“A gift,” he said.
She turned one over, inspecting the spine—and there, emblazoned on it in brilliant gold etching, was Miss Merriweather’s Downfall, followed by her name. Her real name. Poppy Kittridge, Lady Westwood.
“Oh,” she said inanely, and felt tears burn against the back of her eyes.
“They’re just for you,” he said. “A single printing. Mr. Plessing ran it at my request—it’s what I spoke with him privately about the day he came to call upon you.” His shoulders lifted and fell in a sheepish shrug. “I’ve never done anything I could be proud of. There’s never been anything I could put my name to, and it seemed a shame somehow that you had and couldn’t even claim it. I thought you should have these at least, your own private copies in your own name. Even if you never choose to publish under it.”
She shifted uncomfortably, torn between hugging the volumes to her chest and setting them aside to wipe away the tears she was certain would be upon her at any moment. “They’re perfect,” she said, as her breath hitched in her throat. “But they must have been so expensive.”
“Not so expensive as a strand of pearls, worn only once.” His posture relaxed a shade, and he braced one hand on the countertop. “I read them,” he said. “I read them all.”
Surprised, her eyes lifted to his. “You did?”
“And every installment of your latest that I could lay hands on,” he said. “And it was a chore to get them. They all sold out, you know, and I had the devil of a time convincing Jilly to part with hers, however briefly. I suspect she retains some bitterness over the fact that I ripped up one of hers.”
Against her better judgment, she laughed—a shade of a laugh anyway, a ghost of one. It lacked depth and substance, but it was more than she’d laughed in these past few weeks to be certain.
“I would have come earlier,” he said, “but parliament was still in session, and I thought you might have preferred for me to finish something I’d started. And Jilly told me that I owed you some space in which to breathe, and I suppose she was right. I didn’t like it,” he stressed, “but she was right.” His breath escaped on a fierce exhale. “I should have known you’d come at me with some fool nonsense about separate residences, though.”
Stung, she lifted her chin. “It’s not nonsense—it’s perfectly reasonable.”
“I don’t want a wife in name only,” he countered. “And I don’t want to live separately. I don’t want a polite, civilized Ton marriage. Not with you.”
The books tumbled from her frozen fingers, dropping to the floor in a cascading series of thumps. “What?” she heard herself ask, and heard the words tumble over and over in her brain. She couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying, what it was he wanted of her. A divorce? Despite the scandal?
For a moment his eyes drifted over her face, searching for something within it. At last he managed an abashed grin that cut through the severity he’d worn. “I’ve been busy while you were gone,” he said. “I’ve redecorated the earl’s bedchamber. It’s got new wallpaper and carpet, and there’s a little reading nook, and a bookshelf, and a desk by the window that overlooks the garden, and a little silver tray for pens and ink.” He frowned, his brows drawing together in a wrinkle of tawny gold. “I’m explaining myself poorly,” he said abruptly, heaving a sigh.
And she nodded, helpless to do anything else.
“You know I’m not good with words,” he said. “Not like you are—your stories come alive. There’s so much of you in them.” He dug in the pocket of his coat and withdrew a packet of papers, which he laid on the countertop. “For three weeks this is all I’ve had of you. Just new installments of your book, released a week at a time. Mr. Plessing wouldn’t release them to me in advance, and so I had to fight the masses to obtain one upon each release. And each week I had to watch your story fall deeper and deeper into despair, and I was the only one who knew it wasn’t just Miss Ainsworth—it was you.”
Her eyes closed on a wave of humiliation that she’d been so transparent, and her heart gave a painful throb in her chest. A moment later he touched her cheek, his warm fingers cupped her chin, angling her head back toward him.
“It needs a happy ending, Poppy. You need a happy ending.”
Oh, she didn’t want to look at him—it was beyond unfair for him to have come here, to taunt her like this. To bring her such a lovely gift and then make her relive her own mortification.
She forced herself to speak through a throat that felt crammed full of tears and anguish. “Oh, David,” she said. “Sometimes—most of the time—there just isn’t one to be had.”
“Don’t say that.” His voice was rough, scratchy, and he moved toward her, his boots nudging the scattered books out of the way as he crowded her back against the counter, hemmed her in with the threat of his body. His forehead touched hers, and he drew a ragged breath. “For God’s sake, don’t say that,” he said. “I don’t—I don’t ever want you to stop loving me, Poppy.”
“What a cruel thing to say,” she choked out, and her hands shoved at his chest.
“What? It’s not—Poppy, no. Damn.” He caught her wrists in his hand, a self-deprecating laugh caught in his throat. “You know I’m rubbish with words,” he said. “Somehow I left out the most important part. I love you, Poppy.”
She stilled. Her knees trembled, and without the press of the countertop at the small of her back she felt she might have fallen straight to the floor. “You—you do?”
“Yes,” he said fiercely. “My God, what do you think I’ve been trying to say? I want you to come home and be my wife and share our bedchamber with me. I want you to bring the girls back home and take them round to balls and dinner parties, and argue over who we’ll allow to call upon them. I want to debate politics and raise obnoxious little children who will undoubtedly turn out to be holy terrors.” He brushed kisses across her cheek, her chin, the bridge of her nose. “This is why I need you to write my speeches for me,” he said. “If left to my own devices, I’ll certainly muck them up.”
A helpless trill of laughter escaped her, and even though her cheeks were wet and her throat ached, there was a lovely bloom of warmth in her chest, and she felt an unmistakable uprising of hope, of dreams rising from the ashes of despair.
“I’ll still let you muck them up if I don’t agree with you,” she said, listing toward him, and he released her wrists to wrap her in his arms, and for the first time in weeks she breathed in his clean, heady scent, and it sank into her lungs and warmed her from the inside.
“I’ll allow it,” he murmured at her ear. “I’ll simply have to become more proficient at making my case so that you’ll always agree with me.” His left hand moved over her back in soothing circles, while his right curved over the nape of her neck in blatant possession, and his chest rose and fell in a steady, even rhythm that soothed and comforted. “Tell me I’m not too late,” he said. “I don’t want to lose your love, Poppy.”
“Oh, David,” she sighed. “Of course I love you. How could I not?” She tucked her cheek against his shoulder. “I didn’t want to live apart,” she admitted. “But it would have been torture to be so close to you without love.”
“It’s been torture to be so far from you with it,” he replied. Briefly his arms tightened, as if to memorize the feel of her within them. “You’ll come home, then?” he asked. “Now? Today? Because it’s not a home without you.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll come home.” How long had it been since any place had felt like home? Years and years at least. “Oh,” she said. “There’s something I have to do first.” She wriggled out of his arms despite his protest and strode for her tiny bedroom, where the fire crackled merrily. She hadn’t brought so very much with her. It would be the work of perhaps half an hour to pack away her belongings and climb into the carriage and drive away with David toward the rest of their lives.
On the desk, the two stacks of paper lay, awaiting their judgment. Just an hour ago it had been the most painful decision of he
r life, choosing between them. Now it was the easiest choice she had ever made, and the only one that would ever matter. She collected a stack of papers in her hands, tapping the pages into order—all the carefully considered words she’d spent so long pouring out on paper, all the accumulated unhappiness she’d harbored in her heart and spilled out in her stories.
With a flick of her wrist, they went sailing into the fire, and in moments they were in ashes, all the sorrow and misery converted into smoke that rose from the chimney and spiraled out into nothingness, erased from the world in favor of joy and dreams.
From the kitchen, David called, “How do you feel about being debauched in a carriage?”
And she smiled. “Well,” she said, “I suppose I haven’t enough experience to have formed an opinion.”
He poked his head through the doorway. “Would you like to have?”
She tingled straight down to the tips of her toes. “Yes,” she breathed. “Oh, yes.”
Epilogue
London, England
July, 1818
“Careful,” David warned from the couch, where he reclined with his feet stretched out over the arm. “Julia’s going for the ink.”
“Oh, darling,” Poppy chided, sweeping up their infant daughter, who had only a week ago learned to crawl and now was in nearly constant motion, exhausting the both of them with her unflagging energy. “Are you going to be a novelist like Mama?” she cooed, rubbing noses with the chubby-cheeked infant, whose delighted grin bore evidence of her newly-acquired first tooth.
“Of course she is,” David said, as if it were a fact that didn’t bear even the slightest amount of doubt. “She’s going to be brilliant. And so are you,” he crooned to their son, in a positively atrocious rendition of patronizing baby talk. The infant snoozed on his chest, entirely unaware that his father had planned out his whole future already. “You’re going to be the greatest statesman that anyone’s ever seen. And Mama will help you write your speeches, won’t she?”
Poppy settled on the floor near the couch with Julia in her lap to remove the temptation of the ink bottles she’d left on the low table. “Perhaps you ought to reserve judgment on Miles’ future as a statesman at least until he can speak,” she said dryly.
“I will not,” he said, patting their son’s back gently. “How could he be anything but extraordinary?”
Poppy smothered a laugh in her daughter’s tousled golden curls. She’d always had the vague notion that fathers were absent at best, that they generally left the parenting to their wives and to their children’s nannies and governesses. David had bucked all of those expectations from the moment the twins had been born. Contrary to expectations and against the protests of the doctor who’d attended their birth, he’d stayed by her side for the duration of her labor and held her hand, suffering through the whole of the ordeal with her.
Miles had been expected, of course, but Julia had been a surprise, and she’d laughed helplessly even through her exhaustion when the doctor had laid their unexpected daughter in David’s arms and he’d breathed in a completely awed tone, “Two of them. There’s two of them.”
And he was such a doting father. She’d expected to have enough of a trial on her hands with Victoria and Isobel’s propensity toward spoiling and indulging the babies, but she suspected it was David that would present the true problem. Both babies had their father completely wrapped around their little fingers.
David splayed his hand over Miles’ back, securing the baby against his chest as he leaned over to drop a kiss on Poppy’s cheek. “How’s the latest installment coming along?” he asked.
“Well enough,” she said. “Jilly’s coming over in a few hours to read it.” David’s sister had continued to be her editor of sorts, and they spent a great deal of time together, quibbling over plot and structure. This would be her sixth novel, and David had become her most loyal reader, his pride in her accomplishments boundless. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, gently prying a lock of her hair free from Julia’s tiny fist.
“Oh?” he inquired. “Should I be worried?”
She nudged him in the ribs with her elbow, and he laughed at her pique. “When the triple-decker is released,” she said, “I think I might put my real name on it.”
“That’s brilliant,” he said, and the affection and pleasure in his voice warmed her to the tips of her toes. “Finally I’ll be able to brag about my famous, clever wife. You’ll be a sensation.”
“I don’t know if I want to be a sensation,” she said carefully. “But now that the girls are married, my notoriety can’t hurt their chances.” Victoria and Isobel had both married last year, within a week of each other—Victoria to a baron, and Isobel to a viscount, and both seemed blissfully happy with their husbands. Though they now had their own households, they were all frequent visitors to Kittridge House, and hardly a week passed without at least one lively family dinner. Jilly and her husband and daughter were also frequent guests, although Olivia, who was now three, thought herself far too grown to bother much with her infant cousins.
Not so very long ago, Poppy had been desperately struggling to keep her family together. Now that family had grown to ridiculous proportions, and there was always someone coming or going, and their house was so full of laughter and love that it had permeated every corridor, every corner, every crack and crevice until there was no room for anything but happiness.
“You’re going to be a sensation anyway,” David predicted. He sighed and said mournfully, “I suppose you’ll soon have no time to write my speeches for me any longer.”
She smiled. It had become something of a running joke between them, as she hadn’t written his speeches in at least a year. Somewhere along the way he’d learned to write his own, and he read them aloud to her and solicited her opinion. She might have offered a minor correction here or there, or suggested a point he’d glossed over, but he’d become quite the statesman in his own right. He’d made a name for himself, earned himself the respect of his peers.
But their good opinion had never mattered to him half so much as hers had.
“Ah,” he said. “Julia’s nodded off.” With a sigh, he heaved himself off the couch, gently supporting Miles’ small body in his arms. “Come on, then. Let’s return them to the nursery for their nap.” There was a glimmer in his eyes, a rakish insinuation that never failed to send her heart racing.
“Oh?” she said archly. “And what shall we do then?”
He grinned—the sort of grin that suggested hours of playful debauchery between clean sheets, hushed conversations, and countless kisses. “Well,” he said, “someone’s got to inspire all of your happily ever afters.”
Author’s note
Dear Reader,
Books are like babies, and I know you’re not supposed to have a favorite—but this one is mine. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it!
I hope, also, that you’ll give me the opportunity to entertain you once more with my next book, which will feature Gabriel, the Marquess of Leighton. I do love a good redemption story.
Thank you, once again, for giving me the opportunity to do what I love most and share my stories with you.
Love,
Aydra
His Reluctant Lady Page 31