‘I thought it was just your kisses,’ she told him, and he laughed and her heart sang.
Side by side they swam to the little beach and splashed ashore before sinking on to the edge of the dry sand. Lucian put his arm around her and pulled her tight. ‘We should have gone back to the main beach, you’ll catch your death.’
‘Just for a few moments. We need to talk. Lucian, you still wanted to marry me? Why?’ When he hesitated she murmured, ‘I did not think you would be afraid of anything, even of wearing your heart on your sleeve.’
‘Perhaps I am a coward when it comes to risking something I fear losing so much.’
‘Your heart?’
‘Your love. If I have it. I have lost my heart many days past. I love you, Sara, but I thought you did not love me. I thought that you were so frank, so open, that you would have told me if you did.’
‘And I thought you would be repelled by that emotion, by the demands that love makes.’
‘It does?’
‘If it is not returned. You felt it, too, or you would have told me how you felt. I love you, Lucian. I didn’t want to, I thought you were so wrong for me, that I would be impossible for you.’
‘After this evening do you not fear I would be impossible to live with?’ he asked and the lightness of his tone could not mask the urgency of the question.
‘And me. Can you live with me? I get into scrapes, led there by my feelings, not my sense of what is proper,’ she confessed.
‘We can compromise as long as we can talk. Talk and make love.’
She realised that he was leaning back, that in a second they would be flat on the beach. ‘Lucian, darling man, have you ever made love on a beach before?’
‘No. How do I get you out of this shirt?’
‘Sand. Sand gets everywhere. We need a… Oh…’
‘Rug?’ he asked from somewhere under her shirt. ‘Ah, I see, it just pulls up and over. And these trousers, two buttons. Lift, wriggle.’
‘Lucian, I think I am sitting on a crab! Oh, yes, that is…perfect.’ He picked her up and moved her astride him as he knelt in the soft sand. ‘Love me, Lucian.’
‘I will…I do.’ He bit gently on her neck as he lifted her, lowered her, took her in one slow, strong thrust that had her shuddering into an instant orgasm. ‘I can’t… Oh, God, Sara.’
He fell back, taking her with him, and thrust once, twice before he shouted aloud and she collapsed forward on to his chest, gasping with reaction and surprise.
*
‘Lucian,’ Sara murmured in his ear. ‘My feet are wet, the tide is coming in.’
‘How long have we been here?’ he asked, almost nose to nose with her. His face was in moonshadow, but she could see the whiteness of his smile.
‘I do not have the brainpower to work it out. What on earth happened just then?’
‘An explosion of joy, of relief, of love?’ he suggested. ‘I confess to needing to do it all over again, very slowly, on a bed.’ He shifted under her. ‘Without sand.’
‘The swim will rinse most of it off,’ she promised, rolling over and searching for her shirt and trousers. ‘For an awful moment when I found your clothes on the boat I thought…’
‘That I had walked out into the waves and oblivion?’ Lucian stood up, silvered by the moonlight, more beautiful than a man had any r
ight to be. ‘How could I leave a world that has you in it?’ He held out his hand and she put hers into it and walked with him into the sea, too moved for words.
*
‘Admit it, you are feeling all soft and sentimental and romantic,’ the Marchioness of Cannock whispered into the ear of the Marquess of Cannock who was sitting next to her in the front pew of St George’s, Hanover Square.
Before them, at the altar, Gregory Farnsworth was reverently kissing Marguerite, his new bride, and the sound of happy sighs and sniffles rose from every pew where a lady was sitting.