'Not immediately,' he said, his hand now caressing her face, his need to touch her still uppermost. 'At first, before I'd even thought about it, I found myself chasing up the road to the village as fast as I could go, some unformed idea in my head of seeking out transport. Though the idea had taken definite shape by the time I arrived there.'
'Only by then you'd changed your mind?'
'Who's telling this?' he growled, and when she giggled, the telling had to wait when he couldn't resist kissing her.
'Anyway,' he resumed after a moment when it was touch and go that their kiss wouldn't get out of hand, 'when I got to the village, I was dismayed to find that not only was there no transport available, the weekly bus only running on Wednesdays, and it wasn't Wednesday, but also, through the state I was in, I had forgotten to take any money with me.'
'Finding I'd taken that painting book did that to you!' she exclaimed, far from not wanting to hear the rest, thrilled, eager now to hear more.
'Finding you'd taken it had me so I didn't know where I was,' Blane confirmed, before going back to take up from where he had left off. 'It was then I thought I'd better stop and collect my thoughts. Stop to wonder what else I'd forgotten.'
'You'd got a coat on, I hope?' came from her protectively as she remembered it had been tipping it down with rain.
'I'm going to love getting used to your fussing,' Blane grinned. 'Though to tell the truth, I can't remember even now if I stopped to put a coat on. But what I did remember, when I made a concentrated effort was that since I didn't have the key to the cottage with me, I must have left it unlocked, and that if memory served, I'd left a heap of uneaten breakfast for Colonel Meredith to find on his next trip. It came to me that perhaps instead of haring around like a dog with his tail on fire, I'd be much better employed putting a transfer charge call through to my office for someone to come and pick me up. In the meantime I could go back to the cottage and make it look more as we found it while I was waiting for that transport to arrive.'
'But by the time your transport did arrive…' Arden put in.
'I'd had sufficient time for more rational thinking,' he took up. 'Thinking, I don't mind telling, I would rather have done without. But when going back over what a swine I've been to you, I just had to know that I was an idiot to imagine that your tears the evening before must mean you loved me. And if that wasn't enough to contend with, it came to me then—how could I plead with you to marry me when there was still mud being slung on my name, mud that would cling until the inquest proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I hadn't murdered Delcine? How could I come to you at all, until all that had been cleared up?'
'So you wrote the very day of the inquest?'
'Straight after,' he said. 'I wanted to come in person—I was desperate for a sight of your dear, beautiful face,' he confessed. 'But by then I'd had weeks in which to doubt you loved me. I was scared, quite frankly, that my worst suspicions would be confirmed. Scared that after the way I'd been to you, you would tell me to go to hell.'
Her eyes told him she would never have told him that, not once she knew he loved her, anyway. 'But you came in person after all,' she said softly.
'As I said,' Blane told her, 'I'd forgotten all about any money I'd given you at the outset. Your mention of it presented my devious brain with food for thinking that since I was sorely needing an excuse to see you, I had a perfect excuse in this morning's post.'
'I'm glad you came so quickly,' she whispered.
His look echoed her comment as he said, 'I stopped only to ring my secretary to cancel all my appointments, then I was on my way, re-rehearsing with every mile how using that money to get me started, I was going to lead craftily up to finding out how you felt. From your reaction I was hoping to gauge if I had a chance—then I was going to ask you to marry me again.'
'But you asked me to marry you almost as soon as you saw me—you didn't know then how I felt.'
'Nerves,' he owned with a smile. 'Nerves, which never in my life have I been prone to, got to me. Just to see you again, and wham! straightforward nerves had me saying what I hadn't planned to say, the sooner to be put out of my misery of this past gruelling month.'
Arden's own look was adoring. Given that he had suffered severe shock after that accident—that shock not being helped by him facing his inner self and not liking what he saw—Blane was a man with nerves of steel. But that she had been responsible for that steel bending, for him giving in to nerves, made her blink.
'So now, my dear sweetheart,' he said tenderly, 'are you going to give me the answer I came for? Are you going to marry me?'
With an excited thrill she remembered what he had said earlier about being too impatient to wait until spring had started before he took legal proceedings. And joy was bubbling up in her, his answer in her smile, as she asked:
'Can we—settle that matter outstanding—er—in an affirmative way—before March the twenty-first?'
Arden was positively gurgling with happiness when Blane, knowing as well as she that the twenty-first of March was the first official day of spring, grinned broadly in his relief to have the answer he wanted.
'Since we're only in the middle of February now, I should think we can manage it well before,' he said. But his grin was fading as his head came nearer. 'My heart's love,' he breathed. A moment later, his mouth met hers.
Ruthless in All Page 18