“Do you know, Marcus, that I desperately need to be held? The lovemaking was astonishing and lovely, and I am going all to pieces, and… Please hold me and hold me, and never let me go.”

He drew the covers up over her shoulders and wrapped her in his arms.

Matilda gained some insight into what it was like for Marcus to go through life with six competing choruses at full voice in his head at all times.

Amazement thrummed through her, echoing the bodily pleasure she’d found with her intended.

Fury added to her mental cacophony, at Harry and Joseph, a pair of amatory bumblers who had the same equipment adorning every other adult male, but who hadn’t bothered to learn its proper use with a lover.

Lassitude, because Marcus’s hand stroking slowly over her bare back was indescribably soothing.

And gratitude, to Marcus and to life, for affirming her hope that intimacy with a man should be more than a bothersome interlude before a lady availed herself of a decent night’s sleep.

What Matilda felt for Marcus defied words. She recognized protectiveness in the mix, affection, enormous respect, physical attraction, and more, but the passion of those emotions lifted and blended them into a new experience, just as the lovemaking had been a new experience.

I have fallen in love. When all hope of romance had passed, when she’d disdained her younger self for longing for such sweeping emotions, the tenderest of sentiments engulfed her. She cast around for something sweet and memorable to say, something that would stay with a man who could quote Shakespeare, the Stoics, and the Bible with casual ease.

“I never want to leave this bed.”

Marcus’s chest—over which she was draped—bounced a little, and he patted her bottom. “We’d grow hungry, my dearest, and we must not neglect our responsibilities.”

He was teasing her, mostly. Matilda kissed his nose for that. “You have it backward. My father had it backward too. We must not neglect our pleasures, or those responsibilities will choke us to death as surely as a lung fever can.”

“The Stoics would despair of you, but I eventually learned that they were not the elixir of profound contentment I’d hoped them to be.”

“A boy without a father finds guidance where he can. The Stoics were by no means a bad choice.”

A beat of quiet went by, the only sound the crackling fire, then Marcus gathered her in a fierce embrace. “If you refuse to marry me, I will go on somehow, but you have ruined me for any other woman. Do you want that on your conscience?”

“The ruination is mutual, I’m sure.”

His hold eased. “We are to be married?”