“You’ve lived your life a certain way a long time, and I mine,” she said quickly. “Ky, I’ve just begun to change—to feel the change. I don’t want to make a mistake, not with you. It’s too important. With time—”

“We’ve lost four years,” he interrupted. He needed to resolve something, he discovered, and quickly. “I can’t wait any longer to hear it if it’s inside you.”

Kate let out the breath she’d been holding. If he could ask, she could give. It would be enough. “I love you, Ky. I never stopped either. I never told you when I should have.”

He felt the weight drain from his body as he cupped her face. “You’re telling me now.”

It was enough.

CHAPTER 11

Love. Kate had read hundreds of poems about that one phenomenon. She’d read, analyzed and taught from countless novels where love was the catalyst to all action, all emotion. With her students, she’d dissected innumerable lines from books, plays and verse that all led back to that one word.

Now, for perhaps the first time in her life, it was offered to her. She found it had more power than could possibly be taught. She found she didn’t understand it.

Ky hadn’t Byron’s way with words, or Keat’s romantic phrasing. What he’d said, he’d said simply. It meant everything. She still didn’t understand it.

She could, in her own way, understand her feelings. She’d loved Ky for years, since that first revelation one summer when she’d come to know what it meant to want to fully share oneself with another.

But what, she wondered, did Ky find in her to love? It wasn’t modesty that caused her to ask herself this question, but the basic practicality she’d grown up with. Where there was an effect, there was a cause. Where there was reaction, there was action. The world ran on this principle. She’d won Ky’s love—but how?

Kate had no insecurity about her own intelligence. Perhaps, if anything, she overrated her mind, and it was this that caused her to underrate her other attributes.

He was a man of action, of restless and mercurial nature. She, on the other hand, considered herself almost blandly level. While she thrived on routine, Ky thrived on the unexpected. Why should he love her? Yet he did.

If she accepted that, it was vital to come to a resolution. Love led to commitment. It was there that she found the wall solid, without footholds.

He lived on a remote island because he was basically a loner, because he preferred moving at his own pace, in his own time. She was a teacher who lived by a day-to-day schedule. Without the satisfaction of giving knowledge, she’d stagnate. In the structured routine of a college town, Ky would go mad.