The Princess's Forbidden Lover by Clare Connelly

Author:Clare Connelly [Connelly, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

The warmth from the fire was sublime. On their second night in the cabin, with a rug on the floor and a bottle of wine between them, they sat in front of the fire and enjoyed its gentle warmth and the freedom they had to sit close to one another.

She cradled her wine glass in her hands. She didn’t drink alcohol often, and she was already swarmed by a heady sense of intoxication that had very little to do with Harry’s robust Cabernet Sauvignon. Will’s arm around her shoulder was filling her with the greatest sense of contentment she’d ever known.

“Do you think you will ever return to a warzone?”

The fire crackled in the grate. She felt Will’s heavy contemplation of the question. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “A month ago I would never have wanted to hang up my post as a war correspondent. It’s a dangerous job. But I relished that danger. I enjoyed being able to post stories from the heart of battles that most Americans could only imagine.”

“It is an honourable profession.”

He laughed. “You try telling my father that.”

She snuggled closer to his side. “People will always form their own opinions of you. Often such opinions have very little to do with the truth. If your father cannot see the valour in your work then perhaps he never would have. No matter what you did.”

Will tilted his head down and placed a kiss on her head. “He’s a tough son of a bitch.”

“Harry seems proud of you.”

Will curled his fingers around her shoulder. “Harry liked you,” he said with a grin. “And he’s a tough son of a bitch himself.”

“I can’t imagine what he must have gone through.” She sipped her wine to moisten her mouth. “What you both went through.”

Will was very still. Finally, he expelled a long, slow breath. “I was young. And arrogant as hell. I never thought anything like that would happen to me. I hadn’t seen then how fragile life is.”

“No amount of experience could ever prepare you for the death of your wife.”

“No,” he agreed. “Though I know now how instantaneously light can be extinguished from a person’s being. I have seen men take their last breath without any knowledge of it being so. I have held the hands of women, children, old men, as they’ve said prayers and waited for death to claim them. I have seen the callous way in which buildings are bombed from the skies and dozens of lives, sometimes hundreds, are gone, just like that. In a flash.”

She felt his heart thumping steadily and imagined she could sense the grief in it. “Was there… was there any hope for your child?”

His lips twisted. “No.”

The fire crackled some more and Lilah thought he had ended the conversation. But then he shifted a little, bringing his other hand to rest on her knee. He traced a finger over her leg. “They tried. They cut her open. They pulled our baby out. But she didn’t breathe.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.