The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(95)
Lorelai drew his forehead down to meet hers then turned both of their heads to regard the pillar of late afternoon sun filtering into the cave. “That isn’t how light works, is it? Darkness is easily overcome. Not light. The smallest hint of illumination can chase away the heaviest gloom, can slip through the most infinitesimal crack. It is never the other way around.” She kissed him softly, and her lips came away salty as a barrage of emotion overwhelmed them both. “There has always been light in you, my love, and no matter how many have tried to smother it with their black deeds and blacker souls, it resides within you, still. I can sense it, even now.”
He folded into her, his magnificent body sinking against hers in a gesture of submission. To her, but to fate, to them, to the inevitability of their connection.
He cupped her face between his rough, tender hands and captured her gaze with his own so as to punctuate the fervency of his words. “All that is or ever was good in me begins and ends with you,” he breathed. “Every time I said you were mine, I meant that I was yours. Always. Always, Lorelai, I’ve been yours. I’d go through everything I’ve suffered in my nearly forty years on this earth if it brought me to this moment. If it meant that I’ll never spend one more night of the next forty years apart from you.”
The capitulations of joy coursing through her were tempered by a dread wrought of too much loss and tragedy. “A lot can happen between now and never.” When she’d said it before it had been a declaration of hope, now it was a caution.
“Yes, a lot can happen between now and never.” He kissed away a tear that held no pain or sadness, but joy and hope and the fear that once found, it could be lost. “But time will end before I stop loving you.”
“Truly.” She sighed. Could this be real? Could the love she bore him actually be returned, not once but a hundredfold?
“I love you,” he whispered, pressing his lips to hers, enchanting her with soft drags of his mouth. “I could be—I have been—sent to the other side of the earth, and it doesn’t even matter, because I’ll always find my way back to you. I etched the ebony wings on my back years ago because I have always been your raven. Your mate.”
She understood now. He’d never truly been the Rook.
He’d always been …
“Your Rook.”
EPILOGUE
Six Months Later
“My, would you look at those handsome men.” Lorelai clutched his arm as the gangplank lowered in order for them to disembark the steamship.
Ash scowled. “Don’t look too closely. We’re still newlyweds, or need I remind you?”
Her merry laugh still invoked a strange tickle low in his chest. “Don’t worry, darling,” she soothed. “I just find it amusing because from this distance, those men look more like pirates than peerage, what with the eye patch and the other with a metal hand. Perhaps if they give me a peg leg and you a parrot, we’d complete the set.”
Ash smiled down at her with infinite indulgence. “Whilst we are guests of the Duke of Trenwyth and his lady wife, I’ll thank you to remember that I’m not a pirate anymore,” he rejoindered with a bit of haughty melodrama. “I am His Grace, Ashton Weatherstoke. Duke of Castel Domenico, Comte de Lyon et de Verdun, Earl of Southbourne, and so on and so forth.”
“I suppose, as your wife, I should be impressed, but all those flashy titles still seem like such a demotion from the King of the Seas.” She flashed him a teasing pout.
“No.” He tucked an errant curl back beneath her cobalt traveling hat. “Not if you’re at my side.”
Ash kept her steady as she leaned on him down the unstable gangplank, silencing anyone who might remark upon her tedious progress with an evil glare.
She was swept into Farah Blackwell’s awaiting arms the moment they touched solid ground, and introduced to Lady Imogen, the Duchess of Trenwyth.
“Your Grace,” Blackwell greeted him, and Ash had to give his old friend credit because he said the title with much less wry humor each time. “Allow me to introduce His Grace, Collin Talmage, the Duke of Trenwyth.”
They exchanged pleasantries as though the entirety of the surrounding society were not gawking at them.
“I’m indebted to you and your wife, Lady Imogen, for agreeing to use your contacts at St. Margaret’s Royal Hospital to examine Lorelai’s case,” Ash said as the men fell in line behind their respective ladies, who all adjusted their speed to match that of Lorelai.
She’d been getting worse lately, slower, and experiencing more pain. There were stormy days, such as this one, where she resorted to using a cane if she could walk at all.
Every time she winced, a part of Ash died a little. If he could lend her strength, or health, or take some of her pain, he would.
Trenwyth, an unusually tall, bronzed Adonis of a man with a paradoxically forbidding expression, regarded the Lady Trenwyth with equal parts adoration and respect. “I’d be just as desperate for a miracle, were Imogen similarly afflicted.”
The men strolled behind their wives toward a row of well-appointed carriages, silently admiring the view of the three uncommonly lovely women.
Farah was dressed in bloodred velvet trimmed in black that sparked silver notes into her riot of curls.
Lorelai, in the middle, favored cobalt blue to match the sapphires in her cane and, of course, her eyes. Ash had watched her pin her spun-gold locks into a fashionable chignon, as she hadn’t wanted to bring her lady’s maid on this particular trip.