“Isabella!” he gasped, his eyes wide.
She held up her hands. “I didn’t know I was pregnant when I cast the spell! I swear it! But even if had known I would have done it, anyway. In fact, I take comfort in the charm being there for all new reasons now,” she said, casting worried eyes down her body.
Her husband wrapped his arms around her shoulders tightly. “Everything is going to be fine. No child of ours could be anything but good and pure, no matter when they were conceived.”
Trying to be convincing, she agreed with him. It was an old argument between them.
Isobel wasn’t sure when she’d fallen pregnant. It was most likely after Matteo had begun to recover from his ordeal, during one their first real lovemaking sessions. But there was the matter of her substitution in the contraceptive mixture of herbs she’d been taking before he was cured. And if her calculations were accurate, then there was a genuine possibility that the child had been conceived before the purge.
Clinging tighter to Matteo, she pressed her face into his neck, while he ran his hands over her back and bottom in a soothing gesture. His fingers flexed and lingered on the latter, as if he just couldn’t help himself.
“You really are a witch, mi amore,” he said.
Lifting her head, she met his teasing expression. “I think that’s been suitably established my lord,” she said wryly.
“I was referring to the healing charm you managed to imbue in your beautiful body. You picked the one thing I would never be able to deny myself,” he said, gloved hands moving down her breasts to the apex of her thighs.
She blushed, growing warm beneath her dress. But her countenance was sober, because what she had to tell him was serious.
“It was still a risk, my lord. There was every chance that you’d grow tired of me now that you were alone in there,” she said, pressing a hand to his chest.
He frowned and began to speak but she cut him off with a hand over his mouth.
“I was afraid, you see,” she continued, moving her hand over his heart, “that your feelings for me were an artifact, a side-effect of your affliction. There was a danger that over time that your regard and those sentiments would fade away, as if they’d never been there. And if you didn’t touch me, my cure would never work.”
He laughed at her, and she scowled.
“It was a genuine concern.”
He leaned in until their brows touched. “No, my love, there was never any danger of that at all,” he whispered before he kissed her again.
And again. And again.
The End.