Valentine quickened his strokes, wanting to find his release with her, wanting this moment to be perfect. She was beautiful, caught in the throes of passion, lips parted, pupils dilated, her creamy skin marked with a beautiful flush. She would always be the most exquisite woman he’d ever seen. When she cried out, her muscles clenching around him as she tumbled over the precipice into bliss, again he gladly followed.

He’d follow her anywhere. Into pleasure. Into purgatory.

Into the unknown.

His release went on and on, as if that part of him, too, refused to let her go.

“Valentine, kiss me,” she said breathlessly and he did. He kissed her with everything he held in his heart…all the warmth and the budding trepidation, the joys and the heightening worry that he might have been a hair too late in his avowals. That she might have set her sights on someone else. That she might never love him back. Why did people ever give in to love? It wrecked and it took, and left devastation in its wake.

Her fingers cupped his jaw as those heavy-lidded blue eyes bored into his. He let her see it all. He had nothing left to hide, not from her.

“I love you,” she whispered.

He blinked, sure that he’d imagined the soft declaration. “What did you say?”

“I’ve always loved you.” She blushed and ducked her face as if to hide, but he wasn’t having any of that. Valentine wanted to see every emotion, relish everything that crossed her expressive face. He tipped her chin up, the sight of those blues a benediction he would never tire of, not in his lifetime. “I wouldn’t have given myself to you so easily if I hadn’t.”

Sighing softly, he pressed his mouth to hers. “I’m sorry I’m such a buffoon and it took me so long to realize it. I didn’t know what I had until I nearly lost you.” He kissed her again, unable to help himself, and gently withdrew from her body, before tending to her and then to himself with his handkerchief. Smoothing the skirts of her gown into place and fastening his trousers, he suddenly felt unsure of where they went from here. All his cards were on the table. Would she refuse him now? He supposed he could take the coward’s way out and wait.

Or he could…

“Be my duchess,” he blurted out. “Please, Bronwyn.”

She laughed, the light sound filling him like nothing ever would. “A proposal in a tack room?”

“Suits our story, don’t you think? We’ve never done anything the proper way. Our courtship has been arse-backwards from the start.”