At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(99)

"I love you," she murmured, her lips hot against the base of his throat. "I've never stopped loving you."

He pushed the coat off her shoulders, unbuttoned her sweater. "I've never loved anyone but you, Gracie. Never..."

"Those stories... the things you wrote... so beautiful..."

"I remember everything about you... everything—" Every breath she took, every word she had uttered. He remembered it all.

Rachel's voice drifted up the staircase. They needed to be alone, away from the world. He swept Gracie up into his arms and carried her down the hallway to his room, three doors down. The bedroom was dark. He reached for the lamp but Gracie stopped him.

"They'll see the light," she whispered as he stripped off her clothes then shed his own.

They were greedy for each other, avid, intoxicated by the feel of bare skin against bare skin, the wonder of touch. Words of love spiraled between them, striking sparks in the darkness. Their bodies were strange and yet familiar; the rhythm of love was part sense memory, part miracle. He needed all that she had to give, to find the other half of his heart. She needed to make him part of her body the same way he had been part of her heart and soul for as long as she could remember.

Remember... remember this moment...

Remember the way he looked in the moonlit bedroom. Remember the words he murmured against her skin. Remember how it felt to be happy again.

Remember the moment when he pulsed deep inside her body, holding her as if he would never let her go, the way her body answered his with a fierce shattering of her defenses that was triumphant and heartbreaking all at the same time because she knew it could never happen again.





#





He unfurled the future for her like a flag of silk. The fact that they would have a future seemed like a miracle to him, like the first snowfall or a baby's smile. They had been handed a second chance and he wasn't about to waste a moment of it.

Words poured from his mouth the way they had poured from his fingers onto the keyboard. She was the key to everything. Without Gracie by his side, life was nothing more than a counting down of the days. He created castles in the air for her, castles with a foundation of unshakable love, and after a bit he realized that she lay curled on the bed next to him but she hadn't said anything at all.

"Gracie?" He rolled on his side and looked at her through the darkness. "Is something wrong?" He reached out and touched her cheek. It was damp with tears. "Did I hurt you?"

She took his face between her hands and ran her thumbs across his cheekbones, down to the corners of his mouth. "I love you so much," she said. "Nothing will ever change that."

He felt the icy breath of fear against the back of his neck. "What is it?" Eight years was a long time to be apart from the one you love. He knew nothing about that time. "You can tell me anything."

"I tried to find the nerve to tell you all day but there was one interruption after the other." She sat up straight with her back against the headboard. "I don't know. Maybe I was looking for a reason not to tell you at all."

"This is about that day, isn't it?"

"Yes." The look in her eyes scared him. Sadness was in her eyes and regret. She drew in a deep breath and the sound struck him like a physical blow. "Your father knew about us. A friend at the courthouse in Portland sent him a copy of our marriage license."

The icy breath grew colder still. "How did you find out?"

She clasped her hands together but her fingers still shook. "He came to my house that afternoon. He told me we were all wrong for each other, that I would only hold you back—"

"But you were the one with the ambitions. I—"

She wouldn't let him continue. If she stopped, she would never manage to say the words and she needed to say them more than anything in the world. "He knew me, Noah. He knew what made me tick. But I wouldn't give in. I told him I loved you, that I would make you happy, that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. He even tried to buy me off, as if money was the one thing I couldn't refuse but I wouldn't give an inch."

Noah leaned back against the pillow as the story took shape in front of him. He'd found his father parked along the side of the road not far from the docks where Gracie lived. Simon's dying words had been about Gracie. Why hadn't he realized that before?

"Did he threaten you? What did he say that made you run?"