“Thank you for confiding in me,” she said sincerely. “Despite what you might think, nothing that you told me changes the way I feel about you.”

“No?” he asked, skeptical.

“Actually, it does change my feelings,” she admitted, and his stomach clenched again as he braced himself for what came next. “Now that I know some of what you’ve been through, I admire you, care for you, even more than I did before.”

Reese released the breath he’d been holding and managed a weak smile. “You also asked about what makes me happy.”

She smiled back and looked at him, expectant. “I did.”

“That’s an infinitely easier question with a much shorter answer. There’s only one thing that makes me happy, and that’s being with you.”

Sophie longed to reach out to Reese. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and make his pain go away. She wanted to will him to believe that all she said was true. But mostly, she wanted him to know that she loved him.

He’d just bared his soul to her, and words … well, they simply didn’t feel adequate to express the emotion in her chest.

His large, tanned hand rested on the coverlet between them. It would be so easy, so natural, to lace her fingers through his. The problem was that Sophie already knew that holding his hand wouldn’t be enough. She’d want to wriggle against the hard planes of his chest and press her lips to the skin above his collar. She’d insist on slipping her palms inside his shirt and running them over his shoulders and down his back.

And still, she’d crave more of him.

Worse, she knew that if she ever had a taste of physical intimacy with Reese, it would be infinitely harder to say goodbye to him. So, even though her whole body ached with the need to hold him, she couldn’t.

Nor could she reveal the depths of her feelings—not when she was about to accept a proposal from another man. Since it would have amounted to torture for both of them, she settled for giving him a muted version of the truth.

She gazed at him lying next to her, more vulnerable and handsome than ever. “Earlier tonight, outside the tailor’s shop, you told me you wished things were different.”

“I remember,” he said.

Tears welled in her eyes, and she was grateful for the relative darkness. “I wish things were different, too,” she said.

“How?”

“I wish we were both free to follow our hearts.”

He gazed into her eyes but didn’t say anything—at least not out loud. But the expression on his face revealed more than he probably knew: relief, frustration, and affection.