Which was fortunate, or he would have frittered them away too.
“My life was so simple before,” she said, bestirring herself to kiss his cheek. “I intend that it remain simple after we’re married.”
He loved that she cuddled and kissed him so easily, so generously.
“How will you do that? If nothing else, you’ll have the infrequent occasion of state, the household duties at St. Clair Manor, and quite possibly a baby to contend with.”
“None of which matters much, except for the baby.” She set the cat aside. From his expression, Peter did not appreciate being deprived of her lap, and Sebastian could only sympathize. “What matters, the only task to which I must attend without fail, is to love my husband.”
She snuggled against Sebastian’s chest, which was well done of her. His arms came around her, while grief, joy, a distant sense of Gallic irony, and a sharp twinge of anger collided inside him.
She’d sidled up to the sentiment quietly, avoiding notice but paying attention all the while, and then she’d ambushed him, only a small kiss of warning before she fired her broadside.
Sebastian cuddled her closer. “He’s a lucky fellow, this husband of yours. Damned lucky.” And he wasn’t a coward, either, though he hardly knew in what direction lay the kind, honorable thing to say. “He will make loving his wife his highest priority too.”
He kissed her cheek, stroked a hand over her hair, and wondered how much love two people could cram into a week, or a few weeks, before one of those people was left widowed, her love turning to sorrow, then hatred.
***
The clergyman recruited to perform the wedding apparently understood that excesses of sentiment were not called for, though he was both quick and credibly friendly. Milly spoke her vows sincerely, and when it came time for her to sign the documents, she dipped the quill in the ink pot, blotted the tip, paused…
And panicked.
The professor cleared his throat. Mr. Brodie, looking fierce and handsome in his kilt, took to studying the opposite wall of the library where the hound painting hung in its usual location.
Sebastian, however, appeared amused. “We can pursue an annulment if you’re having second thoughts, Baroness.”
Mr. Brodie glowered rather gratifyingly at his employer. “There’ll be no damned—”
“Mr. Brodie,” Milly interrupted. “His lordship is teasing.” And he was challenging, and in some male way, also being helpful. The signature would not be binding unless witnessed, so Milly dipped the pen again, wiped the tip on the blotter and…
The letter M was the same shape as a lady’s décolletage when her hands were at her side. And i was a simple dance maneuver…
Sebastian began humming a waltz, and Milly’s pen picked up momentum. She’d practiced this and practiced it, until her signature became a rote recitation for her hand, and one by one, thirty-three letters flowed onto the page.
“I used to wish my name were Ann,” she murmured as she set the pen back in its stand.
Sebastian sprinkled sand over the ink. “And now?”
“I wish our last name did not use the abbreviation.”
Our last name. His smile was so proud and naughty, Milly wanted to kiss it—to kiss him, because he understood that she wished for more hours closeted with him in libraries and private sitting rooms. He shuffled papers and presented additional documents to tend to, and on this, her wedding day, that was a sort of kissing too. Michael and the professor appended witness signatures where needed, and Aunt—Milly was to call her Aunt now—herded everybody to the formal dining room for a wedding breakfast.
“You’re not eating much, Baroness.” Sebastian held up a bite of cake on a fork right before Milly’s mouth.
“The sooner this meal is over, the sooner we depart for St. Clair Manor.” She took the bite, savoring the sweetness and…lavender in the icing, exactly as she’d requested.
“You will need your strength, Millicent. The day is not over.”
He sounded stern, as if he worried about her fainting dead away over a fifteen-minute formality in the library. Milly held a bite of cake up to his mouth.
“I’m not the only one who will need to keep up my strength, Sebastian St. Clair. Did you or did you not promise to make your regard for me a priority in all things?”
“You and your memory.” He took the cake from her fork and dispatched the remainder of his serving without lecturing Milly further.
The trip to St. Clair Manor, a rambling pile in the wilds of Surrey, was accomplished by midafternoon. And Milly’s husband—a lovely word beginning with an h, much like Harriette—carried her over the threshold to the cheers of a platoon of servants. Milly endured the introductions to some thirty souls, from the butler to the boot boy, each of whom seemed genuinely happy to see the master married.
As Milly was genuinely happy.
“Shall we retire above stairs, Baroness?”
Sebastian’s question was a study in domestic consideration.
“We shall not. It’s a beautiful day. We’ve been shut up in that coach for nearly two hours, and I want to move.”
In his morning attire, Sebastian looked quite handsome, also severe—except for the boutonniere of lavender on his lapel.
He winged his arm. “A tour of the gardens then?”
A tour of the gardens—with servants watching from every window, as Milly tottered around in her wedding finery like some…some baroness?
“I will change my clothes, Sebastian, and then you will take me on a picnic. I want to see your favorite place to dream when you were a boy.”
Her request—well, it hadn’t quite been a request—did not appear to please him. “The most likely spot is a good mile from the house, if you’re willing to hop a few stiles.”
Sebastian was not usually so dense, but perhaps he was suffering the nerves of a new husband.
“Bring a blanket, Sebastian, and some of that food Aunt packed for us, and give me twenty minutes to change my clothes. I suggest you do likewise, because hopping stiles can be hard on wedding finery.”
Milly could have managed a blink in the time it took the commander of Castle St. Clair to realign his understanding of her intentions.
“I will meet you on the back terrace in twenty minutes, madam.”
Milly made in it fifteen, and the fellow she found pacing before the irises was every bit as handsome as his earlier incarnation, but more relaxed, more at home.
“Lead on, Sebastian, and tell me about your parents.”
He took her hand, and she hadn’t even had to ask. “You’re to interrogate me?”
“I’m to be your wife and the mother of your children.” How satisfying, to say that in the King’s English. Milly wished she could write it as easily, but someday—married to Sebastian—she might.
“When I think of my mother, I think of her in those last months in France. She was not happy, she was not well.”
Milly closed her grip on his fingers and tugged him back, slowed him down as he marched them off past a bed of roses not yet blooming. “Tell me of a happier time with her, then. A time when you realized your mama was pretty.”
He paused before one lone, precocious rosebud. “She was always pretty.”
“Don’t snatch it away. Leave it to bloom and show the way for the others. When was your mother happy?”
His stride lost its parade-march quality, and he became a man wandering through a garden on a late-spring afternoon.
“She was overjoyed to go back to France, radiant to at last see her parents, her cousins, her old nurse. I was only a boy, but I recall her standing against the rail on the packet we took to Calais, her gaze fixed on the shoreline of France as if she beheld the approach of heaven. My father stood beside me, beholding her with the same expression she wore watching the shoreline of her homeland.”
“They loved each other.”
Milly was careful to survey the garden as she drew this conclusion. Talk of love made Sebastian go quiet. One had to deal with the topic casually, with every appearance of unconcern. She attributed this to a dearth of such expressions of regard in his life, rather than to a lack of receptivity on his part.
“They loved each other passionately. A boy can’t know that, but looking back, I can only imagine what my father suffered, to part from her when she fell ill. Her last thoughts, her last words were of her love for him. I never got to tell him that.”
Milly waited while Sebastian unlatched a gate in the garden wall, the pause giving her a moment to check an anger directed at two people who’d been more absorbed with each other than with their only child.
“I will make you a promise, Sebastian,” she said as she took him firmly by the hand. “If I lie dying at some point, while our young son endures that trial in a strange land without the comfort of your presence, I will use my last breaths to assure him that he’s a wonderful boy. I will tell him how proud I am of him, and how much I have loved being his mama.”
She would write those sentiments down, too, somehow. A boy needed them, and a mother ought to know that.
Sebastian’s arm fell across her shoulders. “My baroness is fierce.”
“Your wife is fierce.” So was his friend, though Milly would not force that sentiment on him. “Did you always grow hops in this field?”
For a man who’d been away from England for more than a decade, he was well-informed regarding his acres. This field was suited to pasture, being good soil, but too rocky to plow easily. That one had always been the tenant’s common potato field, being thin-soiled even after repeated marling.
He vaulted the stiles one-handed, a display of casual athleticism common to any boy raised in the country, then turned and offered Milly his hand with gallantry country boys never learned.
With each field, each stile and stream, Milly became more and more convinced that all the trials and losses visited upon her earlier in life had been wiped away by the great gift of the person of her husband.
Though the loss of him… She snipped that thought off, because today was her wedding day, and anything or anybody seeking to take Sebastian from her would have to overcome her defense of him first.
Sebastian led her down a grassy lane running between parallel avenues of oaks, until they reached an old overshot grist mill, with lavender, lilacs, and honeysuckle growing in a riot around its whitewashed walls.
Along the stream, blankets and a basket sat in the shade of the oaks.
“This is where you came to dream.”
“I called it planning my life. I intended to be the best Baron St. Clair ever seen. I would write famous speeches, I would advise the king himself, and impress the entire world with my swordsmanship.”
He spoke with affection for that boy. Reluctant affection, but affection.
“I would have been happy to write my lessons,” Milly said, leading him toward the blankets. “Now I am happy to share some victuals with my husband.”
She was happy to share the day with him, to share his land with him, to share his memories with him. As Milly let the peace of the surrounding glade seep into her soul, she would be happy to share herself with him as well.
***
The occasional duel was apparently not enough to keep a man’s instincts sharpened when it came to ambushes. Such were the deadening results of a few years on the fringe of London Society.
“We’re to picnic here?” Sebastian asked. “Wouldn’t you rather take your meal where the sun can reach us?”
Because the footmen had laid out the blankets—a thickness of three old quilts—in the dappled shade near the stream. The meal—assuming his wife allowed him to eat between her questions—would thus take place right beneath one of the best climbing oaks a boy had ever discovered.
Milly snapped off a sprig of honeysuckle, sniffed it, then passed it to Sebastian. “For this meal, my first private meal with my husband, seclusion suits me better. Does the mill still function?”
Sebastian breathed in the scent that symbolized the bonds of love. Honeysuckle was like his wife: a quietly lovely exterior hid a more beguiling and intangible beauty than one suspected.
“The mill ought to work. Local lore is that it dates back to Good King Hal’s day. We had a succession of dry years, though, and my father and a few of the other landowners thought it prudent to build a mill powered by livestock rather than water. The mill closer to the village is larger, but this one could serve when that one’s at capacity.”
Milly went after a cluster of lilacs next, the buds not entirely open.
“Will you make love with me here, Husband? Somewhere you were happy, somewhere a happy memory would be within our reach as the years go by?”
Deliver me from village girls when spring is at its height. He took the lilacs from her and led her to the blankets.
“Baroness, you are very bold on your wedding day.”
“I am very happy on my wedding day. Did you know lilacs stand for first emotions of love?”
Yes, he had known that. He paused to strip a few inches of lavender leaves from a bush and held them out to her. “Lavender is for distrust.”
“Lavender”—she upended his hand, so the leaves fluttered to earth—“is for making soaps, sachets, and money. What do you suppose is packed in that hamper?”
He did not care what was in the hamper. He cared very much that Milly should not trust this happiness she mentioned so casually. Sooner or later—perhaps within the week—she would have to deal with being the Traitor Baron’s wife, or—more likely—his widow.
Milly knelt on the blankets, reminding him of another picnic they’d shared. “You are brooding, Sebastian. Do you regret marrying me?” She passed him a bottle of wine along with her question.
A snippet of schoolboy Latin assailed him: in vino veritas. “I will never regret marrying you, though you…”
She sat back, a knife in one hand, a small loaf of bread in the other.
“Yes, yes, I know. I will regret marrying you. You are a bad, wicked man, treason personified, the shame of three peerages and probably many a colonial society as well. Open the wine, and we’ll toast the depths of your disgrace.”
The bottle in his hand was one of a few shipped back from France years ago, before Napoleon had barged his way onto Britain’s list of crosses to bear.
“Milly, I’m sorry.” So inadequate; so sincere.
She fished another crock out of the hamper and lifted the lid.
“Strawberries. Just for today, Sebastian, might we please not dwell under the cloud of your sorrows and misgivings? Might we pretend you’re any other handsome fellow about to make love with his wife for the first time? You do intend to consummate the vows, don’t you?”
The strawberries went back into the hamper, the lid of the crock clattering against the container. She passed him the knife, though what he was supposed to do with it was a mystery.
Sebastian had upset his wife. She hid it well, probably between a wedge of cheddar and some sliced ham yet to make an appearance on the blanket, but Sebastian was ruining her wedding day.
Their wedding day.
Between one lovely, scented spring breeze and the next, Sebastian’s emotions shifted from a need to protect his wife against the sentimentality of the day, to a need to cherish her for her tender emotions. Regardless of the outcome of the next duel, and the next—of all of the duels—Sebastian would never have another wedding day. Of that, he was certain.
He set the wine aside unopened, tossed the knife into the hamper, and crawled across the blanket.
“Kiss me, Milly St. Clair.”
He should have asked for her kisses. Of all the questions he knew how to find answers to, that question—“Will you
kiss me?”—he could not ask. The best he could do was to nuzzle her jaw, the way her cat might have importuned her for attention—both playfulness and determination in his flirting.
“We’re to eat first,” she said, angling her chin away. “My husband has turned up moody, and I would not impose on him.”
“You should make me beg,” he said, running his tongue over the rim of her ear. “Your husband is an idiot who hasn’t sense enough to be grateful for the blessings that fall into his very lap. I am given to unhappy moods, and I do apologize. I would not burden our wedding day with them further. I shall make love with you, Wife. I will probably do little else for the next week, at least. You may consider that another one of my famous priorities.”
The allusion had the desired effect of tipping up the corners of her mouth. “Some of your priorities are laudable, Sebastian. Will you open the wine?”
She was being coy, for which he adored her. The breeze stirred a lock of her hair across her mouth just as he leaned in to kiss her, so he ended up kissing silky strands as well as her lips.
“Hang the wine.”
He muttered the words against her mouth. She drew back enough to extricate her hair from between their lips. “You might need the fortification.”
Yes, he might. Later.
“Kiss me, Baroness. Today is your wedding day, and you’re fretting over the menu.”
He made a menu of her, kissing her to her back, where she clearly had wanted to be, then feasting on her shoulders, her collarbone, her jaw, the few inches of skin revealed above her neckline. Everywhere, she was warm and fragrant and his.
And yet, a man—a husband—ought not to presume. He crouched over her on all fours, as winded as if they’d been wrestling, not kissing.
“Shall we consummate our vows here, Milly? Is this the memory you want of your wedding day?” Because whatever memory she sought, he’d try his utmost to give it to her.
She cupped his jaw then stroked a hand down over his chest. “Yes. Here. Now. Right now.”
Sebastian felt those words, felt the shape of them as Milly’s mouth moved, and something inside him broke free. His life was a shambles, but this moment, these sentiments of tenderness and desire between him and his wife, they were real, pure, and good.
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