by Mary Balogh
“It was just a kiss,” she said shakily.
“No,” he said. “Allow me to know more about such matters than you, Lavinia. That was more than a kiss. And it was more than just physical. Are you prepared to see me leave here tomorrow never to return?”
She stared at him.
“I could not quite face it myself,” he said. “I have this terrifying notion that I should return to my estate, which I visited for almost the first time in my life a month ago, and make a home of it. I have this even more dizzying idea that I should take a wife there and start rusticating in earnest—and even, heaven help me, setting up my nursery. I’ll do it too, if you will come with me and do it all with me.”
“How ridiculous,” she said without any of her usual spirit.
“Yes.” He gave her no argument. He kissed her instead.
“Well,” he said at last. “Are we going to do it? Or are we going to stand here forever, wearing out our lips?”
“Oh,” she said, “I think we are going to do it, my lord. Just do not expect me to be a biddable wife, that is all.”
“A biddable wife?” he said in disgust. “What a ghastly notion. I will expect—no, I will insist upon—at least one argument a day. Starting at breakfast. Call me Eden.”
“Eden,” she said.
“What a biddable woman you are.” He grinned at her—and kissed her again before she could mouth her protest. “Now I think we ought to go slinking off to the lake to see if Nat and Sophie have finished their tête-à-tête. If they have, we had better hint to Nat that I will be making a formal appearance in his library tomorrow morning or sooner. I daresay he will be so amazed that we could knock him down with the proverbial feather if we felt so inclined.”
“Eden,” she said, tightening her arms about his waist when he would have drawn away, “say it.”
“It?” He grimaced.
“What you would not say earlier,” she said. “Say it. I want to hear it.”
“You certainly enjoy taking your pound of flesh, do you not?” he said, frowning.
Lavinia smiled her dazzling smile at him.
“Lord,” he said, “you had better not do too much of that until we are standing beside—or better yet lying in—our marriage bed. I have enough to cope with. Now let me see—it.” He cleared his throat. “Here we go, then. I love you. Was that it? I hope I have not been through that torture only to find it was something else you wanted to hear.”
“No, that was it,” she said. “It sounded lovely. You can say it every day after we are married so that it will come more easily to your tongue—at breakfast each morning, I believe. I love you too, you know.”
“Unfair,” he said. “You did not even find it difficult, did you?”
She set her forehead on his shoulder then and his arms tightened about her.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “Oh, yes I did. I have always been terrified of love, Eden. I never wanted just marriage as other women seem to do and perhaps a little romance to make it palatable. I have wanted the stuff of poetry and of dreams. I would rather settle for nothing at all than a mere shadow of the real thing. This has to be the real thing. It has to be. Tell me now if it is not and we will part and go our separate ways. Just never come back, that is all, even to see Nat. If you leave now, stay away forever.”
He held her for a long time, saying nothing.
“Now you have really put the wind up me,” he said at last. “It feels real enough to me, Lavinia. I never expected this to happen. I never wanted it to happen. It is not the sort of thing I would imagine merely because I wanted a wife. I have never wanted a wife. It is real, right enough. I love you right enough.”
“I knew,” she said into his shoulder, “that I would squeeze the words out of you again if I tried.”
They both laughed. But they both knew that her words had not been spoken out of anything less than the very depths of her heart. And they both knew that he would not have surrendered his freedom for anything except a deep and abiding love.
“Let’s go and find Nat,” he said.
“Yes.” She drew away from him and smoothed out the folds of her dress. She looked at him and smiled sheepishly. “Oh, it is you, is it? All that close stuff was being done with you?”
“It is I,” he agreed meekly, offering his arm. “We had better get this wedding out of the way as soon as we can. You know absolutely nothing yet, my love, about close stuff. Ah—I knew I could get you to blush again if I tried.”
“Hoist with my own petard,” Nathaniel muttered.
“What?” Sophia turned her attention from the retreating backs of Kenneth and Moira to look at him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Let me show you the lake and the folly. This was always my favorite part of the park. I always loved swimming and boating here. I also love just sitting and dreaming.”
“Yes, I can see why.” They were approaching the bank of the lake and the trees that grew beside it or overhung it. “You have a beautiful home, Nathaniel.”
And now and at last it was all his. He had longed for this day. To know that his sisters were all well settled in homes of their own and Bowood was his alone. To know that he could do as he pleased here and come and go as he pleased. Today it seemed an empty triumph.
And he was afraid to hope.
“There it is,” he said, pointing to their right. It was a small Greek temple of gray stone, complete with columns and carved pediment. “Foolish, is it not? But that is why such buildings are called follies, I suppose.”
“It is charming,” she said, and she smiled as they walked toward it.
It had been built in a carefully chosen spot so that it was hidden by the slope and the trees from the house above. And when one sat on the stone bench inside, one could see only the bank in front and the lake and the trees beyond. One felt surrounded by wilderness.
Sophia stepped inside and sat down. Nathaniel stood outside, his hands clasped behind him, watching her look about at her surroundings. The gardener always kept well-tended pots of flowers inside the folly during the summer.
“Sophie,” he said, “you are looking so very pretty, my dear. I love these light dresses you have been wearing. And you have cut your hair. It is very becoming worn like that, though I suspect it might look less glorious when worn down than it used to look.”
She turned her eyes from the lake to look at him briefly and smile.
“And you have gained weight,” he said. He chuckled. “That is not usually a tactful thing to say to a lady, is it? But it looks good on you.”
She smiled again, though she was looking now at the lake.
“It was a lovely wedding,” she said. “Georgina looked beautiful and was very obviously happy. You must be happy for her—and also very glad to have all the busy festivities over.”
“By this time tomorrow,” he said, “almost all the guests will be gone. In a few more days I will have Bowood to myself.”
“That must be a pleasant thought,” she said.
“Sophie.” He leaned his shoulder against the column to one side of the doorway. “Are you happy? Does the thought of returning to Gloucestershire and choosing a new home, perhaps in a place where you know no one and will have to start all over again—does the thought excite you?”
“Of course.” But she did not look at him.
The same question, the same answer as they had exchanged yesterday.
“Do you know why I brought you here?” he asked her. “And why I showed you around the house yesterday?”
She looked at him then, though she did not answer him.
“I did not want you here at all, you know,” he said. “I sent you an invitation and of course it seemed very likely that you would accept for Lewis’s sake and for the sake of his family. But I hoped you would find some way of refusing.”
She jumped to her feet.
“I did not want to call on you at Lavinia‘s,” he said. “I did not want to have to invite you to tea yesterday. I did not
want you inside Bowood.”
“Let me pass,” she said. “I must get back to Lavinia’s. I must pack my things. Edwin wishes to make an early start in the morning.”
She could have passed him without his moving, but she might have brushed against him had she tried. He did not move.
“But once you were here,” he said, “I knew that I had wanted it all the time. I knew that I wanted to saturate my home with memories of you. I wanted to be able to picture you in every room. You touched the headrest of my chair in the library. You ran your hand over the top of my desk. You stood at the window there admiring the view.”
She sat down again and spread her hands in her lap.
“I wanted you just here,” he said, “so that for the rest of my life I can come here and sit where you are sitting now and feel your presence.”
“Nathaniel,” she said. “Please—”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “I am being dreadfully ill-mannered. I am hanging a millstone about your neck with this self-indulgence of a confession. I will feel guilty, fearing that I have upset you. But I believe I would feel worse if I let you go from here without telling you that I will always be thankful that you came.”
Her head was bent downward. She said nothing. But watching her, he saw a tear splash onto the back of one of her hands. She lifted the hand and brushed at her cheek. He lowered his head to avoid bumping it on the low doorway and stepped into the magical shade of the folly. It always seemed lit from within—something to do with the light from the lake reflecting off the ceiling, he believed. The folly was fragrant with the scents of sweet peas and other flowers.
“I have upset you.” He set one booted foot on the bench beside her and draped one arm over his raised thigh. He bent his head closer to hers.
“Nathaniel,” she said, “what are you saying?”
“That I love you,” he said.
“It is sympathy, pity, affection,” she said. “Think of who I am, Nathaniel. I am the daughter and sister of coal merchants. I have never had any claim to beauty, accomplishments, wit, charm. Whereas you ... You have everything—gentility, wealth, property, elegance, charm, good looks. You could have ... Have you seen the way women—ladies—look at you? Beautiful women? Your peers?”
He touched her at last. He cupped his hand softly about one of her cheeks, the heel of his hand beneath her chin. He did not raise it. He ran his thumb across her lips.
“Terrible harm has been done to you, Sophie,” he said. “I wish I had known you when you were seventeen years old. Would I have found a wide-eyed, lovely girl who considered herself worthy of the best life had to offer? Would I have found a girl who believed that she had everything to offer the man who would love her? And would I have known even then what a priceless treasure I had found? Perhaps not. Perhaps I needed to be older. Perhaps you did. Perhaps you needed to suffer what you have suffered so that all the perfection of your beauty could shine through you. Don’t let the harm be irreparable, my love. Trust yourself. Trust love. Perhaps you can never love me. But there will be someone for you. Someone who will perhaps be almost worthy of you. Meet him as an equal.”
She lifted her hand and set it over the back of his against her cheek.
“Nathaniel,” she said, her voice revealing the fact that she was still very close to tears, “I have something I must tell you, something I must burden you with, though I promised myself I never would. Oh, forgive me.”
He lifted her face to his then and gazed into her tear-filled eyes. “Sophie?” he whispered.
“I told you I knew how to prevent it,” she said. “I told you it simply would not happen. But that last night—I knew it would be the last—I wanted it to be the most wonderful night of my life. It was too. But I forgot about practical matters. Nathaniel—”
He stopped her mouth with his own.
“My God,” he said. “My God, Sophie. You are with child?”
“It does not matter,” she said. “I will go somewhere where I can say I am a recent widow. And I really do not mind. I am really rather happy. I will have a tangible memory for the rest of my life. What are you doing?”
He was swinging her up into his arms. He strode out of the folly with her into the sunshine. He set her down on the bank, hidden from the house, sheltered by the trees. A little piece of wilderness fragrant with trees and grass and water, loud with birdsong and insect chirpings, warm with the late August sun. He stood beside her, looking out across the lake.
“I want to know something,” he said. “You will be marrying me now, of course, as fast as I can procure a license. I told you when we began our affair in London that you would have to marry me if there were a child. But I want to know your feelings for me. I need to know. The truth, please, Sophie.”
She did not speak for a long time. He steeled himself. She would be honest now, he knew. But she was a kind woman who cared for people. He knew that she cared in some special way for him. She would be choosing her words in order to give him as little pain as possible.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” she said at last. “It was at a party in Lisbon given by Colonel Porter. Walter had introduced me to all the other officers. I thought Rex and Kenneth and Eden particularly handsome and charming. You were speaking with someone else, your back to me. But you turned when Walter spoke your name and you looked at me when he presented me—and you smiled. You have been told, I suppose, that you have a quite irresistible smile. My heart was yours in that moment. It has been yours ever since. You lent me a handkerchief once and I never gave it back. I used to keep it between lavender bags and take it out frequently to look at it and hold it to my face. I was in a way, you see, unfaithful to Walter. I put the handkerchief away after his death. I thought I would never see you again. I thought you had become merely a wistful memory until you wrote me that letter two years ago and until I saw you again in Hyde Park this spring.”
He turned his head to look at her. She was looking back. “I am not sure,” she said, “if for even one mad moment I convinced myself that having an affair with you would help me get over you. I believe I knew from the start that I was wreaking dreadful havoc on my life. I dreaded coming here, Nathaniel. I dreaded seeing you. Yet since I have been here I have been storing memories so that for the rest of my life I can picture you in the setting where you will live your life. I touched your chair where your head rests, and the top of your desk, where you work. I sat inside the folly, where you sit, and looked out at the lake, on which you gaze.”
He smiled slowly at her and reached out a hand for hers.
“Come, my love,” he said.
She placed her hand in his and he drew her to her feet and into his arms. But he did not hold her close at first. He set his hands at her waist and moved them inward and down, looking into her face as he did so. He could feel the soft beginnings of swelling in her womb. He slid his hands upward and about her breasts. They were fuller, heavier. They would suckle his child.
She was smiling at last, softly, dreamily.
“It is a good thing you like my extra weight,” she said. “There is going to be much more of it.”
“Oh, I like it,” he assured her. “And it terrifies me. What have I done to you?”
“You have made me feel like a woman again,” she said. “Like a desirable, even beautiful woman. Years ago you gave me a dream to dream against the bleakness of reality. And now the dream has become reality. You have made me fruitful. And you love me too. Nathaniel, you do love me? You were not just—”
He kissed her hard.
“I have a feeling,” he said, “that healing is not going to be instant with you, Sophie. You are going to doubt yourself for a long time to come, are you not? I will be your healer, my love. This is going to be your medicine every time you voice your doubts.” He kissed her again. “I love you.”
She wrapped her arms about his neck and laughed as he picked her up off her feet and twirled her once about. It was a rash thing to do. They were not far fro
m the water’s edge. He laughed too.
Someone was loudly clearing his throat.
“We are not interrupting anything of, ah, importance, are we?” Eden asked.
His fingers, Nathaniel was interested to note, were laced with Lavinia’s.
“When a man and a woman are in a secluded spot wrapped in each other’s arms,” Nathaniel said dryly, “they must be merely waiting with impatience for someone else to come along to make life more interesting, Ede.”
“Quite so.” Eden grinned. “You have two witnesses, Sophie. If I were you, I would demand that Nat make an honest woman of you.”
“She never was dishonest.” Nathaniel frowned. “And that is my ward you are clutching, Ede.”
Eden’s grin did not falter. “And so it is,” he said. “Muzzle me if I am speaking out of turn, but would we save a great deal of time and energy if we celebrated a double wedding? Within the week?”
“I have not heard anyone asking me for Lavinia’s hand,” Nathaniel said.
“Nat.” Lavinia was engaged in that activity she normally avoided at all costs—she was blushing. “Do try not to be ridiculous.”
“I have not heard you ask for Sophie’s either,” Eden said. “Not that you need to, of course. But I will stand her friend. Has he asked you, Sophie? Nicely? On bended knee?”
“You did not go down on one knee, Eden,” Lavinia said.
“I make it a practice never to make a spectacle of myself,” he said. “Well, Sophie?”
“You, Eden,” she said, wagging one finger at him, “may mind your own business.”
Nathaniel set an arm about her waist and drew her against his side. “Shall I let him have Lavinia?” he asked her. “And shall we make it a double wedding? Our families can remain here instead of having the tedium of bringing themselves back in a few months’ time. We can send for your brother in haste—ah, and he can bring Lass with him, since I daresay she is there and you are pining for her—and any of Ede’s family that he has always stayed very quiet about. I daresay Moira and Ken will stay, though I suspect they are longing to return to Cornwall. But they will have to stay. This is all their doing after all. What do you say, love?”