Chapter Forty-Two
“Andrew,” Della whispered, finally.
He turned around. Far away from her still, but somehow, he felt closer than he’d ever been.
“You and I, we keep passing each other by like ships in the night. So close but so far away, and I do not think I can bear another near miss.”
Oddly, he smiled. All she could see was the flash of his teeth in the barely there light, and he was alarmingly beautiful.
That grin was something alive, the way the moonlight fell over him was almost otherworldly.
Almost tinted blue, he seemed like some kind of apparition.
A spirit here to haunt her with dreams of nights like this she’d missed.
“I have been on many ships,” he said, rolling up onto his toes and then lowering himself back down to his heels.
He was trying not to pace, Della knew. Despite his uncanny appearance, it was that familiar motion that made Della realize he was indeed real.
He was here, again. “And maybe you do not see other ships when you pass by them in the night. But you hear them. You feel them. Even if you miss them, you know they have been there.”
He took a breath so deep Della thought she felt it displace the air around her, and she knew, with that sixth sense she had about him, that her life was about to change forever.
“I am trying to say that I have been devoted to you for years. And I should not have left. Even if I thought that you felt no affection for me—”
“Oh, Andrew.” Della stood up abruptly, launching to her feet from the settee in an impressive show of force. “You cannot possibly continue acting as if I do not love you.”
Andrew froze. Della watched it happen, from head to toe, as his blood turned to ice. She wondered if his heart was still beating below all that frigidity.
“Are you so surprised?” Della mused. His reaction was quite ridiculous.
“I’m sure I have at least alluded to falling for you.
For God’s sake, Andrew, you are the one person from my old life I wanted to keep.
I wrote to you, I worried about you, I .
. .” She was so overwhelmed by it all that her words wouldn’t come.
They refused to manifest themselves, and her lungs emitted a frustrated breath instead.
All at once, though, Della realized that some things were beyond words. As she took each creaking step toward him, it was as if she were the fire needed to melt the sheet of ice he’d become. She’d watched him freeze, and right before her eyes, he was melting.
He reached for her as soon as she was close enough, and Della let out a blissful sigh. The hand against her cheek wasn’t frigid or even cool. It was the exact warmth her life had been missing for eight years. His other hand swept locks of her thick, unbound hair off of her shoulder.
Della had forgotten about that, what she looked like.
With her swollen, red eyes and hair that hadn’t been brushed since they’d left the last coaching inn.
She was certain she made a disastrous picture in front of him.
It was not the ideal time to be declaring oneself, she realized entirely too late.
The pads of his fingers traced up her neck, and all thoughts, both rational and otherwise, made a swift exit from her mind.
Both his hands came to hold her face, his thumbs moving over the highpoints of her cheekbones.
Della breathed in his scent. She leaned in close enough to feel his heartbeat against her own chest. That radiant sense of peace fell over her like the warmth of her favorite blanket, the one that lay somewhere in this house, having yet to be unpacked.
“I love you so much,” Andrew said. His lips hovered over hers. One of his hands gripped her waist and the other twined through the strands of already tangled hair at the nape of her neck.
Della kissed him. All she had to do was tilt her head up, just enough to bump her chin against his. He reacted swiftly, pulling her closer in every way that he could. With his hands, with his lips, with his heart.
She opened her mouth once she tasted the mint on his tongue, and she sank her fingers into those untamed curls. Della heard a melting sigh, and she couldn’t place who it’d come from. They were sharing breath, so she supposed it didn’t matter.
Andrew broke away from her mouth, raining hot, open-mouthed kisses across her face and down her jaw. She felt him suck on the delicate skin just below her chin. She felt the brush of his teeth and the swipe of his tongue.
Della moaned something that sounded vaguely like his name.
As soon as she spoke, even one broken, unintelligible word, she realized what she hadn’t actually said.
She stopped him with her hands on either side of his face.
She tilted his head back so she could look at him.
She’d never get tired of those kind, fathomless eyes turned so darkened and hungry.
His pupils were blown, and he was still supernaturally lit by the moon.
“I love you,” she said. He needed to hear it, and she needed to say it.
Not out of exasperation or a sense of urgency, but because it was the truest thing she knew.
One of the most basic things she knew about herself.
She would always be ill. She would always be a baroness.
She would always be in love with Andrew Lockhart.
“I know, love.” He kissed her, brief, fleeting presses of his still-smiling lips. “It’s all right. I know.” He held her shoulders for a moment, his hands sliding down her arms until he intertwined their fingers.
Andrew steered her toward the settee she’d just abandoned, and Della let out an inelegant giggle.
“What is so funny?” Andrew asked as he spun her around to lower her body to the cushions.
“You said it was much too forward to walk into the home of a baroness and ask to court her, but here you are now in a baroness’s sitting room in the middle of the night, making all sorts of propositions.”
He grinned, and Della left a thumbprint in the hollow of one of his dimples.
“Della, you told me that you wanted to marry me years ago. What else was I to do?” He crawled across the divan, leaning his body over hers. Close, but not nearly close enough.
“Nothing,” Della said. She hooked her right leg around his waist and used all the strength she possessed to pull him down on top of her. “Nothing at all.”
His eyes drifted down between them. His hand ran up her leg, from where her knee rested at his hip up to where her thigh disappeared under her gown.
Della arched her back, her neck stretching in search of his mouth.
She bit his bottom lip, and she felt a guttural moan leave his chest. She responded in kind, letting her body do what it wanted and rolling her hips against his.
Before she could even emit the hiss of pain she’d anticipated, he rested his palm flat on the flare of her hip bone.
Just as he had the first time. The pressure eased her pain, but his fingers splayed out so close to where she wanted them only ignited a pressure of an entirely different kind.
Della let her hips slide against his once more, this time she felt only the press of his hardness against her core.
Her hands sought him out, gripping wherever she could reach.
The back of his neck. The curve of his shoulder.
The space where his shirt was coming untucked from his trousers.
That drew her focus, and she tugged at his clothes with all the dexterity she had left in her near-destroyed hands.
As she grabbed at him, Andrew began to understand her intentions.
She pulled at the buttons of his waistcoat.
He tugged at his cravat. Della wondered why she hadn’t started there.
She loved that hollow at the bottom of his throat so much.
She ran her tongue over it as soon as he tossed his cravat away, and that little slice of exposed skin made her want to burn all of the cravats he owned.
He rose to his knees to strip his shirt off, and while Della whimpered at the loss of his weight, she had to admit she did enjoy the view.
Within moments, he was back, slowly pushing her gown up her thighs.
Della met him halfway, peeling the thin fabric off of her in a show of the kind of boldness only he inspired.
His mouth grazed over her collarbone, his teeth gently dragging down toward the valley between her breasts as he loosened her stays and pulled at her chemise.
“Della,” he moaned her name against the skin above her sternum. Her back arched again, wanting more of his mouth.
He continued his path down her body with the faintest licks of his tongue, tugging clothing off as he went.
He sucked on a spot next to her left hip, right beside where his hand still rested.
Her hips thrust against him again, and he seemed to get the message.
She felt the heat of him on her core, his fingers dancing over her flesh where she was wet and wanting.
There was the press of his tongue again, those slow swipes through her folds.
“Tell me to stop if I hurt you.” He looked up at her from between her thighs, and she was nearly too captivated to respond. “Della?” he asked, when she’d been staring for a moment too long.
“Yes?” she responded. She was still half dazed, even though he’d stopped the movement of those talented fingers and his mouth was otherwise occupied. Della ran her fingers through his unruly curls. She realized they were particularly disheveled because she’d been tugging on them.
“If something causes you pain, you have to stop me. Promise me.” He looked so suddenly serious that Della had no choice but to nod.