because I cannot imagine drawing another breath without you beside me.”
Verity set down her teacup with exaggerated care. Her hands were trembling. Her eyes had gone very bright.
“I have nothing to offer you that matches your station,” she said, her voice steady even as her chin quivered. “No fortune. No connections. A false name and a scandal in Somerset.”
“I am a man who turns into a wolf five nights a month,” Lucien replied. “I believe we are well matched in the currency of imperfection.”
The sound that escaped her was half laugh and half sob, and then she was crossing the distance between them, and Lucien rose to meet her and caught her in his arms. She pressed her face against his chest, and he held her and breathed her in and thought that if the curse had brought him to this moment, then perhaps it had not taken everything after all.
“Yes,” she whispered against his shirtfront. “Yes. A thousand times, yes.”
The wolfhounds erupted. Braccus hauled himself to his feet and began circling the pair with his tail swinging in great arcs.
Eirin added her voice, a single sharp bark that echoed off the study walls.
And Ronan bounded across the room and thrust his enormous head between them, demanding inclusion with all the subtlety of a cannonball.
Lucien laughed. It was a genuine laugh, one of several that Verity had drawn from him despite his lack of practice, and the sound of it startled him almost as much as it startled the hounds.
“You know,” he said, looking down at Ronan, “my family has been breeding these hounds for centuries. The first earl imported the first pair from Ireland, and every generation since has maintained the line. They are meant to serve the master of Blackfen.” He reached down to scratch behind Braccus’s good ear.
The old hound leaned into his hand, then abandoned him to press against Verity’s hip.
“But these disloyal creatures will not come when I call them now. They have decided you are their mistress.”
Verity wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and smiled down at Braccus, who was gazing up at her with an expression of bovine devotion that no wolfhound of noble breeding should have been capable of producing.
“Perhaps that is their purpose,” she said thoughtfully.
“Not to serve the master, but to guard the mistress. Especially during the nights when the master is … otherwise occupied.”
The observation landed with a thud. In all the centuries of Northwood history, in all the records and journals he had pored over since his father’s death, no one had suggested the hounds existed to protect the women of the household during the full moon.
It had always been assumed they served the cursed lord.
But Verity was right. The hounds had gone to her. They had chosen her.
“You may be the cleverest woman in Northumberland,” he said.
“I am certainly the cleverest woman in this room.” She tilted her face up to his, her green eyes dancing. “Though the competition is admittedly limited to myself and Eirin.”
He kissed her then, because he could not help it, and because she was smiling, and because the firelight was catching in her red hair and turning the copper strands to molten gold, and because she had just agreed to marry him and he was not going to squander the moment on conversation.
When they drew apart, breathless, he kept his arms around her and rested his chin upon the top of her head. “We shall need a common license. Which means you must have resided in the parish for thirty days before I can procure one.”
Verity counted silently, her fingers tapping against his chest. “I arrived on the twenty-first day of January. Thirty days would bring us to the twentieth of February.”
Lucien tightened his arms. “I shall visit the rector the moment the requirement is met.”
“Such haste,” she murmured. “One might think you feared I would change my mind.”
“I fear nothing of the sort. I simply do not trust myself to maintain anything resembling gentlemanly restraint for nearly a month.” He paused, and the air between them shifted, the warmth of the fire and the closeness of her body conspiring to turn his thoughts in a direction that had nothing to do with clergymen or licenses.
“If I am honest, Verity, this desire I have for you is quite unseemly. I cannot seem to keep my hands from you. I am already calculating how quickly I might divest you of that gown.”
She looked up at him, and the softness in her eyes had been replaced by something fiercer, something that matched the heat building in his own blood. “Then perhaps you should stop calculating,” she said, “and start divesting.”
He did not need to be told twice.
His hands found the fastenings of her gown with a sureness that owed nothing to practice and everything to urgency.
The fabric parted, sliding from her shoulders to pool at her feet.
Her stays followed, the laces yielding to his impatient fingers, and then her shift, drawn over her head in a single motion that left her in nothing but her stockings, the firelight casting her body in amber and shadow.
She was beautiful. Not in the composed, distant way of paintings, but in the way a living thing was beautiful, warm and imperfect, her skin flushed with desire, her breath coming in quick draughts that made her full breasts rise and fall in a rhythm that scattered his thoughts.
Lucien shed his own clothing with far less grace, pulling his shirt over his head and stepping out of his buckskins with the attitude of a man who had run out of patience for fabric.
Then he took her hand and led her to the hearthrug, where Braccus was shooed away, the vacated spot still warm from the old hound’s considerable bulk.
He settled her down upon the rug, her back to him, and knelt behind her.
For a moment, he simply held her, his chest pressed against her back, his arms encircling her, his chin resting in the curve of her neck.
He could feel her heartbeat against his forearm, rapid and insistent, and the warmth of her skin against his was almost more than he could bear.
Then he began to move his hands.
He kissed the column of her neck first, slowly, tracing the line of it from the hollow behind her ear to the slope of her shoulder.
Gooseflesh erupted in the wake of his mouth, and she shivered against him, a tremor that ran through her entire body and communicated itself to his with devastating effect.
He kissed her shoulder, then the ridge of her spine, his lips brushing over skin that tasted faintly of salt and soap, and she made a sound low in her throat that was not quite a word and not quite a moan but something in between that undid him entirely.
His hands moved over her body with a reverence that warred with his hunger.
The roughness of his palms against the softness of her curves drew a gasp from her lips as he cupped her breasts, feeling their weight settle into his hands, his thumbs tracing slow circles that made her arch her back and press herself more firmly against him.
He drew his hands down over the swell of her midriff, across the gentle plane of her belly, and lower, to the soft warmth between her thighs.