When they arrived, instead of lifting her into his arms and carrying her to the bed, he brought her to a chair and placed a sealed envelope in her hands.

“The very last letter that my father wrote informed me that there was one final letter to be collected from Westbury Abbey. I never read the previous missives, so I never knew that he’d left me anything here.”

“West. You didn’t open it?”

“I was waiting for you. You’re the reason I read his letters. I would have gone my whole life without opening them.”

“You open it,” she said, giving him the envelope. “It’s yours.”

He tore the seal from the letter and began to read.

“What does it say?”

“Viola.” His face was stricken by emotion, his voice choked with it. “This was written two nights before he died. I’d always thought his death was unexpected, but he knew his heart was failing, he knew he didn’t have long on this earth. And you were right. That knowledge changed him. This isn’t a letter, Viola. It’s a new will. Witnessed and sealed.”

West sank to his knees before her, clasping her hands in his. “It’s been sitting here the whole time. A new will naming me as the sole heir to all properties and the entire fortune that was attached to my mother.”

“How extraordinary.”

“It’s not a large fortune at this point, my uncle has spent imprudently, but it’s enough to invest wisely, and to complete the most urgent of repairs to the properties.”

“Will your uncle fight it, do you think?”

“I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem to care about Westbury Abbey in the least. I don’t even know where he is at the moment. He was last seen in Prague.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“It’s all because of you, my love.” He kissed her hand, and then he gave her that wolfish, smoldering stare that had been her downfall on that fateful night the first time they kissed. “Now I’m going to show you the bed.”

They came together in a new way this time, with open hearts and cloudless minds.

As the wild bells rang, Viola gave herself to him, and demanded everything from him in return.

Much later, as they lay with bodies entwined, breathing heavily and grinning like fools, Viola nuzzled his neck. “I thought you said that what you wanted to show me had nothing to do with beds or fornication,” she teased.

“I lied.”

“I can’t trust you at all.”

“Not when it comes to luring you into bed. I’ll fornicate with you as often as possible in as many positions and places as possible for the rest of our lives.”

“After we’re wed we won’t be able to call it fornication.”