He didn’t ask her if she liked it. He didn’t need to. She whispered his name, and before he could say a word, she nodded.

Mine, he thought again, and it was the most incredible thing, because until recently, he’d assumed—no, he’d known—that he would not find someone, that there would never be a woman he would call his own.

Softly, he kissed her lips. Then her nose, then each of her eyes in turn. It was bursting out of him that he was falling in love with her, but he had never been a man to speak of his feelings, and the words choked in his throat. So he kissed her one last time, truly and deeply, hoping she recognized it for what it was, an offering of his very soul.

Yours, he thought. I am yours.

Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

Sarah was aware that she shouldn’t have gone outside in the middle of the night. She wasn’t allowed to step outside her house in London without a chaperone; she knew very well that a post-midnight jaunt in Berkshire was equally verboten.

But she had been so restless, so . . . itchy. She’d felt wrong in her own skin, and when she had climbed out of bed and touched her feet to the carpet, her room had felt too small. The house had felt too small. She’d needed to move, to feel the night air on her skin.

She had never felt this way before, and truly, she had no explanation for it. Or rather, she hadn’t.

Now she did.

She’d needed him. Hugh.

She just hadn’t known it.

At some point between the carriage ride and the cake and the crazy waltzing on the lawn, Sarah Pleinsworth had fallen in love with the very last man she should ever have wanted.

And when he kissed her . . .

All she wanted was more.

“You are so beautiful,” he murmured, and for the first time in her life, Sarah truly believed that she was.

She touched his cheek. “So are you.”

Hugh smiled down at her, a silly half grin that told her he did not believe her for one second.

“You are,” she insisted. She tried to make her face stern, but nothing could dampen her smile. “You shall have to take my word for it.”

Still, he did not speak. He gazed down at her as if she were something precious, and he made her feel precious, and in that moment, all she wanted in the world was for him to feel the same thing.

Because he didn’t. She knew that he didn’t.

He had said things . . . little things, really, just an odd comment here and there that he surely did not expect to stick in anyone’s memory. But Sarah listened. And she remembered. And she knew . . . Hugh Prentice was not happy. Worse, he did not think he deserved to be.