Perhaps that harpy Rosamund Wakely was right; he’d left it too late, been too cautious, too shy of commitment. A stray for too long.
Like chancing your luck, don’t you, Christina?
Yes. What’s life worth if we don’t take chances? Isn’t that what we’re here for? It would be amazingly dull otherwise.
In the end, for all her talk, she wasn’t ready to take a chance after all. Not with him. Not with her heart.
He closed his eyes, the heaviness, now a familiar sensation, crushing his ribs. He’d known her for three days, and yet it felt like a lifetime.
Leaning back, he let his gaze wander up at the glistening cobalt firmament of a cloudless summer day. And sighed.
“Hello. Who’s this coming?”
Out of habit, his head snapped up to look. Through the arching, shivering swathes of ivory cloth he saw a woman approach. A blonde in a blue bonnet with ribbons tied under her chin. She carried a hatbox in one hand, a suitcase in the other. Her step was cautious as she crossed the velvet lawn, as if she worried about stepping on any daisies or buttercups.
Harry slammed the front legs of his chair to the ground and stared. Did his eyes deceive him again? Would he start seeing her everywhere now, too, just as he sometimes imagined he saw his mother? This one was coming toward him, not running away.
The pressure in his chest worsened. He thought he might be having a heart attack or a stroke.
Then her eyes found his and she stopped, setting her luggage down. Waiting.
Harry got to his feet, ignoring the questioning looks of his brothers, and walked through the fluttering sails toward her.
“Christina.”
Her lower lip vanished under the upper as she chewed on it. The heaviness began to lift, and he knew he wouldn’t die today after all.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said softly.
“About what?”
“You must promise not to be angry or call me a silly child.”
“How can I promise not to do that until I know what you’re going to say?”
“Don’t be difficult, Harry.”
“Me?” He gasped, half laughing.
She smiled shyly. “I want to come with you. I changed my mind. Mrs. Draycott has very ably taken over the Whitechapel Improvement Committee, and I won’t be going back there again. She won’t let me.”
Eyes narrowed, he looked at her luggage in the grass and then her long, sensual hands clasped tightly together. “It took you long enough to get up the courage to find me, woman.”
Four entire months. What had she been up to all that time, he wondered, not certain he should let her get away with making him wait so long. Had there been other men since then? Well, he would just have to swallow his jealousy. He had wanted her to find her way, make her mistakes, and get it all out of her system, hadn’t he? Perhaps she had. Perhaps she chose him. He daren’t quite believe it.
Her lashes swept down to her cheeks. “I discovered some things about myself and what I didn’t want in life. What was worth caring about and what wasn’t. I missed you intolerably. And,” she raised her gaze to his lips and slowly higher. “I paid a thousand pounds for your company. Did you really think three nights with you was fair exchange?”
He opened his mouth to give a smug answer, but before he could, she unclasped her fingers and raised one to his lips. “You’re good, Harry,” she said with a wink, “but even you’re not that good.”
Capturing her finger between his teeth, he held it there lightly. Her eyes grew foggy, her lashes danced.
“Behave yourself, Harry,” she whispered. “Respectable people are watching.”
He released her finger. “Mind who you’re calling respectable. That’s my family over there, and we haven’t had a respectable Blackwood in seven generations, thank you very much.”
Christina sighed, untied the ribbons under her chin, and slipped off her bonnet to let the sun shimmer in her hair. “And I’m the illegitimate child of a whore. We make a perfect couple.” She shot him a quick, sly look. “I’m in love with you, but I suppose you know that, being so much older and wiser.”
He slid his arm around her waist. “In a year or two, when I’m in a bath-chair with a rug over my knees and a bad case of the gout, you’ll forget you ever said that.”
“I daresay I shall. We may as well make the most of it while the rapture lasts. And we’ll see what happens.”
He kissed her brow. “Did you say rapture or rupture?”
She laughed warmly. “My poor, dear old Harry.”
“How am I going to explain a fancy bit of stuff like you to the good, honest, hardworking folk of Redcliffe?” he muttered.
“You could say I’m your daughter, or your niece.”
“That might not be wise….considering.”
She put her chin up, becoming very prim. “I thought I might teach the children of your mill workers. Wasn’t that a good idea of mine? I’m shocked you never thought of it.”
“So am I.”
“Aren’t you glad I came, old man?”
“Glad is hardly a big enough word, my delectable little hellcat.”
“Good. Now introduce me to your family, Harry, before they all expire with curiosity.”
It was a beautiful day. Summer sang in his heart and made it young again. Harry Blackwood wouldn’t die alone after all. So take that Roz Wakely! He might still, however, become mad, old Uncle Harry. He was beginning to like the idea, and he certainly wasn’t feeling very sane at the moment, when he looked down at the beautiful woman by his side and decided to kiss her on the lips, in full view of his brother’s wedding guests.
* * * *
The three women stood in the ball room of The Grange and examined Randolph Blackwood’s self-portrait hanging in pride of place above the great fireplace.
“We should toast the old rogue.” Lina raised a crystal flute of champagne. “If not for him, we wouldn’t be here.”
Daisy studied the mischievous twinkle in Randolph’s eye. “Luke says he thinks their father deliberately chose us. That he painted us so that his sons would come to find us one day.”
“But he didn’t paint me,” Christina interjected.
So ended that theory. She didn’t like to think that Harry was meant for her mother.
Lina was thoughtful. “He told me once that I was one of three witches sent to chase him down and recapture him, send him back where he belonged. But he had a plan to keep us out of his hair. Do you suppose we are the three?”
“If we are,” Daisy replied, “then he used his sons to trap us.”
“Let’s toast him anyway,” said Christina. “It all worked out in the end, whatever his plan.”
The three glasses clicked, and they exclaimed together at the odd coincidences in life that they should meet again, here, thirteen years to the day since they first ran into each other on a sandy Norfolk beach.
Now they all turned to look out through the glass French doors to where Randolph’s sons stood on the moonlit terrace waiting for them to come out and dance. It was a warm, starry, magical night.
“I suppose we shouldn’t leave them untended too long,” said Daisy.
“Like their father,” Lina agreed, “they can’t be trusted to behave.”
Christina shook her head somberly. “I know I have my hands full.”
The other two looked at her and then all three laughed as she flushed.
If any of them noticed that the door handles clicked open of their own accord, they didn’t mention it.
Together the three rebels walked out through the doors, down the steps, into the waiting arms of their lovers and into the future.
Epilogue
Yarmouth, August 1875
It was a windy day, the sun bright. The gleaming sea pulsed over the sand, whispering secrets.
Seated on a painted bench on the promenade, Randolph Blackwood kept his eyes narrowed to protect against the sharp sting of the sun. He’d sat there a long while, his
thoughts troubled as he considered the passing stages of his life and his own mortality. Time passed so swiftly, he mused, he could almost feel it falling through his fingers like beads of sand. He wanted to be a young man again, to have his life to live over.
Like King Canute, he sat before the sea and fruitlessly commanded the tide to turn back.
Suddenly, a kite swept across the sand before him, and a child came running after it, a slender little girl with white blonde hair. A wisp of a thing in a white lace dress with a bow in her hair. Must have escaped her mother, or a nanny. He slowly turned his head and looked down the sand in the direction from which she’d run. Sure enough, a stout, older woman napped in a deckchair. Careening onward, the child was so fixated on chasing her kite that she didn’t see a pretty, young redhead sitting on the sand directly in her path. A collision was imminent. Meanwhile, from Randolph’s left, a woman with dark hair under a straw bonnet ran across the sand, her eyes on the same kite. She reached up with a graceful arm and captured the ribbon tail.
All three figures merged into a blur under his eyelashes and he blinked to set them free again. The brunette was laughing, breathless. A beauty in her early twenties, but wearing mourning black, she seemed almost afraid to laugh, but it came out in sputters as she gave the stray kite back to the child in the white lace. The redhead stood, brushed sand from her skirt, and pointed out a broken strut on the kite, trying to mend it for the younger girl.
The sun sizzled over the sea and gulls swooped. The three figures stayed close, in a small circle, chatting. The brunette tenderly stroked the little girl’s blond head, but the child was impatient to have her kite back and danced about, busily explaining to the redhead how it got away from her. It would not do so again, she vowed.
Suddenly, as if they all heard a sound at the same moment, the three figures turned and looked out to sea. Staring.
What was it they looked at so intently? The horizon? The future?
They were so still it might have been a daguerreotype, an image captured in time. The only movement came from the breeze that blew curls against cheeks and skirts against legs. And Randolph who, unlike them it seemed, was forced to squint hard through a white hot flare of sun, witnessed the tide turn. The skin on the back of his neck rose in a thousand tiny bumps. His fingers curled tight around the scrolled arm of the iron bench.
He smiled.
They did it. He was convinced. The three of them together had the power that eluded him.
Down the sand, her caretaker awoke abruptly from her nap, sat up, almost falling out of her chair, and looked about in alarm. Finally spotting the child down the beach, she called out, “Christina Deveraux, come here at once! I told you not to wander off. When will you pay heed to me? Always going off on your own way. Terrible child!”
Randolph watched the little girl defy her nurse to stay a moment longer and thank the two women; one for catching her kite, the other for mending it. The three figures dispersed and the child carried her errant kite back to where the older woman sat, but the image of that odd little gathering stayed in his mind.
Child, girl, and woman.
Trouble always came in threes. As did witches. Shakespeare knew that and so did Randolph Blackwood. He chuckled. There was one thing Randolph truly adored and loved to collect—women. Nothing else in the world could take the place of one good woman in a man’s life.
Except, perhaps, three good women. With the power to turn tides.
It was irresistible. It was mischief at its worst, the greatest game he ever played, and the most valuable gift he ever gave his ingrate sons. It was Randolph Blackwood at his finest.
The End
www.jaynefresina.com
Other books by Jayne Fresina:
Last Rake Standing
A Private Collection: Engraved
A Private Collection: Entangled
Evernight Publishing
www.evernightpublishing.com
Enraptured (A Private Collection) Page 13