Piotr sat up, the hotel bed protesting the movement. He slid an arm under her shoulders and hauled her up against him. “Any man who would wish to extinguish the fire that burns so bright in you is no man at all. Whatever dreams you wish to chase, I will chase them with you.”

“I am the luckiest girl in the world right now,” she whispered, looking up at him.

“Careful,” he replied, his eyes dancing. “You might be accused of being a shameless romantic.”

“I’ll have you know that the women in my family are not romantics, shameless or otherwise,” she sniffed. “We leave that to our menfolk.”

“I can’t wait to meet them.”

“You will.”

“They will not be angry? That I married their daughter without even meeting them?”

Sophie bit her lip. For as long as she could remember, marriage had ever been an enemy to her ambitions and dreams and an adversary to her independence and freedom. Her antipathy toward the institution had increased each time some meddling matriarch told Sophie that it was well past time that she abandon her frivolous studies and do what was natural—marry well and settle down.

A thousand times she had sworn to her family that she would never fall in love. Never marry. A thousand times she had sat down at her writing desk to tell her family that she’d been a liar. And each time, the words hadn’t come. She would remedy that as soon as she got back to Warsaw tomorrow.

“They will love you,” she told him. That was the truth.

“I wish my parents were still alive and could have known you,” he said, his finger tracing patterns along the top of her arm. “Though they would have been appalled that I did not marry you in front of a hundred people, in a church filled with flowers, with a brass ensemble to serenade us out. Or that I did not take you to Paris or Vienna for our honeymoon and sleep on silk sheets.”

“That all sounds complicated.” Sophie squeezed his hand with hers, twining her fingers through his. “This world is complicated enough.”

“I didn’t even manage a proper photographer.”

“I didn’t particularly want to marry a proper photographer.”

“Very funny.”

“I love you,” she said simply, those words seemingly inadequate for the storm of emotion that was constricting her chest.

He glanced over at her, holding her eyes with his own, the smile slipping from his lips, his expression intense. “I love you too,” he replied.

“I wish your leave wasn’t so short. I wish you didn’t have to go back to your regiment tomorrow. I don’t want to lose you again so quickly—”