The Runaway Duchess Read online

  “I am trying. You are making this exceedingly difficult.”

  “I am making what difficult?”

  Gavin grimaced. “I am trying to tell you that I love you, but you won’t be quiet enough for me to get the words out.”

  For the first time in her entire life, Charlotte was shocked into true and absolute silence. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Then, to her utter humiliation, she burst into tears.

  “Charlotte.” All of the blood drained from Gavin’s face. “I did not mean to upset you. I… Please stop crying.”

  “You – you – you love me,” she wailed.

  “I do. I mean, I don’t, not if you do not want me to. You do?” he asked uncertainly when she nodded her head frantically up and down. “Then why are you crying?”

  “Because I am so h-h-happy.” Hiccupping, Charlotte used the edge of the sheet to blot at her face and took a deep, shuddering breath. “I love you too. I have loved you, almost since the beginning.” It felt as though something were blooming inside of her chest. Something bright and beautiful and oh so perfect. Smiling through what remained of her tears she nestled into the crook of his arm. “Even when I was so angry at you I could scream I still loved you. You make me very angry sometimes,” she confessed in a low whisper.

  “You make me angry as well.”

  “I do not suppose that will change.”

  “No, I do not suppose it will.”

  Wanting to say everything that was in her heart, she gazed up at him in earnest. “And I truly do not care that you are not a lord. That does not matter to me. It never did. I love you for who you are, not what you are. If you never worked another day in your life and I had to – to bake bread I would do it with a smile on my face, as long as you were next to me.”

  Gavin rubbed his chin. “If you know how to bake bread, why am I paying for a cook?”

  “You are impossible.”

  “But you love me,” he said with a contended sigh.

  “But I love you,” she agreed. “Every stubborn, disagreeable inch of you.”

  “And I love every stubborn, disagreeable inch of you.”

  In the end, it was not the perfect declaration of undying love Charlotte had always dreamed of. But it suited her far better, and in the years that followed when their stubbornness led to arguments and their arguments to fights and their fights to lusty bouts of lovemaking, she often thought of that morning and was content in knowing that even if given the chance, she would not have changed a single word.

  THE END