Forever Your Rogue

by Erin Langston

Tell me, he asked her sleeping form. Tell me what I missed. He was desperate to know it all—wobbly first steps and halting first words; Cora, round-bellied and barefoot, slicing a plum in the darkened kitchens. He didn’t know Leo’s first bad dream; he didn’t know Tess’s first laugh.

But when you smile at me, your eyes hooded and heavy in the first light of day, it’s gold in my pockets, gold in my hands, gold in my unformed heart. Gold, gold, gold, Cora. I’ll gather your smiles, and they’ll make us rich.

“I love you without condition.” He drew her against him, brushing an achingly soft kiss against her mouth. “That means I love you even if you don’t say it in return.” In a hundred unwitting moments, Cora had tripped, she had stumbled, she had pitched halfway in love with Nate Travers. And on the most ordinary Thursday in July, she fell the rest of the way.

“A future with Cora isn’t the problem, I assure you. I’m in love with her, Raymond. I love her, I love her children—” Nate broke off, his voice oddly thick. “I feel thunderstruck, every moment of the day, by how it happened. I don’t understand. But they’re mine. They’re my family. They were always meant to be.” He swallowed hard. “I belong to them.”

“You maddening woman. Do you hear yourself? You are the love of my goddamned life, Cora. You are the reason for my goddamned life. I am insanely, irrevocably in love with you, I’m in love with your children, I’m in love with the family we created this summer. I’m going to be in love with all of you until the day I take my last breath, and then the dust of me will keep on loving you thereafter. You’ll never be free of me, Cora.”

He had four children—two he made and two who had made him—and Nate loved them all fiercely, equally, differently.