Beresford's Bride

by Way, Margaret

  “I don’t want anything from his will, Mamma,” Toni said faintly. “Give him my love and tell him I wish him a speedy recovery.”

  Would she ever understand her mother? Now that they had broken up, Zoe and Claude were practically inseparable. The big thing with Zoe was to make her laugh, and Claude could tell wonderful stories in four different languages.

  By Saturday, Zoe hadn’t returned from the shelter of the manor’s ancient walls but she had rung each day with a report on Claude’s progress. Mercifully, Claude was in no danger. “A little warning to be heeded,” Zoe said. He didn’t want Zoe to return to Australia, but she promised him she would spend time with him each year. Claude really knew how to live, Zoe said. Good food, marvelous wine, the cigars he couldn’t give up, which had brought on his heart attack, of course, Toni thought.

  Left alone, she decided to accept an invitation to have dinner with a party of young friends, but at the last minute declined to go on to a nightclub. That’s what Byrne had done to her. She couldn’t think of anything or anyone else. Terrible pining kept gnawing away at her. If she was absolutely honest she would have to admit she wasn’t enjoying anything very much. She could go home without Zoe, of course. Living in the wonderful romantic city of Paris, one of the great experiences of her life, she was lonely and bored. Every little fiber of her longed for a man with silver-gray eyes and black hair, a man who made the very air shiver with his vivid presence.

  Her friends, still trying to change her mind, dropped her off outside her apartment building. She wasn’t inside more than ten minutes when the doorbell rang, startling her. It had to be Zoe. No one else could get in. Security in the building was tight. Trust Zoe not to let her know she was coming.

  When she opened the door, the shock stopped her breath.

  Byrne stood on the threshold, a smile on his stunning face, at least two dozen red roses in the crook of his arm.

  “Well, aren’t you going to ask me in?” he asked as casually as if they had never been apart. “Or are you suffering from violent shock?”

  She tried to laugh, did not succeed. “Byrne, it is you?”

  “As I live and breathe.” He moved closer, bent his dark head, put his mouth very briefly over hers.

  She rested against the door for a moment, taking a deep breath. “Please come in. I’m just so surprised.” In fact she felt hot and light, as though she could float.

  “This is a very beautiful apartment, Antoinette,” he said, glancing around.

  “Claude gave it to Zoe when they were first married.” She spoke rapidly. “She’s sold it but settlement will take another few weeks. She’s with Claude at the moment. He suffered a minor heart attack but he’s on the mend.”

  “That’s good,” Byrne responded automatically, turning to her and holding out the roses. He was wearing a beautifully cut gray suit, an elegant red silk tie and a pale blue shirt. He looked stunning. “Toni?” he prompted gently.

  “I’m sorry.” She moved forward immediately. “You’ve taken me so much by surprise. I’m not sure I’m not hallucinating.” Excitement was overloading her nerve centres. She took the roses, went to find vases, distributed them between two big crystal bowls.

  “Here, let me help you.” Byrne took one vase from her while she went to fetch the other.

  “They’re so beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.” For a moment she buried her face in the fragrant crimson petals. “Tell me, how did you get in? Georges is very strict about security.”

  “I told him I was your friend from Australia,” he explained. “The roses clinched it. I’ve been ringing most of the evening.”

  “I was out with friends.” She spoke nervously, still battling the overload of excitement.

  “You look gorgeous.” Under his smooth banter was a powerful pounding. “But surely you’ve lost weight?”

  “I’m into a rigorous exercise program,” she joked.

  “You’d better cancel it. You’re bordering on fragile.” He allowed his eyes to move over her. She was wearing a short, very sexy evening dress in a dull gold with some sort of a low draped bodice and a wide lace hem that revealed her lovely legs. She had certainly acquired Parisian panache.

  “Please, Byrne, sit down. Could I get you anything?”

  “Sure could,” he said.

  She couldn’t look away. “What?”

  “Tell me why you’re so damned nervous?” He lowered his tall frame onto one of the sofas upholstered in Louis blue brocade.

  “You make me feel like this all the time.”

  “Miss me?” There was a sparkle of devilment in his light eyes.

  “Would I offend you if I said I’ve been very busy?”

  “That’s okay. I’ve been busy, too. Tell the truth.”

  “I’ve missed you terribly,” she said in a rush. “But thank you so much for your letters. They told me everything—except whether you missed me.”

  “Why else would I be here, Antoinette?” He stood, scattering a charge of electricity over the beautiful, traditional room. “If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed...”

  “You’re so cruel,” she said before he caught her to him, kissing her mouth, reveling in its seductive shape.

  “Did you dream about me?” He carried her to the sofa, cradled her across his knees.

  A trace of tears glinted in her violet eyes, though she was smiling. “When I finally gave in to sleep, yes. Oh, Byrne, I’m just so overjoyed to see you.”

  “Then do you think you might show me?”

  She lifted her slender arms, locked them around his neck, saw the faint lines of tension on his handsome dark face. “Not until you tell me you’ve punished me enough.”

  “Punish?” He groaned. “God, you were with me wherever I went. My first thought, my last thought and most in between. Nothing means a damned thing without you. You’ve moved right up under my heart.”

  She started to grit her small white teeth in an effort not to lose control, but the tears started to fall.

  “Darling, you don’t have to cry about it.” He hugged her to him.

  “You always manage to bring tears to my eyes. I love you so much.”

  “Then you’d better marry me,” he suggested with extraordinary tenderness.

  Her whole body turned incandescent. “You mean it?”

  His love for her leaped like a flame. “I’ve come halfway across the world.”

  “And I was coming home to you. Without Zoe, if I had to. I can’t be anywhere you’re not.”

  “So I take it that’s a yes?” he asked.

  It was a wonderful moment, a moment she would never forget. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “‘Let’s seal it with a kiss. A life of joy in one another, Antoinette.”

  “Amen.”

  It was a long time before they spoke again.

  Byrne twisted his lithe body, withdrew a small box from the pocket of his jacket, which he had draped over a chair. “The most time-honoured gesture of a man to his fiancée.” He lifted her left hand and kissed it.

  In the navy velvet box was a glorious ring. A large, square-cut sapphire of beautiful clarity and colour sur- rounded by a wreath of diamonds.

  “What else but a sapphire for a woman with such eyes,” Byrne said.

  EPILOGUE

  IT WAS the year of Beresford marriages, the gossip columns wrote, four in all, but none more newsworthy than the wedding of Byrne Beresford, chairman of Beresford Enterprises, cattle baron from legendary Castle Hill Station and arguably the country’s most eligible bachelor, to Miss Antoinette Streeton, only daughter of the beautiful and popular society figure Zoe LeClair and the late Eric Streeton of Nowra Station.

  The columns went on to say the bride was already halfway family, as her brother, Kerry, had married the bridegroom’s sister earlier in the year. Unlike that splendid and lavish occasion, Mr. Beresford and Miss Streeton had chosen a quieter ceremony. The family fairly dripped money, so the low-key occasion came as a surprise to many,
but it was clearly what the couple, said to be deliriously happy, wanted. Miss Streeton was to have three attendants—her sister-in-law, Catherine, matron of honour, a lifelong friend, Miss Fiona Crawford, and a Mademoiselle Dominique Dupré. who was flying in from Paris, where the bride had spent several years. Every society journalist in the country was desperate to get an invitation, but only one was sent, to the doyenne Fleur Colwyn of “Fleur’s Diary.”

  “Low-key or not, it’s bound to be gorgeous!” Fleur gushed to her editor, which, as a prediction, proved marvellously correct.

  It had been a blazing hot day but the night was wondrously cool, the velvet dome of the sky a sweeping, star-studded glory. There were one hundred guests waiting for her outside, family, friends, people who were close to her. Ever since she could remember, Toni had dreamed of a wedding under the Southern Cross. She knew that was what she would have. When she had told Byrne of her special wish, to her joy he had found the idea delightful, so a starlight pageant it had become. Beautiful, memorable, imaginative.

  After several pleasurable discussions, an amphitheatre had been decided on. Erected in Castle Hill’s home gardens, it transformed the great glade of lawn—dominated by magnificent old gums and dense plantings, at the far end a lake filled with water lilies, irises, the huge gunneras and a flotilla of black swans—into an open-air temple. Hundreds of star lanterns were hung in the great trees, the fluted white columns were wreathed in exquisite white flowers, and ivy leaves trailed from top to bottom. An altar table of pristine marble stood on the wide dais flanked by two sandstone pedestals supporting large garden urns filled with masses and masses of luminous fragrant flowers. The raised floor of the amphitheatre was covered in a carpet especially woven for the wedding. It featured a large central star motif.

  Toni’s wedding dress was something out of a midsummer night’s dream, a slender flute of white chiffon over silk, the low round neck and the long sheer sleeves embroidered with silver crystals with a river of glittering silver, ice blue and gold stars swirling diagonally across the ankle-length skirt. Around her neck she wore Byrne’s exquisite gift to her, a necklace of two interlocking silver chains so arranged that the large and smaller diamonds strung along them formed an outline of the Southern Cross. A high rounded headband studded with diamanté secured her froth of a short veil with scatter sequins, diamond stud earrings at her ears. She was carrying a bridal posy of massed pink, cream and white roses interspersed with orchids and sprigs of fernery. On her feet she wore custom-made evening sandals, with three diamanté straps.

  “You look too beautiful to be true. Like a young goddess,” Zoe said tremulously, a vision in a couture outfit of aqua and apple green patterned silk, complemented by a stunning little veiled hat.

  “I feel every inch a woman, Mamma.” Toni’s smile was radiant. A woman eager to go to her beloved, to be joined in holy matrimony before God and man.

  For years after, people spoke about the Beresford wedding. The slender tapers the guests held that lighted the bride’s procession. The beauty and radiance of the bride, the irresistible appeal of her star dress, the fiery pride of her groom, resplendent in a silver gray brocade Nehru jacket and gray trousers, his soft white shirt highlighted by a burgundy silk cravat. Could anything have been more magical, more summery than the open-air temple, a billion stars blossoming over them, the air so fresh, faces gilded in the flickering tapers, the shining teardrops, the sighs of absolute delight as the bride came into sight, followed by her attendants in lovely slim gowns of celeste blue, sugar pink and lime green silk, the bodices that winked in the candlelight encrusted with crystals and seed pearls? The music was perfect, too, Handel, Bach, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Elgar, carrying far and wide across the boronia-scented bushland to the silent, mysterious desert with its towering sand pyramids. And afterward, to cap the stylish reception, the most wonderful display of fireworks for the whole station to enjoy.

  At the altar before Bishop McGrath, Byrne turned his blazing eyes to his bride, consumed by her beauty and his ever-burgeoning love for her. She was enchanting inside and out. Her lovely face, turned to him, rivalled the radiance of the stars. He knew he would remember her at this moment for the rest of his life. With a great sense of happiness and security in the woman he loved, Byrne turned as Bishop McGrath began the service that would make him and his beautiful Antoinette husband and wife.

  Sometimes, if one was lucky, happiness was right on the doorstep....

  ISBN : 978-1-4592-6295-9

  BERESFORD’S BRIDE

  First North American Publication 1998.

  Copyright © 1998 by Margaret Way Pty., Ltd.

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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