His hand was warm over hers. With him so close, she didn’t even feel the snow. Trembling, she whispered, “Darius...what are you saying?”
His jaw tightened. “If you still want to divorce me, you won’t need a lawyer.” He reached into his shirt pocket, where a single page was folded in quarters. “Here.”
Opening the paper, she looked down at it numbly. She tried to read it, but the words jumbled together. “What’s this?”
“Everything,” he said quietly. “Fairholme. The jets. My stocks, bonds, bank accounts. It’s all been transferred to your name. Everything I possess.”
She gasped, then shook her head. “But you know money doesn’t mean anything to me!”
“Yes, I know that.” He looked at her. “But you know what it means to me.”
Letty’s eyes went wide.
Because she did know what Darius’s fortune meant to him. It meant ten years of twenty-hour workdays and sleeping in basements. It meant working till he collapsed, day after day, with no time to relax or see friends. No time to even have friends. It meant borrowing money that he knew he’d have to pay back, even if his business failed. It meant taking terrifying risks and praying they would somehow pay off.
Those dreams had been fulfilled. Through work and will and luck, a poverty-stricken boy whose mother had abandoned him as a baby had built a multibillion-dollar empire.
This was what she now held in her hand.
“But I’m not just offering you my fortune, Letty,” he said quietly. “I’m offering everything. My whole life. Everything I’ve been. Everything I am.” Lifting her hand, he pressed it against his rough cheek and whispered, “I offer you my heart.”
Letty realized she was crying.
“I love you, Letitia Spencer Kyrillos,” he said hoarsely. “I know I’ve lost your love, your trust. But I’ll do everything I can to regain your devotion. Even if it takes me a hundred years, I’ll never...”
“Stop.” Violently, she pushed the paper against his chest. When he wouldn’t take it, it fell to the snow.
“Letty,” he choked out, his dark eyes filled with misery.
“I don’t want it.” She lifted her hand to his scratchy cheek, rough and unshaven. Reaching her other arm around his shoulders, she whispered, “I just want you, Darius.”
The joy that lit up his dark eyes was brighter than the sun.
“I don’t deserve you.”
“I’m not exactly perfect myself.”
He immediately began protesting that she was, in fact, perfect in every way.
“It doesn’t matter.” Smiling, she reached up on her toes to kiss him, whispering, “We can just love each other, flaws and all.”
Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately against the greenhouse, with the hot wet jungle behind the glass, as they embraced in the snow-swept bare garden. They kissed each other in a private vow that would endure all the future days of sunshine and snow, good times and bad, all the laughter and anger and pleasure and forgiveness until death.
Their love was meant to be. It was fate. Moíra.
They clung to each other until he broke apart with a guilty laugh.
“Ah, Letty, I’ll never be perfect, that’s for sure,” Darius murmured, smiling down at her through his tears. “But there’s one thing you should know...” Cupping her cheek, lightly drawing away the cold wet tendrils of her hair that had stuck to her skin, he whispered, “For you, I intend to spend the rest of my life trying.”
* * *
Spring came early to Fairholme.
Darius had a bounce in his step as he came into the house that afternoon with a bouquet of flowers. He’d had to work on a Saturday because it was crunch time developing the new website. But he was hoping the flowers would make her forgive the fact that he’d missed their new Saturday morning family tradition of waffles and bacon.
Darius had started that tradition himself, in the weeks he’d taken to focus only on Letty and their beloved son, whom they’d nicknamed Howie. After that, encouraged by Letty, he’d sheepishly called Mildred and apologized, then asked if there was any way she could try to reassemble his team at the office.
“The office is still in fine fettle,” she’d replied crisply. “I’ve been running everything just as you requested. I knew whatever you were going through you’d soon come to your senses. I haven’t worked for you all these years for nothing.”