He kissed behind her ear. “Look at the last one.”
She looked. It was an erotic image, passionate without being obscene. It was a memory and a prediction.
“That’s what we are together. What we’ve been from the first. Do we look like we make each other miserable?”
“No.” The word for how they looked was ecstatic.
“Do we look all wrong for each other?”
“No.” They were perfect. “But …” She tried to remember what to say. That she was a mess— But maybe she wasn’t. She was good at her job, and this man behind her, this man holding her in his arms, seemed to think she was good at her life.
He turned her around. “I’ve been a bloody stupid fool,” he said quietly, running his fingertip along the rim of her shoulder. He met her eyes. “I disappointed you, and I behaved like a despicable coward, as you said, and I’m so sorry for that. I’m trying to turn myself around.” He gestured at the gallery space, and she took in for the first time how large the room was. Dozens of Nev’s paintings lined the walls, and hundreds of people milled around talking and looking at them. She caught a glimpse of Richard in conversation with Judith and Christopher. More disconcerting, she saw that a circle of people had gathered around to watch her with Nev—the muse and the artist in conversation.
She looked back at him, and the earnestness in his eyes grounded her.
“I quit the bank. The day after you got on that bus. And I’ve told my mother if she ever tries to manipulate me again, or even so much as offers unsolicited advice, I’ll stop speaking to her.” He glanced down at his jacket sleeve and smiled sheepishly. “This is the first time I’ve worn a suit in nearly a month.”
“When you relapse, you do it right.” She ran one finger over the studs on his shirtfront.
He touched her smiling face, his thumb brushing lightly over her cheekbone. “I’m doing my best to deserve you, love. I know we could be happy together.”
She thought about the morning she’d woken up in his bed and found a toothbrush and a towel waiting for her in the bathroom. How she’d walked into his studio and seen him painting, and he’d made her pulse race and her palms damp when he smiled. The feeling she’d had the first time he was inside her—that the two of them were more together than she’d ever been with anyone else. That as a whole, they made something bigger than the sum of its parts.
She thought of Nev at the bar after the rugby match, how magnificent he was when he did what made him happy instead of what he thought he ought to do.
She thought maybe he was right. They could be happy together.
His strong hands cupped her face, and he kissed her.
Flashes went off, bright enough to see through her eyelids. His lips were warm and soft, the same, but strange again after so many days without him. Just like the first time he’d kissed her and every time since, her whole body lit up in response to the movements of his mouth over hers. But this time it was different. This time she knew who he was. This time she knew who she was, too.
When he broke off the kiss, she opened her eyes. “What was that, Neville?”
He smiled. “You tell me, Mary Catherine.”
It was the smile that did it. She kissed him again, hard and fierce, and when his tongue brushed her lower lip, seeking entrance, she let him in. She wouldn’t try to keep him out anymore.
They came up for air eventually, by which time the state of her panties was shocking. Nev looked around at the fifty people staring at them, gawping and recording their makeup kiss with cell phones and cameras and one very large, very unwelcome video camera that said BBC FOUR on the side, and he said, “Bugger.”
“Bugger?”
“I hadn’t planned to do this with an audience,” he mumbled.
Before she figured out what that was supposed to mean, he’d dropped to one knee in front of her and stuck his hand in his pocket.
“Nev?” she asked, growing apprehensive. It was one thing to believe they were an indivisible unit. To accept, however tentatively, that they had a chance at happiness. It was quite another to see the man she loved on bended knee, pulling a jewelry box out of his tuxedo jacket.
He opened the box. “Will you wear it again, love?” The ring he’d bought her more than a month ago.
“Please, please stand up.” Her eyes darted frantically around the crowd. “Please, please, please.” She couldn’t do this yet. Not tonight, not in front of these people.
“I want to marry you.”
“I get that. C’mon, stand up,” she begged, leaning over to tug ineffectually at his elbow.
“I love you.”
“I know. I love you, too. Get up.”