Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 30

Today is the twenty-second of November in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and eighteen. Yesterday in front of several witnesses, I vowed to love you reverently, discreetly, advisedly, and soberly. And this morning, for you alone, I vow this: I will love you indiscreetly and unadvisedly, fearlessly and without reservation, with all my body and all my heart, today and tomorrow and until the end of time.

—from the papers of the Countess of Strathrannoch, left upon her husband’s pillow

Arthur’s mouth was warm against Lydia’s ear, a soft and humid caress. “Close your eyes.”

“I—” Her voice was a squeak. She tried to modulate it. “I cannot!”

“Aye, you can.” His arm slipped steadily around her waist. “Close your eyes, love of mine.”

His hand was large and solid on her hip, and she found herself rather mesmerized by the sight. “I—I can’t do it.”

He hummed into her ear, a deep vibration that was almost a laugh. “I could blindfold you. Would you like that, Lady Strathrannoch?”

“I—I—” Oh, she’d gone shivery all over, heat rising to her skin. He could—she thought she might—

She blinked rather rapidly, recalling herself, then whirled and stuck her finger into his chest. “No! We are in the middle of a public street, and the road is made of stones that I suspect have lain here since the fifteenth century. I will not close my eyes and stumble about like I’ve spent the morning tippling—”

“Do you not think I would catch you, my love?”

She disregarded that with an additional poke of her finger into his delicious left pectoral muscle, directly above his heart. “And I certainly will not permit you to cover my eyes in broad daylight where anyone could see.”

Now he did laugh, and the sound rippled through her, a steady tide of pleasure and affection. “But later perhaps? In the privacy of our room?”

She shifted her finger up slowly, coming to rest in the notch of his collarbone. With a sigh, she savored the feel of his warm bare skin. “I shall consider it.”

He laughed again, and caught her wrist, and pressed a kiss to the tip of her index finger. “I’ll hold you to that. Come then, Lady Strathrannoch. Let me take you to your wedding present. ’Tis on your own head if you’re not surprised.”

After their reunion at the Hope-Wallace residence, they had lost no little time in making for Scotland. Lydia did not, under any circumstances, mean to inform her mother and brothers that she and Arthur were not already wed. She had spent enough nights without him in her bedchamber—she had no desire to prolong that particular separation.

A journey to Gretna Green would have been shorter, for the purposes of a most expedient Scottish wedding. But Arthur had fixed upon the notion of returning to the coaching inn along the Great North Road where they had stayed after his escape from the Thibodeaux’s carriage. She’d been surprised by his insistence—she’d supposed he would want to put the entire escapade behind them, now that the Thibodeaux were to be tried for their crimes and Davis had disentangled himself from the Home Office.

Davis had written Arthur a letter, passed on through Jasper’s hands.

I know you’d wish for me to come back with you to Strathrannoch , Davis had said, but I must learn to make my own way. I’ve taken a post in Upper Canada, at a timber company. But I will write to you, Arthur. I swear it.

Arthur had been quiet for a time, then folded the letter and placed it in his coat pocket. He’d looked—not so wounded as she might have feared. Conflicted, perhaps, but at peace with Davis’s decision.

His mouth had tipped up at the corners when they’d arrived back at the familiar inn on their way home to Strathrannoch. Inside she’d found a rather smug-looking Selina and her husband, as well as Georgiana and Sir Francis Bacon.

They’d arranged it all—Arthur and Selina and Georgiana together. He’d wanted her friends to be there to witness their vows.

The thought seemed to glow inside her, a bit of starlight captured somewhere in the vicinity of her heart. They’d pledged their troth right there in the public room and then retired to their bedchamber promptly and at a most indecent hour of the afternoon.

The next morning, Arthur had informed her—looking nearly as pleased as when he’d removed her shift in their bedchamber the day before—that he had a gift for her, in honor of their wedding. He’d needed to take her to it down the street, a fact which struck her as slightly alarming.

He brought her, in the end, to a milner at the edge of town. The man—a round-faced fellow of perhaps twenty—came tumbling out of his house, face alight.

“You’re back!” he said happily. “And with your lady wife too! Ah, good. You’ll be here to take her home with you, then?”

“Aye,” said Arthur. A smile had made itself at home on his mouth, and Lydia wanted quite desperately to kiss him there. “We’ll be taking her back to Strathrannoch with us.”

She stared up at him in bemusement. “Taking whom with us?”

“Come, Lady Strathrannoch,” he said in answer. “Let’s see your gift.”

He led her around to the back of the milner’s cottage, whereupon she discovered a small stable yard that housed two dusty chestnuts, a sturdy gray, and—

Her mouth dropped open. Her gaze flew up to Arthur’s face. “My horse!”

He was grinning quite in earnest now. “Aye. I knew you’d not wanted to part with her.”

Lydia dashed toward the stocky roan, Arthur close behind her. She devoted a moment to pats and kisses, and then turned back to him. “How did you manage it? I thought never to see her again after you sold her.”

He wound his fingers in the horse’s red-brown mane. “As to that—well, in truth, I never sold her. I left her here, in this lad’s keeping. Told him, ah”—at this he looked a trifle embarrassed, his throat going pink—“that the mare belonged to my wife, the Countess of Strathrannoch, and to treat her as such.”

“I don’t understand.” The mare lipped at Lydia’s hair, and Lydia stroked her nose. “You came back with money—enough for the mail coach and more besides. How did you manage it?”

His mouth tilted, his smile just the faintest bit lopsided. “I sold something else instead. Something that mattered to me far less than your mare did to you.”

“What was it?”

He brushed her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “My father’s signet ring.”

Her mouth dropped open

Still smiling crookedly, he tapped her lower lip with one finger. “Dinna fash. I made a wee mold of the thing ages ago. I don’t need the ring to mark my letters with the Strathrannoch seal. ’Twas sentiment, I suppose, that I kept it for as long as I did.”

She managed to recover herself, and she captured his hand with her own, pressing it to her cheek. “Arthur—you did not need to do that. You could have sold the horse.”

“Aye,” he said, and he sobered a bit as he looked down at her, at his palm cupping her face. “I did not need to do it. But I suppose—well. It took me no little time to have this revelation, I know. But I suppose that was the first time I began to understand that I did not need to hold on to him any longer. To the lies of his that I’d let myself believe.”

His fingers moved a bit beneath hers, his thumb coasting along her cheekbone and then her lower lip. “That was the first time I said it aloud, you see. That I wanted you to be my wife. That I wanted to make a family with you. I had not let myself believe, until then, that it could be possible.”

Her vision had blurred, and when she blinked, two hot tears came loose and ran heedless down her cheeks. “I love you,” she said. “Every day. Always. For the rest of my life.”

He bent his head and brought his mouth very close to hers. “I’ll hold you to that as well.”