“I did love him,” she said carefully. “For those years there was nothing brighter in my life than my feelings for him.”
“I know,” he said. “I will never make you feel guilty for feeling that way.”
“I love him still,” she said. “He is a part of me. And I won’t ever stop loving him and occasionally crying for him.”
“I know, Ellen.”
“I will never love you as I loved him,” she said.
He nodded.
“But then, I never loved him as I love you.”
He looked into her eyes, his expression quite blank.
“I never knew,” she said, “that love for two men could be so intense and all-consuming and yet so different. Charlie was my very best friend, my brother, my father, my protector. And, yes, my lover too, for we had a quite normal marriage and I loved the physical part of it because it brought me closer to him than I could be at any other time. I would have been happy with him for the rest of my life, Dominic. I would never have allowed anything more than a vague and unwilling attraction to you.”
“I know.”
“And you are my consuming passion, my web of love,” she said. “I don’t think I can ever have enough of you. And yet it is not just physical, either. At one time I thought it was, and that was when I despised and hated myself. But it is not. It is a passion, a hunger, for you, not just for your lovemaking. A hunger to be with you and part of you for a lifetime. I can return your love, Dominic, provided only you accept that a part of me will always be Charlie’s.”
He laid a finger along the length of her nose. “I would think the less of you,” he said, “if I thought that it might ever be otherwise.”
They smiled tentatively at each other.
“So, Ellen Simpson,” he said, “do you feel a little better now at the prospect of marrying me?”
She nodded.
“Before Christmas?”
“Tomorrow, if you wish,” she said.
“Alas,” he said, “there are such things as banns.”
“A shame,” she said.
“Besides, I have to ride to London, with or without you, to ask the Earl of Harrowby for the hand of his daughter. Do you think he is likely to cut up nasty?”
She smiled slowly at him. “You are going to do that?” she asked. “When I am a widow of five-and-twenty, and perhaps not his daughter anyway? How lovely, Dominic. He will be very pleased.”
“Not likely to poke me in the nose because I have caused his daughter to be increasing?” he said.
She shook her head. “I think he will thank you for making it possible for him to become a grandpapa so soon.”
“I can have the banns read next Sunday, then?” he asked.
She nodded.
He sat up suddenly and got to his feet. He reached down a hand for hers.
“How indisposed is your condition making you feel?” he asked, pulling her up beside him.
“Not at all,” she said. “I have never felt healthier in my life.”
“Good,” he said, stooping to wrap his arms firmly about her waist and lifting her from the ground to twirl her around and around until she was shrieking with laughter.
“It is so good to hear you laugh, Ellen,” he said as he came to a stop and set her feet back on the ground. “I am going to try to fill your life with laughter.”
“I wonder if the world will ever stop spinning wildly about me for as long as I am with you,” she said breathlessly.
“Absolutely not, my love,” he said against her mouth, before deepening the kiss. “I make you a solemn promise here and now that it never will.”
“Then good-bye equilibrium and sanity,” she said, wrapping her arms up about his neck. “My love.”