He knew.

Not that it didn’t all matter, because it did.

But he knew that it didn’t matter as much as she did, that the past wasn’t as important as the future, and the family he’d lost wasn’t nearly as dear to him as the family he would make.

“I love you,” he said, his voice finally rising above a whisper. He turned, his heart, his very soul in his eyes. “I love you.”

She looked confused by his sudden change in demeanor, but in the end she just smiled—looking for all the world as if she might actually laugh. It was the sort of expression one made when one had too much happiness to keep it all inside.

He wanted to make her look like that every day. Every hour. Every minute.

“I love you, too,” she said.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her, once, deeply, on the mouth. “I mean,” he said, “I really love you.”

She quirked a brow. “Is this a contest?”

“It is anything you want,” he promised.

She grinned, that enchanting, perfect smile that was so quintessentially hers. “I feel I must warn you, then,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “When it comes to contests and games, I always win.”

“Always?”

Her eyes grew sly. “Whenever it matters.”

He felt himself smile, felt his soul lighten and his worries slip away. “And what, precisely, does that mean?”

“It means,” she said, reaching up and undoing the buttons of her coat, “that I really really love you.”

He backed up, crossing his arms as he gave her an assessing look. “Tell me more.”

Her coat fell to the ground. “Is that enough?”

“Oh, not nearly.”

She tried to look brazen, but her cheeks were starting to turn pink. “I will need help with the rest,” she said, fluttering her lashes.

He was at her side in an instant. “I live to serve you.”

“Is that so?” She sounded intrigued by the notion, so dangerously so that Gareth felt compelled to add, “In the bedroom.” His fingers found the twin ribbons at her shoulders, and he gave them a tug, causing the bodice of her dress to loosen dangerously.

“More help, milady?” he murmured.

She nodded.

“Perhaps…” He looped his fingers around the neckline, preparing to ease it down, but she placed one hand over his. He looked up. She was shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “You.”

It took him a moment to grasp her meaning, and then a slow smile spread across his face. “But of course, milady,” he said, pulling his jumper back over his head. “Anything you say.”

“Anything?”

“Right now,” he said silkily, “anything.”

She smiled. “The buttons.”

He moved to the fastenings on his shirt. “As you wish.” And in a moment his shirt was on the floor, leaving him naked from the waist up.

He brought his sultry gaze to her face. Her eyes were wide, and her lips parted. He could hear the raspy sound of her breath, in perfect time with the rise and fall of her chest.

She was aroused. Gloriously so, and it was all he could do not to drag her onto the bed then and there.

“Anything else?” he murmured.

Her lips moved, and her eyes flickered toward his breeches. She was too shy, he realized with delight, still too much of an innocent to order him to remove them.

“This?” he asked, hooking his thumb under the waist-band.

She nodded.

He peeled off his breeches, his gaze never leaving her face. And he smiled—at the exact moment when her eyes widened.

She wanted to be a sophisticate, but she wasn’t. Not yet.

“You’re overdressed,” he said softly, moving closer, closer, until his face was mere inches from hers. He placed two fingers under her chin and tipped her up, leaning down for a kiss as his other hand found the neckline of her dress and tugged it down.

She fell free, and he moved his hand to the warm skin of her back, pressing her against him until her breasts flattened against his chest. His fingers lightly traced the delicate indentation of her spine, settling at the small of her back, right where her dress rested loosely around her hips.

“I love you,” he said, allowing his nose to settle against hers.

“I love you, too.”

“I’m so glad,” he said, smiling against her ear. “Because if you didn’t, this would all be so very awkward.”

She laughed, but there was a slightly hesitant quality to it. “Are you saying,” she asked, “that all your other women loved you?”

He drew back, taking her face in his hands. “What I am saying,” he said, making sure that she was looking deeply into his eyes as he found the words, “is that I never loved them. And I don’t know that I could bear it, loving you the way I do, if you didn’t return the feeling.”

Hyacinth watched his face, losing herself in the deep blue of his eyes. She touched his forehead, then his hair, smoothing one golden lock aside before affectionately tucking it behind his ear.

Part of her wanted to stand like this forever, just looking at his face, memorizing every plane and shadow, from the full curve of his lower lip to the exact arch of his brows. She was going to make her life with this man, give him her love and bear him children, and she was filled with the most wonderful sense of anticipation, as if she were standing at the edge of something, about to embark on a spectacular adventure.

And it all started now.

She tilted her head, leaned in, and raised herself to her toes, just so she could place one kiss on his lips.