Chapter Twenty
Wilfred inhaled deeply. No need to think about it too much. Just walk forward.
Walk forward into the rest of your life.
Wilfred stepped into the drawing room to the sound of loud cheers—but it was not the cheers that he cared about.
It was the warmth, not of the fire, but of the welcome.
The smiles, and the outreached hands from two gentlemen and the cries of delight from three women…
and the quiet, certain silence of the woman he loved.
“Oh, here he is, the man of the moment.”
“Give the man room, Edie. He can barely move.”
“I’ll hug my future son-in-law if I want to, Frederick, and there’s an end to it!”
Wilfred would not have described it as a hug, so much as a gentle garroting. The Viscountess Pernrith was clutching him so tightly around the neck, if her husband had not rescued him, he may have expired.
Which would have been a terrible shame, just a few days before his engagement party to be followed the next day by special-license wedding.
“Well, you got here in the end.” Michael grinned as he clapped Wilfred on the back. “With no small help from myself, may I add—”
“Yes, thanks to our enlightening discussion the other day, dear brother, I now have quite a clear idea of how much help you have been.” Irene smiled with daggers in her eyes as she stepped forward. “You’ve been an age.”
She leaned forward and kissed Wilfred on the lips, and he was forced not to sweep her completely into his arms and take her right there, right now on the carpet of the Chances’ drawing room. There were no blankets, for a start. And a plethora of family.
“Please, not in front of us!” chorused the two younger Chances.
Wilfred grinned bashfully at Gwen and Teddy. “Sorry, Gwen and Teddy.”
“Don’t you apologize,” Irene said firmly, tapping him on the arm.
“Sorry, Reeny.”
The room was filled with laughter and Wilfred’s smile became a spot sheepish. But it was his family’s laughter—his family. Strange, to think that he had believed marrying Irene would have made a difference to how included he felt.
Unbeknownst to him, he had been a part of the Chance family for many years.
“Come, I pulled out a rather splendid case of champagne I have been saving for my second daughter’s engagement,” said the Viscount Pernrith with a wink to his wife. “I had to buy them by the dogcart, for I was certain I would marry them all off—”
“And now it’s our turn!” said Gwen with a shiver. “Now that both Jess and Reeny—”
Irene stomped her foot. “Don’t call me that!”
“—will be married, Teddy and I are officially out,” finished his future sister-in-law.
Was it Wilfred’s imagination, or did neither of the two youngest Chances seem pleased by the prospect?
He had always presumed the tension between the sisters had been that Jessica’s and Irene’s lack of husbands—former lack of husbands—had prevented Gwen and Teddy from attending the many balls, concerts, recitals, picnics, and dinners that the elder two had.
And yet—
“Baron and Baroness Llyne, my lord,” intoned Mrs. Kinley by the doorway.
Wilfred was torn from his thoughts by the rush of Chances toward the door.
“Jessica!”
“Oh, Reginald, we did not expect you for hours!”
“Tell me, is the moat really deep enough to swim in?”
Wilfred chuckled as he stepped back—mostly to protect his feet—and found his arm taken by the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
“It’s all a bit of a fuss, I know,” Irene said quietly with a wry smile. “But I wanted it. A…A welcome for you, to the family. Officially.”
Wilfred’s spirits stirred as he looked around the drawing room.
Michael had just nudged Reginald’s shoulder and offered him a glass of champagne, while the Viscountess Pernrith was carefully examining Jessica for tiredness, though goodness knew why.
Teddy had disappeared—oh, he realized, he hadn’t noticed her go—and Gwen was scowling over at the sofa as her father appeared to be persuading her to go and talk to her eldest sister.
He sighed happily. This was what he had always loved about the Chances—the Pernrith Chances, anyway. The ones he knew best.
They weren’t perfect. The family had its own set of scrapes and alliances, there were arguments and there were disagreements, and they loved each other. Nothing came before that.
And they had loved him, as a child then as a man, without question. Without needing anything in return.
Wilfred blinked away tears. I am not going to cry.
“I hear congratulations are in order,” Llyne said with a grin, stepping around his brother-in-law and grasping Wilfred’s hand in a strong handshake. “I have to say, I wasn’t surprised.”
“‘Wasn’t surprised’?” said Gwen from the sofa, her eyes wide as she looked around. “I couldn’t have seen it coming from a mile off!”
“Did you not? Oh, I had these two down for future happiness a long time ago.” Irene’s mother smiled, making Wilfred flush.
Was I truly that obvious?
“Are we late?”
The voice by the doorway was a new one, though not new to Wilfred.
“Lilianna—and Evelyn, and the husbands!” said the Viscount Pernrith with a smile. “I hope your parents accompany you?”
“Do we only get described as ‘the husbands’ now?” Lilianna’s husband, a man with mischief always dancing in his eyes, said with a grin.
“Yes, I think so,” Evelyn’s husband said, matching his smile yet standing a little less loosely, his shoulders tight as he kept a careful eye on his wife. “I say, is that champagne?”
The room grew more and more crowded as more and more of the extended Chance family arrived.
Cousin Thomas sent his apologies, as his wife and their newborn were not travelling from Stanphrey Lacey, Frank had them all in stitches by arriving in trousers—“Francesca Dorothy Chance!”—and Wilfred found his hand shaken and his shoulder clapped so often, he was a little surprised bruises had not appeared.
It was… Well, overwhelming. To be amongst such a family was one thing. To join it, officially, was quite another.
And throughout the onslaught of affection and welcome, Irene stood by his side, her hand either in his own or slipped into the crook of his arm, and Wilfred knew he could face down armies if he needed to with her support.
Not that the gigantic Chance family was quite as large as an army.
“I must say, I am delighted to be able to officially welcome you to the family as a member, not as one of our dearest friends,” the Viscount Pernrith was saying to him.
Wilfred blinked. When had the man stepped there? “Oh. Oh, thank you, my lord.”
“I think at the very least you can call me ‘Pernrith,’” Irene’s father said with a laugh. “Unlike my unconventional eldest brother, I am unlikely to be handing my title to my son anytime soon.”
It was not impossible to miss the wince from Irene beside him, and Wilfred was so attuned to her, he almost felt it.
“Ah, Lindow,” said Pernrith with a smile that was perhaps slightly tight. “My favorite brother. Come on in. Warm yourself by the fire. Champagne?”
“I had not realized absolutely everyone was going to be invited to this engagement party,” Wilfred hissed to his betrothed.
Irene frowned. “What do you mean, everyone? It’s just family here.”
Just family. That was the odd thing about the Chances. They were divided into their branches, Wilfred knew, and yet still they were all one family.
“So, half the family seems to have known this forever,” said a grinning Samuel, the eldest son of the Marquess of Aylesbury, after everyone had arrived and settled across the room on chairs, window seats, and sofas, all with champagne goblets in their hands.
“And half the family seems to be surprised. Which camp is everyone in?”
There was a chorus of answers as heat rushed up Wilfred’s spine.
“Wasn’t it obvious?”
“Never saw it coming!”
“I thought I saw something last year—”
“I always knew,” said Samuel over the hubbub.
“Nonsense,” shot back his brother, Benjamin, painfully handsome and well aware of it, with a lazy smile. “You just want to seem clever.”
“Better than seeming foolish, as you so easily manage,” returned the elder brother.
The squabble managed to encompass half the room, and the other half were chatting amongst themselves about the upcoming wedding, the recent birth of Thomas’s little one, the state of the weather…
“So. When did you know?” came a quiet voice by his side.
Wilfred turned to see Irene offering him a glass of champagne. “‘Know’?”
“That you loved me,” she said easily, with no hint of embarrassment whatsoever. “When did you know?”
When did I know?
When had the stars been born? When had the oceans not been deep? When had the deserts bloomed? When had time itself had only just begun?
The answer Wilfred wished to give sounded foolish in his throat. He couldn’t say that. She would laugh at—
No. No, she wouldn’t. Oh, Irene often laughed with him, but she never laughed at him.
“From the very beginning,” he said simply, conscious of the tenderness of his fingers against the cool of the glass. “From the first moment I saw you.”
Irene rolled her eyes. “We were children!”
“Even then, I knew there was something special about you. Something special between us,” Wilfred said with a wry smile. Somehow, they had managed to step away from the rest of the family toward the wall, and in a way, it was as though they were all alone. “Something different.”
Though Irene was clearly attempting to prevent it, her lips were curling into a smile. “You did?”
He nodded, gazing down into those spectacular eyes. “I did.”
Her laughter was nervous. “I didn’t.”
Wilfred squeezed her hand, knowing she would need his reassuring touch. “I know.”
And he would never hold it against her. How could he? There were no rules on how love should grow. Would he have preferred it if she had loved him earlier? Perhaps. But that would not have been their story.