Page 151 of The Darkest Heart
“Is it really finished?” she cried, clinging to him.
“Yes, I swear, it’s finished. It took me a while to realize, Candice, what’s really important, but you and our children are the most important things in my life. Will you come? Let me take you away, make you happy?” He heard the anxious, pleading note in his voice, but didn’t care. He cupped her face and held it. “I will make you happy, that I promise.”
“If I said no,” she said with a smile, through her tears, “would you listen?”
“No.”
“I would come,” she said, “even if you wanted to go back to Cochise. I can’t live without you, Jack.”
He crushed her to him. “I love you,shijii. And this time we’ll make sure the preacher is real, I promise.”
“I love you,bilnadeshi shijii,”she murmured. “Husband of my heart.”
He began kissing her. “I love you,” he whispered. His mouth moved over her hair, her ears, her face. “I love you, Candice, desperately.” His lips played softly on hers, his hands stroked down her back. “How could you have ever thought I’d let you go,shijii?Never.” He caught her mouth with his. “If I had to follow you across the seven seas to China, I would. There is no desert wide enough, no mountain high enough, no forest thick enough, to keep me away from you.
There’s nowhere you could go that could be far enough away to stop me from finding you—don’t you know that by now,shijii?”
Her response was to hold his face, twining his hair in her fingers as he kissed her again and again.
