Maggie pressed on. “It was when I sat with her during the fever. Most of what she said in her final moments didn’t make any sense. But she mentioned your name, and she asked for a priest. Not Mr. Applewhite, but someone else. A man she called Father Tuck. I’d no idea she was religious.”

St. Clare hadn’t either. Jenny had never attended church services and had never encouraged him to do so. As far as he could remember, she’d been at odds with God. Bitter about her lot in life and the scorn she faced as an unwed mother. “I suppose death makes believers of us all.”

“Yes, well, regardless of religion, it was you she was thinking of at the last. That must mean something.”

“What it means, my dear, is precisely nothing. Less than nothing. It’s so much ancient history to me. Not worth discussing at all.”

“And that’s that, is it? You have no intention of talking about the past?”

“No,” he said frankly. “I don’t.”

“I’m a part of your past.”

“No, you’re not.” He looked at her in the darkness. “You’re a part of me.”

Her mouth wobbled.

“The very best part,” he said. “The only part that matters. I may have given up the hope of seeing you again, but not a day has passed that I haven’t thought of you. That I haven’t wished…”

“What?” she asked softly.

“That I could be with you again. Like this. As the man I am now.” He slid his arm around her waist and drew her close. “That I could finally make you mine.”

She touched his face, tracing the curve of his brow with her fingertips and stroking the hard line of his jaw. “My first love,” she murmured to him. “My only love. I am yours. I’ve always been yours.”

Something inside him—a tightly held coil of worry and tension—slowly eased. He leaned into her words. Drinking them up like a man too long deprived of water.

She’d always known what he needed, what it took to make him whole. And she gave it to him now unreservedly. Her love. Her friendship. The exquisite reassurance of her touch.

He turned his face into her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm. “What about Beasley Park?”

“I could ask you the same about your grandfather and your title. Unless… You don’t have a plan, do you?”

His expression turned rueful. “None of this has been planned. Not since the moment you walked into the library at Grosvenor Square. As for what comes next…I only know one thing.” He loomed over her on the bed, his words as solemn and weighty as a sacred vow. “Whatever happens with my grandfather, with Beasley Park and all the rest of it…I’m never letting you go again.”

Chapter Twenty-One