Chapter 39 #2
She nodded. “I can understand that.”
“But,” he said and he reached in his pocket for something, “I love you more.”
She caught her breath as he slipped something on her finger. Her ring finger. She looked down. “That’s quite a rock—I mean admission,” she managed. She blinked at the sight of the diamond on her finger, then looked back up at Patrick. “You can’t leave your land, Patrick.”
“We’ll work it out. You’ll need time with your family as well. We’ll find a balance. If you’re willing.”
She considered. She looked at the ring on her finger. She thought about what it would mean to have Gilbert McGhee in her life.
She thought about life without Patrick.
Then she thought about sunshine suddenly bursting forth all around her on a cloudy day.
She looked up at Patrick. “If I say no?”
“I’ll prod you to bed with my sword.”
She laughed. He smiled before he bent his head and kissed her thoroughly.
“Say me aye,” he whispered against her mouth. “Say me aye.”
How could she say anything else?
So she said him aye.
And she was, she had to admit a good deal later, extraordinarily glad Dewey’s brass bed had been too much for Uncle Fred’s bad back.
It was very late in the day that she sat at her great-grandmother’s kitchen table and watched Patrick make something with eggs and a few of Sunny’s vegetables she hadn’t gotten around to eating.
“So,” she said casually, “how long are you really here for?”
He looked at her in amusement. “I have an open ticket.”
“Oh.”
“And if you still have to ask me that question, I have obviously left my work undone.”
“Is that possible?” she mused.
He turned and looked at her, spatula in hand. “Is it our marriage that troubles you? If you’re uncomfortable with our medieval ceremony, we can be wed again. I didn’t propose very well the first time.”
“You didn’t propose at all the first time.”
He laughed and turned back to the stove. “I’ve tried to remedy that this afternoon.”
He certainly had. He’d asked her to marry him several times. In between doing, well, other things.
“Your sire might like to give you away,” he offered.
“There is that,” she agreed. “He might have a few things to say about our good vicar’s interpretation of the marriage rites.”
He brought over two plates, set them down, then sat down across from her. She smiled weakly.
“This is very domestic.”
“We have to keep up our strength.”
She found herself smiling. In fact, she had a hard time not smiling continually. And when she wasn’t smiling, she was staring at the beautiful man across from her and marveling that not only did she know him, she knew him.
He had accepted that serious commitment from her with the appropriate amount of solemnity.
“Your sister is a goodly wench,” he said, admiring his breakfast. “Nice veg, what she grows.”
She choked. “You didn’t call her a wench, did you?”
“Aye.”
Madelyn gaped at him. “Did you call her that to her face?”
“I called her several things far worse than that, especially after what she fed me. She invited me for supper when I arrived and fed me some sort of chocolate cake laced with lobelia.”
“Sunny? Chocolate?”
“Perhaps it was to cover the vast quantities of lobelia.”
“Is that nasty?”
“ ’Tis an emetic.” He smiled wryly. “I spent the rest of the evening with my head in the loo.”
“Gross.”
“Especially since it was her loo I was occupying for the rest of that night. She merely stood there and watched me retch. Nary a word of comfort did she offer.”
Madelyn pointed a forkful of egg at him. “The chocolate should have tipped you off. She doesn’t usually have it in her house.”
“She took special thought for me, then.”
“She’s just avenging my honor. I bawled on her couch for two weeks.”
He reached for her hand. “Did you?”
“Didn’t you?”
“I don’t cry.”
“Hmmm,” she said with pursed lips. “Then what did you do?”
“I stomped about a great deal.”
“Same thing.”
He smiled gravely. “It is.”
She picked at her dinner for a while, then looked at him. “You’re really staying,” she said.
He sighed, put his fork down, then took hers out of her hand. He stood, pulled her up, and into his arms.
“I can see I have more convincing to do.”
“Patrick, you can’t just haul me around like a sack of potatoes every time you want to get your way.”
“Can’t I?” he asked.
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll never get a full meal. I’m starving.”
He let her slide to her feet, then took her face in his hands and kissed her until she began to think that food maybe wasn’t all that interesting after all. When he released her mouth, she looked up at him.
“This is going to be complicated, isn’t it?”
He looked at her solemnly. “Aye. But worth it?”
She went into his arms, rested her head against his chest, and sighed. “Definitely.”
He kissed her forehead, held out her chair for her, then sat down across from her. Madelyn tried to eat, but she found that she couldn’t do much more than attempt to shovel in a few bites in between bouts of intense smiling.
There she was, not in the land of waking dreams, yet still dreaming all the same.
But if it was a dream, she never wanted to wake up.