The Bride He Stole For Christmas by Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER TWELVE
A YEARLATER, to the day, Timoney George walked down the stairs of the house in Belgravia she and Crete had picked out together to marry the man who waited for her there at the bottom, in a grand hall thick with brightly lit Christmas trees.
She had never felt more alive.
“My love,” Crete said, his dark eyes intent on her as she descended the sweeping steps toward him. “You are a vision.”
And her smile was so wide she was afraid it might actually break her wide open. But maybe she wouldn’t mind too much if it did.
This had been the best year of her life.
It had started in that cold, cavernous flat that he’d somehow filled with Christmas and it had only gotten better. Day by day.
Her uncle was still not speaking to her, but despite what her parents might have counseled had they been here, Timoney could not bring herself to consider his silence a loss. She had used Julian’s behavior with the diplomat’s wife as an excuse and Uncle Oliver had only sneered and told her to grow up.
Timoney felt that it had been a sign of how grown up she really was that she had not engaged with him any further.
Julian had been even more difficult. He had blustered and tried to bully her when she’d called him. Not because she’d wished to talk to him, but because she did not intend to hide from the choice she’d made. She had not called so he could soundly abuse her for the better part of a quarter.
Which he had done at top volume until Crete, who had been holding her in his lap while she sifted through the wreckage of the life she’d walked away from, jumped in. He suggested that Julian seek redress for whatever damages he felt he had faced through Oliver, as Oliver was the one who had set the wedding into motion in the first place.
And if you do not care for that solution, Crete had continued with a cool menace, cutting through Julian’s outrage that easily, I can assure you, this mongrel would be only too happy to let loose the full power of my legal team upon you.
Timoney had never heard from Julian again.
Happily.
When she and Crete had gone back to fetch her things after New Year’s, her uncle had quitted the house in protest. But her aunt had met her at the door. Hermione had insisted that Timoney and Crete stay for tea with her daughters, and had even, in an act of defiance the likes of which Timoney had never seen before, eaten a petit four.
Her daughters had been wide-eyed. Timoney had been filled with hope—for all of them.
Things had only gotten better from there.
She and Crete had looked for a place to live that felt like a home, and had settled on a house not far from the listed house she’d lived in before she’d met him, that he had once mocked.
And because they built what they had now around joy, anything was possible.
Anything was possible and nothing could take it away.
Every day that passed, the deeper it got. The better it got.
Crete learned how to delegate, turning over the parts of his businesses that no longer thrilled him to his fleets of underlings, all of them desperate to prove themselves. Timoney learned that when a person had been given everything on a platter, as Crete had once accused her, the best thing to do to live a meaningful life was turn around and start offering platters to those who might need them. She set up the George Foundation in her parents’ honor, and by that fall, was ready to throw her first ball.
Where she and Crete had danced together, in public, for the first time.
She could still recall every moment of that waltz. His ring on her finger and his hand in the small of her back. His dark blue gaze fierce and proud.
And that crook in his lips that was only and ever hers.
That smile that would have told her how much he loved her—even if he hadn’t spent a good part of each day making sure she knew exactly how much.
A favor she took great pleasure in returning.
“Are you ready, kardia mou?” asked the man who waited for her today, resplendent in a dark suit and unrecognizable from the Crete she had known before.
Because this Crete smiled. This Crete was transfigured by love. By joy.
By all the hope and light they could handle.
“More than ready,” she told him, taking his hand.
And he led her into the room where their officiant waited.
A room filled with the life they’d built together. Art that made her heart hurt when she looked at it. Comfortable places to sit, to lie, to explore each other in every possible way. Rugs on their floors and happy plants.
The house they lived in together was filled with books. With laughter.
With enough love to light up the whole of London.
And often did, by Timoney’s reckoning.
Today they stood in the middle of a beautiful Christmas and gave themselves to each other in a new way.
And after they said their vows—after Crete kissed her and murmured marvelously possessive words against her lips that she took pleasure in returning—he swung her up into his arms and looked down at her, beaming.
Not an alien at all, this glorious man of hers. But her husband now.
And more than that, too.
But she would save her little secret for later. After they moved from this private moment that they’d wanted to be only theirs into the banquet hall where their friends waited. Her friends, that was, and Crete’s half siblings, because this had been a year of new beginnings in every possible way.
Because joy made even the unimaginable possible, day in and day out.
They would feast and they would laugh. They would dance as husband and wife. They would toast their new life and ring out those Christmas bells.
And then later Timoney would share with him that there was yet another new life they could celebrate in six months’ time.
“Hope and light,” Crete said to her, like another vow, as he carried her into the hall to the sound of cheers within.
“Hope and light,” she replied. “Forever.”
But every part of her was bright and awake and alive now, and ever would be. Because Timoney knew that for them, forever was just the beginning.