They closed around her, squeezing her so tightly she could hardly breathe. His face came down to rest on her soft hair, lightly kissing the sweet-smelling strands. Amanda’s arms went around his waist, holding him close. He felt so hard and strong and solid against her. She knew, with a heart-quaking sense of wonder, that at last she had come home.
“I wanted you from the first moment I saw you on the beach,” Matt whispered into her hair, his voice thick. “You were so small, and so exquisite. But then I found out that your heart was as beautiful as your face, and I was lost. I loved you, Amanda, when you cried over my scarred back, though I wouldn’t admit it even to myself. And I loved you more the first night we made love. When you said you loved me . . . You don’t know what you did to me, Amanda. I was yours from that night on. I wasn’t going to abandon you to the machinations of that swinish brother of yours. When I left, I had already decided that you would come with me. I wanted to take care of you, spoil you a little, give you everything you didn’t have.”
“Oh, Matt . . .” That was all she could force through a throat that was suddenly tight. She had never dreamed that he loved her this much; it was everything she had ever wanted and more.
“I’ve been a swine to you,” he muttered. “I know it. How could I have thought you had betrayed me?”
She pulled a little away from him then, smiling up at him mistily and placing silencing fingers over his mouth.
“Hush,” she said softly. “We won’t talk about that. I understand.”
He smiled back at her, a crooked twist of his lips that said almost as much as the soft blaze in his eyes. “You’re an angel,” he said, catching her hand and pressing his lips into the palm. “My own red-haired angel. Marry me, Amanda.”
Her eyes glowed. “Yes, darling,” she answered, loving him with her voice as well as her eyes. His eyes flamed down into hers, and then he was swinging her off her feet, finding her mouth with his as he carried her to the bunk.
It was a long time later when she remembered to tell him about the baby.
epilogue
Zachary Peter Grayson made his entrance into the world on February 3, 1843, at half-past five in the morning. His father and uncle had been keeping vigil downstairs in Belle Terre’s library since one o’clock the previous afternoon. Nervous as schoolboys, wincing at every cry from the bedroom above, they had mutually turned to strong drink for moral support. By the time Master Zack deigned to appear, the men were well past the stage commonly described as falling-down drunk. Amanda, upstairs in the master bedroom with two maids, a midwife, and a doctor in attendance, scarcely glanced at her son before falling into an exhausted sleep. Matt, when invited upstairs by the doctor to make the new arrival’s acquaintance, showed even less interest. He ignored his son completely, heading straight for his wife’s side, taking time only to press a gentle kiss on her brow and assure himself that she was indeed asleep and not dead before he passed out on the floor at her side.
Two months later, however, Master Zack’s position in the household was very different. His doting mama and proud papa were eager to carry out his slightest wish (which they somehow divined from his various gurgles and smiles and coos), and his fond uncle brought him ridiculously unsuitable presents every time he returned from a voyage. In deference to Zack’s existence, Matt had to all intents and purposes given up the sea, preferring to stay at home until Zack and Amanda could accompany him. He divided his time contentedly between overseeing Belle Terre’s sugar crop and attending to his shipping business in New Orleans. Amanda was seldom far from his side.
“Doesn’t he look like an angel?” Amanda asked fondly early one morning in April as she lay her sleeping son down in the hand-carved wooden cradle that stood in the place of honor at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom. Matt, having watched her nurse the child—Zack’s greediness was a never-ending source of amazement to him—from the warm comfort of the big bed, smiled and stretched against the pillows.
“An imp of the devil, more like,” he said, his voice gruff although his eyes were as fond as Amanda’s as he studied the tiny, red-haired, thumb-sucking being who was his son.
“He is not.” Amanda rounded on her husband, who grinned lazily at her. The sun was just beginning to peep over the horizon, sending golden rays into the room through the open windows. One touched Amanda’s unbound hair, bringing it to life in all its crimson glory. Newly slender, her face still flushed with the sleep that Zack had called her from, clad in a prim white nightgown, she looked scarcely more than a child herself; certainly not old enough to be the mother of a son.
“If he’s an angel, then he must take after his mother.” Matt’s voice was indulgent. “Who is sweet as a kiss and heart-stoppingly beautiful. Aren’t you coming back to bed?”
Amanda looked over at him, smiling. There was no mistaking the amorous note in his voice. The last months of her pregnancy and then her recovery from a difficult birth had forced a long period of abstinence on both of them. Since the doctor had pronounced her fit just two short weeks ago, Matt had been insatiable. Not that she minded, she thought with a grin. She had been insatiable herself.
“Don’t you have to go to the fields?” She looked at him innocently through her lashes. Propped up against the pillows, his black hair tousled and his wide shoulders very bronze against the white linen, he was the epitome of the virile male. The sheet lay across the lower half of his body, leaving the broad, black-pelted chest bare to excite her imagination. As for his face—he was still the most breathtakingly handsome man she had ever seen.
“Later,” he said, his voice thickening. “Come back to bed, Amanda.”
She smiled at him, her eyes warming. Then she went back to bed.
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