Although maybe she’d earned it. Maybe all the difficulties, hardships, and disappointments in her life had brought her to this point. Maybe she wouldn’t be experiencing this kind of joy if she hadn’t experienced the alternative.

Alex caressed the naked skin of her shoulder while pressing his mouth to her hair. “What are you thinking about?”

She propped up her chin on the back of the hand she had planted on his chest to look up at him. Her golden knight. The man who’d renewed her faith in honorable men. It was a heavy mantle of expectation to wear, but she knew he was up to the task. “You. Me. The future. That I’ve never been so happy in all my life.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” she repeated, surprised by his tone. “You sound disappointed.”

He grinned rather devilishly for someone who was supposed to be a paragon of honor. “I was rather hoping you were thinking about ways to make me break more vows. That last one was rather . . . effective.”

“Well, when I bent down to examine that ‘scratch’ you weren’t going to tell me about”—Lachlan had some explaining to do for that!—“it seemed a good place to start.”

“Oh, it was. And nearly a good place to end a few minutes later.”

She grinned. “I guess that means I was doing it right?”

“Sweetheart, with your mouth on me like that there is nothing you could do that wasn’t right.”

“That’s good, because I had an idea when you were behind me in the saddle.”

Alex swore, and she looked up at him and frowned. “What was that for?”

“For what you are about to do to my stamina. This isn’t going to last long.”

But he was wrong in that. It would last forever.

Epilogue

EPILOGUE

Berwick Castle, Berwick-upon-Tweed, July 17, 1328

THE SPIDER HAD spun her web.

Robert the Bruce had lived to see the day that at times—too many times—he feared would never come. Twenty-two years ago, when things had seemed their darkest, he’d learned an important lesson in perseverance from a spider in a cave to never give up. Today that lesson had paid off.

As Bruce listened to his four-year-old son and heir, David, repeat the vows that would bind him to his seven-year-old bride, Joan of the Tower, Edward II’s youngest daughter, he knew that his long struggle was over. The die that had been cast twenty-three years ago at Lochmaben Castle had finally stopped rolling.

He’d won. He’d won.