Completely

by Ruthie Knox

  After that, she and Kal talked about the future. It wasn’t scary.

  Tomorrow they would retrieve Yangchen. Rosemary would phone Indira, withdrawing from the team with apologies. After that, they agreed to be in New York for at least a few months. She would write. At some point, he’d have to travel to Kathmandu, and she’d be unlikely to join him. She wanted to keep close to Beatrice for this next bit to make sure she was getting on all right.

  He agreed he’d like to see her place in Harpenden, and they tentatively planned a long visit for a month or two in the future.

  They talked about using mobile phone apps to stay in touch over distance, video chat to see each other’s faces, and for dirtier purposes.

  “You know,” Kal said, “what we’re talking about here…it’s not some conventional life.”

  “Do you mean we may never have a master suite and a picket fence? We may not be a couple in a way that makes sense to the rest of the world?”

  Kal nodded.

  “I’m not afraid of that. I believe we can be together in a way that makes sense to us, that makes our lives better and richer. That’s what’s important.”

  “I think so, too.” He smiled. “I’m pretty excited about it, to be honest.”

  She splashed water on him. “I should hope so.”

  He reached for her again, pulling her onto his lap, and she luxuriated in her excitement and happiness. None of this scared her. It would be complex, maybe even difficult, but Rosemary had done any number of difficult things.

  It was always good to have a mountain in front of her.

  They stayed in the hot tub for a long time. The more she had to drink, the more relaxed she became, and the lower she slipped into the foam. She reached out her foot and slid it up Kal’s thigh.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “Bad whoa?”

  “Not necessarily a bad whoa.”

  She put her drink down and bobbed over to straddle his lap. “I’m very warm,” she said, “and very amenable.”

  “What are you amenable to?” His hands found her arse and pulled her close enough to verify that he was at least halfway to amenable.

  “What do you say in America? To riding your pole?”

  Kal laughed. “Nobody ever says that anywhere.”

  “I just said it, though. Disproving your point.” She wiggled up and down in demonstration. Kal closed his eyes and blew out a long breath.

  That only made Rosemary want to wiggle more.

  “Jesus, woman.”

  “You should say, ‘Jesus, Lady Rosemary.’ ”

  “Lady Rosemary of the Pole.”

  “Stop talking now.” She kissed him. His hands came up out of the water to find the back of her head, her hair stuck in dripping ropes to her chest, his mouth hot and hungry, tasting of licorice and hard spirits.

  The water made it difficult to keep her position, but that only made it more interesting, everything slippery and wet, Kal’s hands roaming, his fingers seeking between her legs, surprising her with need.

  “We should get out of the water,” he said.

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to tempt fate. If we have sex without a condom, I’m pretty sure the gods are going to decide we’re morons and give us a baby.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  He licked behind her earlobe, making her shiver. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how sex works, Rosemary.”

  “I haven’t a clue, actually. Why don’t you show me?”

  Kal tried to stand with her all wrapped around him, but the water sloshed everywhere and he slipped, which made them both laugh. The air outside the hot tub was cool, gravity impossibly heavy. She dripped a mess all the way to the bed, where she spread-eagled. Kal crawled over her.

  He kissed her, holding her wrists to either side of her head, making such a thorough job of it that she grew impatient with him and tore her mouth away to bite his shoulder. He just smiled that Kal smile, then kissed his way down her body without missing a single important part on the way.

  He held her knees open and licked her. Rosemary decided that mildly intoxicated head was her favorite kind.

  Or perhaps it was that she loved him.

  Either way. She lost her train of thought as he got busy with his tongue, his fingers, perhaps those were his teeth, it didn’t signify, only that it felt amazing and she clutched the sheets in both hands, raked her nails over his shoulders, held on and held on and held on until he got her too close and she started to hit him.

  “What’d I do wrong?”

  “Come up here.”

  “I was almost done.”

  “I know that, come up here.”

  He did, his smile a wicked wink. She had to wait for him to locate his trousers and the condom, only to wait longer for him to put it on, but at last she had him where she wanted, his mouth where she could kiss it, his biceps where she could dig into them when she opened her legs and he started to move inside her body.

  Kal groaned.

  Rosemary flushed red from toes to the tops of her ears. “Oh, God.”

  He pressed his forehead to hers and made love to her in smooth, slow strokes, the best kind of torture, the best man she knew, the love she got to keep close for as long as they could make it last.

  She didn’t need him, but she wanted him. She loved him.

  When she came, she came everywhere, with everything in her, and she held him tight, grateful that it was Kal who had brought her down from the top of the world, Kal who had traveled with her across time zones and miles, Kal in her bed, in her body, in her heart.

  He was hers, and she was his.

  It was perfect.

  Epilogue

  The wind gusted, positively frigid.

  Rosemary climbed a bit higher, careful to find good placements for her feet against the icy granite. The sky was clear and blue, but the weather could be temperamental here in May, and though the sun was out, the temperature had risen only a few degrees since it broke over the horizon.

  She clasped her hands in front of her face and blew into her cupped palms.

  It had been one hundred and twenty-six days since she’d seen Kal.

  She’d counted.

  She tightened her hold on her wrap, mooring her hat in place against another blast of wind. She couldn’t be sure the pins would hold, and she didn’t want to chase her hat across the churchyard in these shoes. The church steps were treacherous enough, rimed with ice where the sun hadn’t warmed it enough to melt yet.

  A black car pulled up to the curb, and Beatrice climbed out, waving madly. Rosemary waved back. “You made it!”

  “I was only on the other side of the Channel.”

  “Yes, but you never know when they’ll go on strike and cut you off.”

  “I’d have swum to keep from missing this.”

  Beatrice had cut her hair shorter since Rosemary last saw her in New York. The rainbow of colors was gone, replaced with a uniform soft pink that made her skin glow.

  “How was the screening?” Rosemary asked. Beatrice’s film about Nancy Fredericks had been selected for one of the Parisian festivals, the fifth in the past six weeks and, Beatrice assured her, a sign of even better things to come.

  “It was great. Some of the bigger distributors were there. I talked to one of them for twenty minutes. I think they might make an offer.” Beatrice looked around. “Is everyone else here?”

  “Your father and Allie are inside. I think there are seats saved for you—your grandmother will know.”

  “Aren’t you coming in? You’re a bit blue.”

  Rosemary linked her arm in her daughter’s. “Of course. I was only waiting for you.”

  The chapel had been decked out in royal blue and white, with sprays of white and pink roses on the pews, gothic windows streaming light, masses of gray stone built into impossible arches that drew the eye up and filled the heart with light. A chamber group played softly in an alcove near the alt
ar, the music as lovely and joyful as the occasion.

  Rosemary wished she could feel more—take in the beauty of the morning with her whole heart—but she found herself counting windows and pews, surveying the crowd, looking for the one man who wasn’t here.

  “Mum!” Beatrice was ahead, at the end of one of the front pews. “Nan says we’re up here.”

  She took her seat next to her daughter. Beatrice leaned into her side. “It’s very chic, you know, attending a wedding as a single. You shouldn’t feel like a goose about it.”

  “I never said I felt like a goose.”

  “Possibly you look a tiny bit like you feel like a goose.”

  “I’ll try harder to control my expression.”

  Across the aisle to her left were Winston and Allie. Allie wore a frothy concoction composed of layer upon layer of blue feathers, indecently low-cut. She’d told Rosemary earlier that it was vintage. Evita had said after Allie walked away that it was worth seven thousand pounds if it was worth a farthing, and she speculated Winston had bought it. Evita couldn’t be convinced of Allie’s healthy financial status. To hear her tell it, American money had a habit of evaporating in a wink.

  Rosemary caught Winston’s eye and gave him a nod. He smiled. He appeared entirely satisfied with himself, and with his date, whose feathers brushed against him whenever she moved.

  There was a commotion near the front of the church, and Rosemary turned to see Allie’s sister, May, proceeding down the aisle. Ben trailed behind her, his expression stormy.

  Rosemary had turned too late to confirm whether it was May who had created the turmoil, or—far more likely—Ben’s short-tempered reaction to whatever he perceived to be a threat to her safety.

  May looked painfully beautiful in the way that tall, striking women always were when pregnant.

  Ben offered her no fewer than three different snacks in the short period Rosemary spent observing them. May brushed them away, her eyes busy soaking up the windows, no doubt planning how she’d sketch the scene for one of her books. Winston had told Rosemary she’d landed a three-book deal. One of them would be set in the UK, so May was dead determined to do research between Ben-mandated periods of rest.

  The chamber group had fallen silent. An officiant stepped into place at the front of the chapel, and the assembly hushed, expectant.

  A man sped down the aisle, half hunched over, and caromed into the pew beside Rosemary. His elbow connected to her side, but her gasp was surprise, not pain. “You said you wouldn’t make it!”

  Kal smiled. His hair was half flat, half standing on end, as though he’d slept with it mashed against a pillow of rocks. His skin was wind-burned, the bridge of his nose peeling, and he wore stained khaki travel trousers and the zip-up fleece she’d never managed to convince him to throw in a bin. He looked bloody marvelous.

  “I didn’t think I would.”

  “You smell like a bus.”

  “I smell like three buses.” He leaned close and kissed her, and oh, there was her lift. There was her heart. “Also, maybe a little bit like the cigarette”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“that the driver who took me to Dover at four this morning was smoking. Nice hat, by the way.”

  The opening strains of the wedding march rang through the chapel. Rosemary touched her head. “Evita insisted I wear it.”

  “It gives you that Lady Rosemary of the Pole look.”

  She smacked his arm. Primarily as an excuse to touch him. “Lower your voice.”

  Kal leaned in close and licked her neck. Her hand found his thigh, and his fingers wrapped around her forearm. She let out an eep that caught the attention of several people in the nearby pews, and she had to sit still and pretend to be good while Kal peeled back the sleeve of her dress and said, “Damn, woman. What’s this?”

  “Beatrice and I got matching tattoos.”

  “How far up does it go?”

  “All the way to the elbow.” There were stylized flowers and thorns, and at the crease of her arm, parallel to the largest veins, she’d had them do Kal’s name.

  They’d spent so many nights apart. They’d had to—Kal needed to be in the Khumbu for part of the Everest season, and Rosemary had to be available in New York for the final stages of editing and proofing her book, not to mention working with the publicist she and Yangchen had hired to finalize the details of the launch.

  Still. Rosemary hadn’t anticipated missing him quite so much. Beatrice had manipulated this loneliness into an enormous tattoo.

  Thank goodness Rosemary liked it.

  “When’d you do it?” Kal asked.

  “Two weeks ago, and Beatrice said it wasn’t meant to hurt for very long afterward, but she lied.”

  “That’s because you got red,” Beatrice said. “Your skin doesn’t like red. Hi, Kal.”

  Kal waved. “Hi, Bea.”

  The doors opened at the entry to the church. Everyone turned to see Winston’s brother, Neville, handsome as sin in his tails, walking down the aisle with his mother.

  The tears sprung to Rosemary’s eyes automatically. She had known Nev since she and Winston dated at university, when Neville was a spotty, fair-haired teenager who adored his older brother and resented her existence.

  She’d watched him grow up. He’d watched her disappear in her marriage.

  Rosemary was there on the weekend Nev brought Cath home to meet his parents. She’d seen how he looked at the woman, and she’d seen how Cath lifted her chin and held her own at the dinner table. It was Winston’s treatment of Cath, even more than his betrayal of Nev, that had convinced Rosemary to leave him.

  Neville showed his mother to her pew. Winston rose from his seat and joined his brother as best man.

  The music changed, and the crowd turned as one, rising to watch Mary Catherine walk down the aisle on the arm of the man who would be her father-in-law. Her hair was dark, cut close to her head, glossy and sharp. She wore a crimson dress, tight to the hips, with a skirt that pooled on the floor and trailed fully ten feet behind her.

  She looked absolutely stunning, her eyes locked with Neville’s at the end of the aisle.

  They began the exchange of vows.

  It wasn’t the traditional service, but the words they spoke conveyed the truths they’d learned about love and partnership in the time they’d already spent together.

  Mary Catherine Talarico, do you promise to love this man to the end of your life?

  I do.

  Do you promise to honor his purpose, cherish his heart, and encourage him through all the challenges of the years ahead?

  I do.

  Rosemary squeezed Kal’s hand, and he squeezed back.

  She hadn’t known they would have this moment together. Nor had she expected she would want it—some version of it—in their future. They’d spoken of weddings only in the abstract, the far-off hypothetical possibility, barely worth thinking about.

  Kal ducked his head close to her ear and whispered, “Let’s get married.”

  Rosemary could only nod.

  —

  The reception took place in the ballroom of the Chamberlains’ country estate. Rosemary had never seen quite so many people packing these rooms at once.

  She’d never seen quite so much of Richard’s precious art collection on display in the halls, or quite so much champagne being passed freely about.

  She’d never seen Evita so effervescent, or Richard so garrulous, or Neville and Cath so purely, perfectly happy.

  All she could think of was escape.

  “I’ve just realized something terrible,” she told Kal, whom she’d pulled into a recess in the wall in the hope of keeping anyone else from speaking to him.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m meant to be sharing a room.”

  “With who?”

  “I don’t know, actually. One of Winston’s cousins, I think. There weren’t enough rooms for everyone to sleep singly.”

  Kal looked around at the vast ballroom, t
he high ceilings. “How is that possible?”

  “There are a lot of people staying the night.”

  “Couldn’t we hide out in an attic or a servant’s garret or something?”

  “Trust me, there will be no hiding in this house. We’ll have to find somewhere else to go.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I’m well aware of that. I lived five minutes up the road for the better part of my adulthood.”

  “Where else is there?”

  “We’d have to go to London, I’m afraid. The inns will all be booked with wedding guests.”

  “I’ve got a tent.” Kal grinned.

  “I’m not sleeping in a tent on the lawn in May. We’re going to find a proper bed with a proper mattress.”

  “In a proper hotel with proper soundproofing.” Kal spun her around and pressed her into the wall. “I’m all for it.” He kissed her throat. “Don’t look now, but the Frederickses have arrived.”

  Nancy and Bill Fredericks were bearing down on them, and Rosemary had never been so unhappy to see two people she liked so much. It was only that they’d come to England on holiday a week earlier, and they had another two weeks planned for a whirlwind tour of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland before they skipped over to Greece to check on Bill’s relief work. And she’d heard every detail of their plans the night before, over dinner.

  She held Kal’s hand as she heard it all a second time, and died ten thousand deaths. She counted them, one death at a time.

  “They’re really nice,” Kal said when Bill and Nancy finally left, lured away by Beatrice. “I could’ve lived without the blow-by-blow, though.”

  “There is only one thing I want right now, and it’s not remotely suitable for company. Come with me. We’re going to map an escape.”

  She led him out of the ballroom, down a back hall, descended with him to the basement, through the kitchen, and out a little-known exit that would lead them to the front drive.

  Cath was perched on a low stone wall, smoking.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Rosemary said.