I got so many wonderful reviews for the last chapter. Thank you so much! I got the impression that a lot you didn't think I went into enough detail with that last scene, so I wrote the first part of this chapter especially for those who voiced their opinion on that lol. I hope you enjoy!

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tom

With my arms tightly around her I kissed and savored the taste of her bare shoulder. My lips moved up, down and around her neck, shoulder and back, anywhere I could reach without shifting our positions. I could feel her sigh in contentment though the beat of her pulse as incoherent as a flutter. She was awake though barely. The sun wasn't even close to rising and we had taken one another twice and I was nearly ready for another. My kisses persisted and I let my hands wander over her front. She sank back into me, her head falling back in desire and I took advantage of the movement, letting my lips wander further up her neck.

"Why aren't you asleep?" she questioned in a murmur. Her eyes were closed.

I kissed. "Not tired." I said and then kissed again. "You have awakened a monster."

"I can see that."

I gave her a nudge and turned her over so that she was laying beneath me. "I need you again." I told her before dipping my head in, teasing the kisses out of her tired lips. It took a moment before her arms came around my neck in response. I knew she was tired, but my body didn't seem to care. I seeded kisses down her neck and lower, tendrils of desire unfurling from each one. "God," I breathed, "You're so soft. So warm and soft and sweet." The emotion was swelling in my heart as I said the words and caressed her naked skin with my kisses. This wasn't just lust, it was love, raw and powerful.

My hands hadn't left her body since we had gone the kitchen hours earlier. Even in those few moments in between where both of us had been too exhausted to move, they found someplace on her to rest. At first I was honestly afraid it wasn't real. I had slept next to her for nearly a week, but this was altogether different. I had been afraid she'd disappear if I let her go. So I didn't. She hadn't complained.

Below me her body was waking. My touches had roused her and brought on a second, or was it a third wind, and she began to respond with the vigor I had been seeking. I brought my head up for a moment to look down at her. Her hair was splayed across the pillow in dark ribbons, her eyes alert. Her expression was one of complete certainty and she wound her arms back around my neck and pulled me down for another kiss, teasing me with her tongue. All thoughts left my mind when she tilted her hips up to meet mine.

Hours later, I woke to a well-established day streaming in from outside the window. The place next to me on the bed was vacant and a quick glance around the room told me that I was alone in it. My clothes, absently discarded the night before had been neatly folded and set on the chest at the end of the bed. Everything else in the room was also neat as a pin. I smiled to myself as I rose and dressed, taking care to make the bed behind me. I was out of practice, but I straightened the sheets and pillows to the best of my ability before throwing the quilt over the top and smoothing out the wrinkles. Something told me I had a neat conscious lady on my hands and I would make it a point to please her. I made a stop by my own room to clean up before going downstairs, the scent of toasted bread leading me to the kitchen. When I opened the door, her back was to me, pulling the toast out of the toaster. I took the advantage and walked up behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist and gathered her against me, nuzzling my face into her neck.

"For once, I was the first to wake up." She teasingly said.

"Then I didn't do my job well, did I?"

Laughing she turned around to face me, giving my cheek a caress. "I don't see how you could have possibly done any better, but I'm willing to humor you if you'd like to give it another try."

I laughed in response and pulled her closer to me before going serious and kissing her tenderly. I let my eyes linger on her for a long moment after we parted. So long in fact that she asked if anything were wrong.

"Are you all right?"

"Marry me." I suddenly said.

"What?" she was clearly taken aback by the statement, but I went on.

"I want to marry you."

Un-expectantly she pulled from me. "Tom—"

"I had intended to ask you anyway." I quickly supplied, knowing exactly where her mind was going.

"Did you?"

"Yes, you know that."

She considered this. "Yes, I suppose I did and I wanted you to—"

"Past tense."

"No," she shook her head, "I still want you to, but are you sure you're not doing this because of what...of what we did last night…and this morning."

"I'm sure." I assured, but she didn't seem convinced.

"I didn't want trap you into asking me."

"I don't feel like you have."

"I am the one that initiated it. I know I am. Don't feel obligated to ask me just to make it right."

"Kate," I took her hand into mine. "That's not what I'm doing." Then I considered for a moment that it might have been part of what I was doing. She was a decent girl. I didn't just go around haphazardly spoiling decent girls. "Okay," I conceded, "maybe it gave me a nudge to ask you at this moment, but as I said, I was going to ask you anyway. You can ask Alec."

She looked away. "What happens when I say "Yes"? What happens after that? You have a child, a job. I have a job. We live in completely different areas. How would that work?" Gone was the confident Kate that had appeared yesterday. Now before me was a woman clearly tortured by a number of possibilities and their repercussions.

"Kate, it will work."

"How? How will Sybbie react?"

"She loves you. She thinks you've hung the moon. I have no doubt you'll be a wonderful mother to her."

"Mother?" her face seemed to lose all color then and I had to quickly rebound.

"Step-mother." I amended. "I'm not throwing you into the ocean without a life jacket, here. We will both learn as we go."

Absently she nodded. "And what about the Crawley's? Lord Grantham couldn't even stomach us alone together for hour, how will he react to a marriage?"

"I will deal with Robert, it will be fine."

She still seemed unconvinced.

"Kate, look. We've both done this before and we both did it in worse situations than this one. I know Sybil and I fought tooth and nail to be together. Her family and mine both thought we had lost our minds, but we managed anyway. There were much larger canyons to cross then and I know you and David had the same issues." She gulped and nodded, renewing my faith that I wasn't losing this argument. I put a hand on each of her shoulders and looked her in the eye. "I had been in such a fog before you came along. I have had my doubts along the way too, but this is right, I can promise you it is. We were meant to be together."

Her eyes, brown and warm were moist with unshed tears and slowly she nodded. "I want to say yes and I will, but…I need to sort this all out in my head first. I need to be completely free of any doubt that we will hurt someone or completely ruin things by getting married."

I know I stared at her in disbelief for much longer than what was necessary. She wasn't saying No, but she hadn't said Yes either. What the hell was I supposed to do with that?

She shifted uncomfortably under my gaze, clearly tortured by the arguments going on inside her head. I considered, really considered, her worries then. I didn't have answers to most of them myself. Worrying meant that she cared though. And waiting to answer meant she cared enough to consider it. Getting angry with her wasn't going to solve anything and I knew that. So I forced the anger that was beginning to steam inside of me and kissed her, brief and lovingly and then pulled her into an embrace. If the action surprised her she said nothing about it. Instead she sunk into me and sighed with a kind of relief.

Kate

…I had lost so much. My mother, my father, my husband…my best friend. So much for the three years past. What have I gained though? My independence? A new life…a new love…

I put down the pen and gently massaged the hand that had held it. I wasn't used to writing. I was so used to typing these days, picking up a pen seemed like an almost foreign language to me. It was just after noon and I had been in father's old study, at his familiar desk, writing for nearly three hours. A dozen or so papers were stacked next to the current one. Filled with babble, incoherent random thoughts, all of which had been running through my head since David's death. Not only had I held the secret away from others, but from myself as well. Now that it was over I wanted it out of my head.

And. Well, I needed the distraction.

Tom's proposal earlier that morning was still fresh in my mind. How could it not be? The man had asked me to make a life with him and I metaphorically thrown it back in his face. I couldn't even begin to understand my reasoning behind it either. The things I had said were only part of it. I loved him and I had wanted nothing more than to say yes, but marriage scared me. Perhaps not so much the union itself, but everything that went along with it. It wasn't Tom that I feared, it was everyone else.

"What are you doing?" my would-be-fiancé interrupted from the doorway. I had no idea where he had been hiding himself since we parted ways in the kitchen, but he seemed to have found me without any problem.

I quickly gathered the scattered papers around me and stacked and patted them into a neat pile. "Nothing." I replied.

He was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, his face full of light and humor. The very sight of him conjured up several images and thoughts from the night before.

"Let me touch you. Let me touch all of you." He had said as he had kissed the tips of my fingers.

I quickly brushed away the treacherous thoughts. Not now. I needed to keep my wits about me. No handsome smirk was going to unhinge me.

"Where have you been?" I asked, almost afraid of the answer. What if he had gone off thinking and now decided he wanted to take the question back. I didn't think I could withstand that…

"Around." He came into the room, admiring the book shelves still filled to capacity with my father's volumes. "I want you to come with me tonight."

"Where?" I flipped the papers over so that only the blankness of the back sheet showed as he neared me.

"To have dinner with my family." The confusion on my face was a plain enough response. He smiled and kept on. "I am leaving Monday, you know that." I did. He had mentioned it earlier. Only to break my heart further. I knew he needed to get back to Little Sybbie, but I still felt the selfishness of wanting to keep him here. "And they've been asking to meet you for some time."

"They have?"

He leaned against the desk. "You can't really blame them, can you?"

"I suppose not."

"So you'll go?"

I paused, chewing my lower lip in thought. "This doesn't have anything to do with what you asked me earlier, does it?"

He leaned in and kissed the top of my head. "Not everything has to have a motive, Kate."

Reluctantly I agreed to the visit. His mother knew Mrs. Roark so it wasn't exactly like I was meeting a bunch of strangers, but the hours leading up to our arrival at their home still weren't comfortable ones. He had made the entire idea seem innocent enough, but I still felt it was more than that and I dressed with great care. I went through a half a wardrobe of dresses before I decided on one that didn't look as plain as a nuns garb or one that screamed I had spent the hours between midnight and sunrise naked in bed with their son doing things that were reserved strictly for the marriage bed. I finally decided on a nice looking gray blue dress that had seen little wear in the past two years. I added my mother's pearls to it before going down the stairs to meet him.

The taxi he hired took us out of Sutton and almost to the opposite edge of Dublin before stopping in front of a small, but pleasant looking house. As Tom paid the driver I took a look around, eyeing the quiet street that was well away from the crowded city center.

"This is where you grew up?" I asked as we began to go up the walk together.

"No, they moved here I left home."

"What does your father do?"

"He's a postman."

I nodded. It was a good profession to have.

"Do they know I'm coming?" I then asked.

He shot me a sideways grin just as we were stepping onto the porch and he put his hand to the door. "No."

There wasn't any time to react to the news. I barely got a glare summoned before the front door opened and a short round woman was pulling Tom into her arms and kissing his cheeks. She exclaimed over his handsomeness, the fact that he didn't appear to be getting enough sleep…Lord…and that he needed a good meal or two before turning her sights on me.

At first the expression on her face was unreadable. She looked me up and down and directly in the eyes before speaking. "Kathleen?"

I nodded and managed a smile.

"Tommy always manages to snag the beauties." She smiled and then pulled me down to kiss my forehead. The move shocked me. The only woman to have ever done that to me was Mrs. Roark and since the woman had diapered me as a babe I had never thought to argue. When she released me, she moved swiftly back into the house.

"Malachy!" she hollered "Your son has brought a girl home!"

Tom led me inside the house and shut the door. I moved down the cramped hallway, following Mrs. Branson as she continued to yell for her husband.

Then from up the stairs came, "Shut yer cake hole, woman! I can't find my pants!" then a pause. "Which son will it be?"

"The one that always brings home the pretty girls!" she yelled back, before moving out of the hall and into what I assumed to be the kitchen.

"It's Tom, Da!" another voice came, this one moving down the stairs. A second later a pretty blonde haired girl appeared. She must have only been about twenty and had the look of Tom around her eyes and mouth. She smiled at her brother and hopped off the stairs to give him a hug before looking me over. I must have passed another inspection for she gave me a warm smile and introduced herself as Mary Elizabeth.

"Jack and Sean are in the back room." she said turning back to Tom. "They've been waiting for you. I'll take Kathleen into the kitchen." And without giving me a chance to say otherwise the younger girl grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the only familiar face in the whole Branson house.