“Aye. Aye, a thousand times, aye.” Her eyes, those complicated, soulful wells of earnestness, filled with passion and a yearning for adventure that lit him up from the inside, grew exceedingly bright. He could almost see himself reflected in her tears of happiness. “And so, we can go home now?” she whispered.
“I am already home,” he murmured against her mouth, and their kiss went on all night.
Epilogue
Ireland
THEY RODE UP the last windy hilltop, and Magdalena stopped short and stared.
A manor house rose up, three storeys high, built of stone and surrounded by ramparts as solid as the earth itself. Behind and above it, a blue sky domed, broken by puffy white clouds. The grass was endlessly green, and the sun fed its rays upon the earth. Beyond, a blue sky rippled under the sun, and sea birds called.
They’d reached Tadhg’s home—the old one, contained in the earth and rock of Ireland itself, and the new one, visible in the brick and stone of the manor house that would serve as the seat of the newly established lordship, the barony of Amainiris —and Magdalena was captivated.
It seemed the whole world stretched out before her, high up on this hill. Precisely like the hill that she used to climb, before Augustus and the dreary world had pulled her back and saved her life. Or part of it. But the other part of her, so impractical, so sweet, had dissolved like sugar in a puddle.
Tadhg had never once pulled her back. He was eternally pressing onward, onward, into whatever was to come.
And he kept bringing her with him.
Into this, their life.
She threw her arms open and let the wind blow up from the sea and envelop her. Chills raced across her skin. She felt sparkling bright, as if she was covered in tiny, glittering granules of…sugar.
The breath burst out of her in a laugh as she turned to Tadhg.
He stood a pace back, watching her, smiling faintly, a brow arched in silent question: Is it good?
“Oh, Tadhg,” she breathed. “It is beautiful.”
He laughed at her reverent tone. “’Tis drafty and mottled with holes. But we shall make it home, aye?”
“It already is home,” she said firmly.
He pulled her to him, and as he did, the sun was going down, setting in bright bolts of pink and gold and green, stretching out to the edge of the world. “It’s ours now, Maggie. The whole world is ours.”
“I do not need the whole world.” She pulled him to her. “I need only you.”
He kissed her gently, watching her eyes fill with happy tears, and he knew everything he’d ever dreamed of, was indeed right in front of him, in Maggie’s loving eyes.