“Our state of affairs is somewhat ambiguous at the moment.” David looked across the bed at Victoria. “But in a few days Victoria will no longer be a Munro.”
“I was not for certain that you would choose to keep the name, Victoria.” His sudden pause sounded loud, but his proud face had filled with emotion as he shifted his attention to David. “If I have not thanked you yet—”
“You have, Sir Henry.” David nodded in deference. “More than you know.”
“I’ve yet to misjudge a person’s character. It is nice to know my family is in capable hands, Chadwick.”
Sir Henry left the room, the sound of his cane thumping across the sitting room as he limped toward the door. David moved into the bedroom doorway and, leaning a hand against the doorjamb, watched the outer door shut. Victoria joined him. After a moment, she regarded David’s profile, and he felt an enormous surge of love.
“Have you decided to formally accept the terms of the will then?”
He turned into the room, leaning his back against the door as it clicked shut, and suddenly he wanted to laugh with the relief of a hard-fought day, as if he had just come from battle unscathed and very much alive. His wife was free, and he’d never felt more confident of his future. “I think you know I have.”
“Where did you go today while I was in my bath?”
“Ravenspur asked to see me.” David slipped the locket out of his pocket. “He said that you wanted Nathanial to have this.”
She almost didn’t take the locket. Neither of them spoke a word about the treasure, but the topic was there between them. He knew only time could truly eradicate the past. But nine years had been a good start.
“Then everything is finally over?” she asked.
“Or it is just beginning.” David reached behind him and carefully eased the sling from his arm. Ignoring the pain, he tossed the fabric to the floor.
Her eyes widened in alarm. “Should you be doing that?”
He slipped his arm around her waist and, with only the slightest encouragement on his part, she moved into his arms. “Probably not.” She had used his soap. His lips brushed her forehead and the fine hairs at her temple, then his hand tilted her chin and he pressed the advantage. “Have I ever told you that I like the way you smell?”
“David?” She pulled back. “We really were legally married in Calcutta, correct?”
“You are questioning the legitimacy of our civil ceremony?”
“If you were supposed to be working on a covert job, why did you use your real name?”
“As luck would have it, my brother served in India before I got there,” he said in the manner of someone confessing for the first time. “The governor general recognized the family resemblance my first hour at the consulate. Denying it would only have raised questions. None of that mattered anyway.”
“Why didn’t you leave and let someone else take the job?”
“Because I saw you.” And smiling that familiar smile she loved so much, he framed her face with his hands. “I only know that I love you, Victoria or Meg, I will love and honor both of you through sickness and in health until death. You are the mother of my son. The mistress of my new home, and everything that I hold dear. I don’t ever want to wake up and find you gone from my life again.”
Clutching his lapels, she regarded him with shining eyes and laughed. “We will love and honor you back. In fact, we are all going to grow very old together.”
With a reverent touch, he slid his fingers into the warm sable of her hair and tilted her face. They’d been lovers for weeks, but this was different. He was about to be exactly where he wanted to be. Where he thought he would never be again when he’d awakened that stormy morning at Rose Briar to find her gone from his life—in her arms.
Yet, in a way, Meg had vanished, for he no longer saw the woman he’d married in Calcutta all those years ago. The girl he’d fallen in love with and lost had matured into a woman he would love forever. When he’d seen her in the church that morning, he’d seen only Victoria.
A devilish twinkle appearing in his eyes, he backed her to the bed. “Where do you want to honeymoon?”
He smiled like a saint but promised sin, leaving her breathlessly aware that she was ready for her honeymoon now. And closing the distance, his mouth sinking onto hers, David sealed the private vows they had just spoken, melding her past to his future, and knew he had found his piece of heaven in his arms.
They were married just after the New Year at St. Mary’s in London. With her hands clasped to his, his body warmed by her gentle strength, they faced each other and spoke the promise in their eyes. Sir Henry, Nathanial, and Bethany stood around them. His family was also there. His brothers and sisters and their children were present to share this moment in his life. He felt blessed and, as he met the conviction in Victoria’s gaze, he felt alive.
More than alive. He felt peace as he spoke his wedding vows for a second time in his life. For he had found purpose. Or it had found him. He was not sure of anything except its steadfastness in his life and his promise that he would never forsake his family.
Eight months after they were married, he and Victoria christened their second child in the church at Rose Briar, a little girl who looked the image of her mother, more fragile than a sunbeam, and David had held her in his palms, caught by the tiny miracle of life that never ceased to amaze him. Sir Henry passed away shortly after that day, but not before he held his newest granddaughter in his arms.
The funeral took place in September, a year after David’s arrival, where long rows of meadow hay lay drying in the fields, ready for gathering. The weather had grown cooler and autumn set in on the banks of the Cuckmere River where the measure of a man’s dreams could be found in the fruits of his labor, a child’s sparkling laughter, and a wife who loved him.
“There you are,” Victoria said, finding David in the cemetery one day after she was leaving the cottage to return to Rose Briar. She saw patients there these days, and most days the tenants kept her busy. She carried their baby. Nathanial and Bethany were with her.
David was looking down at the tilled earth beneath his feet. Someone had set flowers on Sir Henry’s grave. “Don’t you think it strange that you and I came here and both found the same thing?” he asked as she held out her hand to him.
Victoria glanced up at the church and the beautiful stained-glass windows and smiled. David pulled her against him, then told her that he loved her, outdoors beneath a bright bold sky amid the modest zephyr and surrounded by angels.
It only seemed fitting, he thought as he took his tiny daughter from her arms, for fate had returned to him a second chance and the promise of a shiny gold future he never thought possible. The treasure he’d been searching for his entire life. David laid his arm across Victoria’s shoulder, and together with Bethany and Nathanial flanking them, they walked home.
About the Author
MELODY THOMAS is a wordsmith, a creator of dreams, and a passionate believer in happy endings. A product of thirteen schools and twenty-two moves stretching across the Unites States and Europe, she is a self-proclaimed gypsy. Her fascination with historical romance began when, in her teens, she visited the Tower of London and learned that Henry the Eighth had beheaded two of his wives. This was great fodder for her teenage imagination and the start of a love affair with history, intrigue, and irresistible heroes.
Melody now lives with her husband near Chicago and invites you to visit her website at www.melodythomas.com.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ANGEL IN MY BED. Copyright © 2006 by Laura Renken. All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition December 2006 ISBN 9780061739309
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