Or perhaps he’d chosen loneliness not just for Daisy’s sake, but for Oliver’s. He’d always suspected it. “Honestly, I think he felt guilty for all the money we’d spent on treatments over the years. After our parents died, he refused any more, anything beyond routine. He said he didn’t want to squander my inheritance on quacks hawking medicine that wouldn’t work. My inheritance.” He squeezed his eyes shut again, though it only made Morgan’s image all the clearer in his mind. Looking at him with that love. That selflessness. “As if any of that mattered more than having him for one more day, one more week, one more month. I’d have given it all for him. And he should have let me. It was his, not mine.”

“I can understand his thoughts though. He wanted to provide for his family in whatever way he could. He wanted to leave you with a legacy, not debt or resentments. My father—he apologized over and again for his illness’s taking over our lives. As if I would have traded those days with him for a debut Season at the prearranged time.”

She had the right of it. Morgan had been that very way. He tugged their joined hands over so he could take a turn at kissing her knuckles. “I don’t want to lose her, Libby. Not yet. I’m not ready. And I know I’ll never be ready, but . . . but now I’m really not.”

“I’m not either.” A smile trembled its way onto her lips. “I’ve only just found her. I know I haven’t the claim on her that you or your family or the islanders do, but . . . but I want the chance to.”

A corner of his own mouth tugged up in response. And his free hand lifted to rest on her neck, under her ear, without his being aware of giving it the command. “She’s certainly claimed you. I think that gives you every right to claim her back.”

He really ought to drop his hand and step away. But she leaned toward him, and he was helpless to do anything but meet her, lips to lips. Heart to heart. Their fingers untangled, giving him the freedom to slide an arm around her waist, hers wrapping around him.

For those few glorious moments, there was only her and them and this—a primal need to know and be known and belong there with another. There was the simmer in his veins that no one else had ever ignited and the thudding of his heart that said this was right. There was the fog of pleasure that masked, just for a minute, the pain of the last twenty-four hours.