If he’d had a home at all, it hadn’t been here at Beasley Park. It had been her. Maggie Honeywell had been his home. His only harbor in the storm.

All those years abroad, wandering the world, St. Clare wondered how he’d ever managed to go so long without her. Ten long years, with nothing but his memories to sustain him. It didn’t bear thinking of, not now that he’d seen her again. Not now that he knew she was free. That she’d been waiting for him all this time. His love. His Maggie.

“Is it the same as you remembered?” she asked.

He pulled a face. “Smaller.”

“It stands to reason. You’ve grown bigger, after all.” She lay back on his coat, her head resting just over the edge of the collar on a tuft of forget-me-not covered grass. “Do you remember us lying here together that day? Before it all went wrong?”

“How could I forget?” He was tempted to lie down next to her. In for a penny, in for a pound, wasn’t that how the saying went? But there had to be limits. Even for him. He cleared his throat. “Have you come here often down the years?”

“Too often for my own good.” She turned her head to look at him. The collar of his coat brushed her cheek. “I believe most of these wildflowers have been watered by my tears at one time or another.”

He took her hand. The thought of her weeping over him made his chest constrict. “That’s all over now.”

“Yes.” Her fingers curled around his.

“I thought of this place a good deal,” he said. “Especially in the beginning. I wanted to come back here again. To see if I’d feel the same.”

“Do you?”

He huffed a breath. “No.”

She lifted her brows.

“It was never this place that made me happy.” He brought her hand to his lips. “It was you.”

Her eyes glistened. Good lord, the way she looked at him. As if he were, indeed, as essential to her as light or air. Her soul mate. The other half of her heart.

It both electrified and humbled him. More than that, it filled up the emptiness inside him. Made the broken pieces of him whole.

She’d been right that day in Hyde Park. Neither of them could exist outside the presence of the other. He knew he couldn’t. Not anymore.

“I love you, Maggie Honeywell,” he said huskily. “You do know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you love me? Not just the memory of me…of him…but me, as I am now?”

“Yes. For all eternity.” Her voice was a velvet promise. A vow that had never been broken. That couldn’t be broken. Not by time or distance. Not even by death, he suspected.

“Say it,” he commanded. “I need to hear it.”