by Lara Temple
Before she could stop him he reached out and turned over her sketch. It was an absent motion, but as soon as he saw the drawing his gaze focused, colour staining his cheeks. Her heart sank. Just when he was softening towards her. He would probably see this as another offence.
‘Sam...’
‘You cannot expect me not to draw you. That is not fair. I keep them all safely in a case so you needn’t worry anyone will see them...’
‘There are more?’
He followed her glance towards the leather-bound case on the table and something between a whimper and a groan escaped her. She didn’t try to stop him as he opened it and looked through them. There was no hiding it now. All her drawings of him on the Lark, the endless drawings she’d made during his two-week absence and those of him in their bed...
He took the one of him leaning back in the bath, looking beautiful and weary and worried.
‘I can’t help drawing you.’ The words burst out of her and he finally put them down.
‘You are so damnably gifted, Sam,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t deserve you.’
‘Edge...’
‘No, please listen. I know I have been...unbearable these past days. I will do better.’
‘Can you not tell me what is bothering you? I would rather know the worst than imagine it. Even if you are regretting this marriage. Just tell me.’
He planted his hand on the case and took a deep breath.
‘Marrying you was the best thing I have ever done, Sam. Remember in The Curse of the Valley of the Moon when the dragon warns Gabriel not to use his wish to find Leila, that being granted your heart’s desire too easily can poison the gift? Well, I was wiser than I realised when I wrote that because it is true. Out of nowhere you offered me what I wanted most in the world, though I barely admitted it to myself. I knew there would be a price, but I was willing to pay it. I still am, but I can’t deny it hurts like the devil to know I am a compromise, Sam.’
‘A compromise?’
‘Until you told me about the man you loved I was beginning to hope you were learning to love me a little, too—I mean not as a friend but as the person you need more than anyone else. Perhaps that was why it hit me so hard, to be pushed back like that. I wanted to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze and watch him empty of life as if I could drain him out of you like a poison. It was a foolish, juvenile reaction and I vented my fear and disappointment on you though you are not to blame for loving him. It is what it is. I hope that with time you will come to care for me in the same manner as I care for you, but even if you don’t I will never regret this.’
His eyes were a very clear green as they searched hers. ‘I’ve scared you. I didn’t mean to do that, but you wanted to know the worst. And I suppose the worst is that I love you. You will no doubt think me a fool and a cad and you would be quite right, but I fell in love with you eight years ago and I didn’t even understand it. I made a terrible mistake with Dora and she paid the price, poor girl. She could have been happy with someone else. She deserved to be. Dora was what I thought I wished to be after I escaped that hellish war, but with you I was completely myself—good, bad and boring.’
‘You were never boring,’ Sam managed to say, trying to cling to something in this foreign landscape. Beautiful but foreign, like a dream.
He smiled again.
‘Yes, I was, rigid, boring, trying to herd you into a corner where you wouldn’t threaten me. But I couldn’t and I didn’t really want to. If I had, I wouldn’t have followed you around everywhere those weeks, scolding like a pathetic mother hen. I employed every excuse I could to be around you and not once did it occur to me why until you fell on top of me and knocked some sense into me when it was far too late. That moment shifted my life on its axis, Sam. I never admitted it, but from that moment onwards the only time you weren’t at its centre was when Jacob was born. For a while I had him and I was so happy...’
He looked down again and she risked her dream by taking his hand and threading their fingers together. He closed his eyes.
‘I wish... I wish he had met you. I wish he were here with us.’
Sam wrapped herself around him, her face against his chest.
‘I would have loved him and loved him and loved him.’ She spoke the words to his heart, her lips reverberating with its beat. His hand smoothed her hair, gently pulling the pins out of it.
‘I know that, little mountain goat. I told him all about you, everything I could remember. I wrote my first book for him, but you inspired it like a madcap Don Quixote, tilting at pyramids and ambitious priests and wrathful gods. I don’t know if he liked my stories, but I know he loved your drawings.’
‘I want you to tell me all about him, everything and anything you wish. I’m so afraid to ask and have you push me away again, but I’m tired of being afraid with you. And you are such an idiot, Edge. It’s my fault, but you are an idiot. Do you really believe I would have made the same mistake twice? I only married Ricki because you were married to Dora.’
‘You don’t mean...you were very young, isolated...’ He shook his head and the warmth was already being furled back in, but she held on to his hand, ready to weather this wave as well.
‘I know that is how you thought of me, but I wasn’t being madcap Sam when I kissed you eight years ago, Edge. When you told me about Dora that day you smashed a world I’d hardly even realised existed. I was miserable and lonely and it was even worse when Mama and I returned to Venice. I needed so desperately to be loved and I made a horrible mistake. I told you I wanted a family, but that wasn’t why I proposed to you. I may not have admitted to myself I still...cared for you, but within two days of seeing you at Qetara I knew I couldn’t bear for you to disappear, not again. I had to try...’
His hand jerked in hers and the battle for and against believing her was evident in the tension that deepened the lines about his mouth. She clasped her hands tighter around his. She needed him to believe her. If he were to trust her, to open to her, he had to believe her.
‘I was young, but not a child, eight years ago, Edge. It wasn’t an infatuation, no matter how handsome you were and how peculiar my upbringing. Because even then I knew you, Edge. Down to my core and down to yours. That hasn’t changed. I never thought of it, but I could always feel who you were behind those mile-high walls you erected and I think you always knew it, too, even if it didn’t affect you as it did me. When you left I was determined to overcome you, but I never did, Edge. I’m so glad you were brave enough to tell me you love me because the words have been burning inside me for weeks and weeks, but I was terrified of chasing you away again and I’m exhausted with being patient. I love you so much. You are the only man I have ever loved.’
‘Sam... God, Sam, I need this to be true.’
‘Of course it is true, Edge. Can you not see it? It is in every one of these drawings I have been hoarding and hiding from you. Lucas was right when he said that I’d drawn you into my illustrations for your books even before I knew you were the author. I wove you into my life the only way I could. I don’t need you to give me a home or children. You are my home. I need to be with you because I am utterly myself with you, even when you are impossible. And I am beginning to believe it is the same for you, so it is good Rafe and Lucas and Chase interfered in our lives. What do people do without big brothers?’
She was babbling and she could see him teetering on the verge of his wary need to shore up the battlements. True to form.
She grabbed his shirt in her hands.
‘I love you, Edge. I dare you to believe me and step off that cliff with me.’
‘You always did enjoy tossing out dares, Sam.’ His mouth softened into the smile that melted her each time, but she was lost in the sea green of his eyes.
‘I dare you,’ she repeated and his hands swept down her back, moulding to her backside as he raised her towards him.
‘I love your posterior, Sam. Every lush inch of it.’
‘You shan’t distract me. I dare you to step off the ledge, Edge, and trust me to catch you.’
‘I’ll crush you. You nearly broke every bone in my body when you jumped off that temple. And you definitely broke my heart.’
She heard the catch in his voice, the need, the fear, the yearning.
‘You broke mine, so we’re even. Trust me.’ She brushed her mouth over his, fitting their lips together as perfectly as she had that first time so long ago. God, he tasted like heaven, like honey cakes and bliss and eternity.
‘Sam, I adore you...’
‘I dare you, love of my life. Jump...’
So he did.
Epilogue
The sound of hammering followed Edge as he crossed the lawn towards where Sam was standing beneath the willows, the rowboat shifting lazily on the water beside her. Her hair was loose over her shoulder and he brushed it aside to kiss her nape, breathing in the scent of another world.
His chosen, perfectly imperfect world.
His hand skimmed downwards, hesitating before coming to rest on the rise of her abdomen where their child was growing. She placed her hand on his, their fingers interlacing. He knew the heartbeat he felt was hers, not the child’s, but his breathing tightened anyway—with fear, with love, some more fear and finally with hope. He wanted this, with Sam, so badly. He was so much luckier than he deserved.
If he’d learned anything in these past months with Sam, it was that they were good for each other. Even when they fought he felt himself grow, open up to her, resting each time more easily on this trust he’d never trusted. On Sam. He had no idea how he’d survived for so long in his loneliness when being with her felt so natural. It was into this world, this reality they would bring their child...their children. It felt so right his heart cracked each time he allowed the realisation to settle.
Each time he let himself love her a little more.
‘Love of my life,’ he murmured against her skin and she sighed and took his hand, pulling him towards the wide wicker chair under the willows.
‘I knew not even you could write with all that noise. At least this time the nursery won’t take as long as the rest of the house did.’
‘It wasn’t the noise that distracted me. It was the sight of you through the window. We need a larger chair. Better yet, sit on me, you two.’
‘I’m beginning to feel like two. At least I no longer feel seasick. Perhaps our little girl was practising for all the voyages we shall take her on.’
He pulled her on to his lap, touching his lips to her forehead and breathing her in.
‘Or boy,’ he murmured against her skin and she took his hand, but he could feel that quiver of tension that came over her when she worried memories of Jacob were hurting him. ‘Whatever it is, Sam, I’m so happy I was clever enough to accept your proposal.’
‘Occasionally even you have bursts of intelligence.’ She snuggled more deeply against him and picked up the book that was resting on the arm of the chair. ‘Like this one. I never asked you, Edge, but now that I’ve read Treasures of Siwa again I couldn’t help wondering...’ She opened the book and he tensed as her fingers rested below a particular passage. ‘I wondered why Durham only sent a partial manuscript of this one and when I discovered you were the author I was so upset I forgot to ask you why. Was it because of this?’
He glanced at the page. Strange that he had not thought much about it when he wrote it almost two years ago in Brazil. It had just...come. Now it looked like a premonition.
Leila knew love was never intended for her kind and she had no such expectations. So when love came she hid it deep inside the caverns of her soul and turned her back on it, though it blazed hotter than the August sun.
But even the best hiding places must eventually be abandoned or they become graves. And so, when she stood at Gabriel’s side above the valley and felt his pain strike sharper and deeper than the swords that decimated her family and dreams, she finally said the words that would bring either damnation or release.
‘It was only ever you, Gabriel, my one and only love.’
Her finger rested below the word ‘love’ and he took her hand, raising it to press a kiss to the heart of her palm.
‘I didn’t think about it at the time. I only felt...unnerved and as usual I did my foolish best not to consider why. But, yes, I put those words on Leila’s lips because I needed to hear them, Sam. Even if it was only in my mind. They were true for me even if I was too great an idiot to realise it. Rafe told me the Desert Boy books were one long love letter and he was right. They were always my love letters to you, Sam.’
Sam touched his cheek and smiled and his world filled once more.
‘I’m glad you wrote them, Edge. Because it was only ever you, my one and only love.’
* * *
If you enjoyed this story
be sure to read the other books in
The Sinful Sinclairs miniseries
The Earl’s Irresistible Challenge
The Rake’s Enticing Proposal
And why not check out Lara Temple’s
Wild Lords and Innocent Ladies miniseries?
Starting with
Lord Hunter’s Cinderella Heiress
Keep reading for an excerpt from The Princess’s Secret Longing by Carol Townend.
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The Princess’s Secret Longing
by Carol Townend
Chapter One
1396—the Alhambra Palace in the Emirate of Granada
Princess Alba lay in the dark, an unfamiliar noise had dragged her from her dreams. She turned restlessly, unable to work out what had woken her. All she could hear was a trill of birdsong. In her mind’s eye, she saw birds flying over lawns and terraces and flitting in and out of shrubs in the wilderness beyond the palace wall. They sounded happy. Free!
A lantern glowed softly in a niche, casting a gentle light on the sleeping forms of Alba’s sisters, Princess Leonor and Princess Constanza. Their black hair was loosely tied back for sleep, just like hers, and their eyelashes lay like dark crescents against their cheeks. Princess Alba and her sisters were triplets, identical triplets.
Alba yawned and, as she looked at her sisters, she was gripped by an odd fancy. It was as though she was looking at other versions of herself, versions which had yet to waken. Irritated, she brushed the thought aside. Her sisters’ features might mirror hers, but their characters—oh, so very different.
The bedchamber shutters were closed, and it was so early that nothing was visible through the star-shaped patterns cut into the wood. The Princesses hadn’t been long in their father’s favourite palace—only a few days—but already Alba knew that in daytime the piercings in the shutters turned bright sunlight into starry splashes on the floor tiles.
There it was again! That mysterious noise. Alba sat up. What could it be? The cry of a hawk? No, that was no hawk. That was surely—a baby.
Her breath stopped. Could it really be a baby? Whose could it be? It couldn’t belong to her father the Sultan, may God exalt him. The Sultan had only sired three children, Alba and her sisters. Sultan Tariq’s unfulfilled wish for ot
her children—more precisely, for a son—was well known.
Alba scrambled to the window. Kneeling on a cushion, for the window was low and the floor hard, she shoved at the shutter and strained to hear more. She’d spent most of her life far away in Salobreña Castle and not once had she held a baby. A pang shot through her, violent and intense. If there was a baby in the palace, she must see it. Hold it.
Loath to wake her sisters, Alba snatched up a robe and veil and was dressed in no time. She took the lantern to light her way, crept softly downstairs and slipped out of the tower.
The stars were fading, the sky was turning pearly grey and the air was pleasantly cool.
Ahead of her, paths ran this way and that. Buildings were visible as black shapes at the end of the paths. So many walls and towers. Alba had yet to learn the layout of the grounds, but in this instance, it didn’t matter. That sound, the faintest of whimpers, was her guide. There was a baby in the palace!
Stepping on to the lawn, Alba sped past a hissing fountain. She entered a small grove of trees and was greeted by the heady scent of oranges. A section of the palace wall lay on her left hand and light glowed briefly from a guardhouse at the top. Her father the Sultan had many guards.
Mindful of the need for discretion, Alba tugged her veil tightly about her face. Sultan Tariq insisted that the Princesses wore veils, even when walking here in the palace grounds. Any man who caught a glimpse of her face would be severely disciplined. Alba wasn’t sure what form the punishment would take, it was enough to know that her father ruled with an iron hand. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if a guard suffered on her account.
God was with her, she saw no guards.
Several buildings were clustered behind a screen of myrtle bushes, the thread of sound came from the nearest. The strengthening light revealed a line of windows with arches shaped like horseshoes and a large door heavily decorated with ironwork. The door opened smoothly, and Alba entered a shadowy antechamber. An indignant wail echoed across the marble floor.