Patrick plunged into her with a slow, steady rhythm. Their bodies slid easily against one another. Gentle. Soft. Unrushed. He nuzzled his forehead against hers, both damp with sweat from their lovemaking. Their eyes never left each other. Not even as Patrick drew closer and closer to his release, and every part of his body screamed for him to let go, to lose control.
His hips began to move of their own accord, jerking, bouncing, and thrusting as they saw fit. His movements quickened, grew stronger, deeper. More urgent than before. He pumped against her, feeling his release building and building until he could not hold back any longer. And as he finally reached his own climax, he sobbed, crying out her name as it overtook him.
Patrick poured himself into her, unashamed for the first time in his life of the intensity of his orgasm, of the vulnerability of his wet, spent, shuddering body.
This was no mindless coupling. No breathless act between two desperate, love-starved individuals. This was a consummation. A pledging of one body to the other, that from that day forward, they would belong to each other. Through sickness or health, wealth or poverty, they would be together.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Linley lay in Patrick’s narrow metal bed, listening to the rain splatter in the mud just outside the screen door. They held hands beneath the thin cotton sheets, drifting in and out of sleep as the afternoon passed. But as wonderful as their reunion had been, she could not shake the one undeniable truth keeping her from happiness.
“Patrick, you need that money.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about the money.”
If he had any sense at all, he would realize what a fortune he was giving away. A hardworking man could toil six days a week and still only hope to earn fifty or sixty pounds a year. At that rate, Patrick could live for the next seventy years without ever having to lift a finger. But the more Linley prodded him, the more she realized he truly did not care about the money—which could only mean one thing…
“Are you in love with me?”
Patrick didn’t even blink at the question. “Isn’t it obvious?”
How far they had come since that day in Rabat, only six months before. How different their lives were now, all because of one chance meeting in a hotel garden. A brushing of shoulders had set off a chain of events leading Patrick half way around the world, and Linley right into his arms.
Life was funny like that—using one seemingly inconsequential event to create the turning point of two very different lives.
But Patrick hoped their lives would not be different for much longer.
“Linley,” he said. “It is true that I am in love with you. And I will continue to love you for the rest of my life, but I’m not the same man who consented to be your lover a few weeks ago.”
Linley turned in the bed to face him, to look him eye to eye. Her heart beat in her chest as she struggled to keep her breathing slow and steady.
“And I cannot, being the man I am now,” he continued. “Agree to be your lover.”
Her breathing stopped altogether. Why was he doing this to her? How could he, after all they’d been through?
But with all they had been through, could he no longer stomach her? Wasn’t it true that Patrick had seen her at her absolute worst, reduced to no more than an infant, needing to be bathed, and changed, and fed?
“No!” she cried. “Patrick, what are you saying? I don’t under—”
He held up his hands. “Wait. Let me finish, please.” There was a pause. He reached for her hand and held it tight in his. “While you were sick, while I sat every night by your bedside, believing you were dying right before my eyes…I felt so helpless.”
“But you weren’t helpless! You saved me!”
“I stole you away like a petty thief. I had no more right to take you from your father than a common burglar has to pinch the family silver,” he explained. “And while I risked my life, and your life, and Schoville’s life, I realized there was one thing I could give you. One thing I had that was worth giving—my name.”
Linley’s mouth fell open.
“You see, knowing that, I cannot be your lover,” Patrick said. “I cannot agree to be anything less than your husband. I love you, Linley. And it’s all or nothing.”
She could not utter one single word to him. She simply stared, struck dumb.
“I know how you feel about marriage,” Patrick said. “I know you want to be free to come and go as you please. And I know we both have obligations on opposite sides of the world, but I want to know that, wherever you may be, you are safe and provided for.” Patrick hardly stopped to take a breath, afraid if he slowed down she would stop him. He had to get it out. He’d been waiting weeks to tell her. “I can do that for you. I can give you my title, and my money, and whatever else you want from me. Name it, and it’s yours.”
“Patrick, I will not marry you,” Linley told him. “You said it yourself that you wouldn’t wish your title on your worst enemy. Yet, you would sentence me to a lifetime of trying to live up to your good name.”