Epilogue
Irene could not help but snort with laughter as another piece of toast slipped off the long toasting fork and into the fire.
“Blast it!”
“I told you, you’re leaning too far forward,” she said through her giggles. “You’ll never get a single piece of toast that way!”
Her best friend and husband leaned back ever so slightly but made sure to nudge her on the shoulder as he did so. “Who made you the Queen of Toast?”
“I have always been the Queen of Toast,” Irene declared haughtily before collapsing into giggles.
Their laughter filled the large drawing room. Wilfred had offered to invite her entire family, even all her aunts and uncles and cousins, to see the New Year in after the wedding. Irene had considered it, for a short moment, but decided against it.
After so long not quite understanding each other, with Irene herself not realizing the incredible man she had right before her eyes, she was going to take some time to enjoy him on her own.
They had abandoned the thought of sitting politely on a sofa.
The pile of cushions and blankets near the fireplace was where they had found themselves, creating a sort of nest of love and affection as the fire blazed.
Wilfred’s cook—their cook now, Irene had to remind herself in the privacy of her own thoughts—had offered to make them something to eat, but Wilfred had given all of the staff the night off.
As midnight had chimed through the Aynor townhouse—my new home, Irene reminded herself with a thrill—she had kissed her husband and very soon the comfortable cushions on the drawing room floor had gained quite another use.
After they had enjoyed amorous congress, twice, they had pulled on a semblance of clothing and Wilfred had tugged a blanket around their shoulders, and they had sat, quietly talking about nothing while her husband failed utterly to make toast.
“Ouch!”
“Don’t touch the metal too close to the bread, you dolt,” Irene said lazily, all warm and full of previous attempts at toast that had been smeared with honey from the pot they had found in the kitchen.
Wilfred grinned, kissing her shoulder. “I should have listened to you, O Queen of Toast.”
She smiled back, wondering how on earth she had managed to find such a perfect man.
In a way, she hadn’t found him. He had found her—as Wilfred was eagerly reminding her of every single day, it seemed.
“Just because I didn’t realize how I felt about you didn’t mean that I didn’t feel it,” she had shot back to him last night.
And he had smiled, and kissed her, and Irene had felt more alive in that moment than all the moments preceding it.
Combined.
“So,” Wilfred said quietly, bringing her back to the present, “it’s a new year.”
“1841,” Irene tried out, not particularly liking it. “Strange to think just how much has happened this year.”
“Many of your cousins have found spouses,” he said quietly. “And so has your sister.”
“And I’ve found you.”
Wilfred snorted. “I was always here. You didn’t have to find me. I was never lost.”
No, but I was, Irene thought as she slipped her hand into his. So lost, and I did not even know it.
Now that she was here, her heart fully open both to Wilfred and to herself, Irene marveled at the fact that she had not known the precious value of the man beside her. Oh, she had always appreciated him. As she had told him, inexpertly, at the opera—she had always loved him.
But realizing that what she felt for Wilfred was so unlike anything she had ever felt for any other man, for any other friend, that had taken time. Time she had not realized was… Well, not exactly wasted.
She would spend it better now.
“So, what is it to be?” Wilfred slipped the half-burned, half-hardly-cooked bread from the toasting fork. “Is that better?”
“No,” said Irene happily, nonetheless taking a bite while in awe that he could be so inept. “It’s a good thing you have a cook.”
“We have a cook,” he corrected with a shy smile.
Irene’s stomach jolted, and not because of the inexpertly made toast. She had never thought much about her home in the future, but now she was here, within it, and she was already finding there was a great amount of joy to be found in organizing one’s own life.
Now that she was duchess, she wholeheartedly agreed with her husband to offer Dempster that promotion to butler at the Aynor country estate.
That was among the first tasks they’d complete in the new year.
Being a mistress of her own home, however, was nothing compared to being the mistress of this man’s heart.
“As I said, what is it to be?” Wilfred asked as he carefully placed the second-to-last slice of bread on the end of the toasting fork.
Irene frowned as she munched. “What is what to be?”
“What are your New Year’s resolutions to be?” he clarified with a smile. “It’s the first of the year.”
“Barely.”
Her husband glanced at the clock and shrugged. “Still, it is the first of January of a brand-new year. Everything is fresh. What are you resolved to do this year?”
“I don’t know why you are asking me. You never manage to keep to New Year’s resolutions!” Irene teased.
And it was true—he never had. Wilfred was a great man for ideas, but he rarely followed them through.
Except this time, when it had really mattered.
Wilfred snorted. “This year is going to be different.”
Irene giggled. “Oh, yes? Are you suddenly fueled with a sense of willpower you have never had before?”
“Reeny!”
And she smiled and did not correct him because if there was one person in the world who was permitted to use that version of her name, it was him. Her Wilfred. “Yes?”
“I have excellent willpower, if you don’t mind me saying,” he said in a mock-haughty voice.
Irene giggled. “Oh, you do, do you?”
His eyes glittered. “I managed to hold back on declaring my undying love for you for years, didn’t I?”
She leaned forward and stole a kiss, and though she had only intended it to be a quick one, the sensual bliss that flowed through her the moment her lips touched Wilfred’s meant that Irene kissed him most heartily for several minutes instead.
When they broke apart, both were breathless.
“You were saying something,” Wilfred exhaled. “Or I was. Damn it, woman, you always make me forget what I was thinking.”
“That’s because I didn’t marry you for your thinking,” Irene teased. “I married you for your skills in bed.”
“That must be it.” He chuckled, turning back to the fireplace. “Oh, damn!”
Irene collapsed into giggles. “It certainly isn’t your toast-making abilities!”
Wilfred waved the toasting fork wildly in an attempt to dampen the flames now completely consuming the bread on its end. Eventually, he allowed the bread to drop into the flames with a wry smile.
“Well, one last piece,” he said. “Hopefully, this time I’ll manage.”
“Why don’t you give that to me,” Irene said firmly, phrasing it not so much as a question, but as a statement.
Her hands moved, taking the toasting fork from the bungling husband of hers, and angling it perfectly over the flames so that the bread started to brown. Brown, not burn.
Wilfred leaned back on his haunches and examined her. Irene tried not to notice just how intense his gaze was, but it was his attention and not the fire warming her face.
“What is it?” she asked eventually.
“You,” Wilfred said simply. “Where did you learn to make toast like that?”
Irene grinned, though the memory had tinges of sadness as well as merriment. “When I was…oh, about nine? Nine or ten? My father hit a bit of a tricky spot with money and we had to let our cook go for a time.”
Wilfred sat up smartly. “I didn’t know that.”
“No one did,” Irene said lightly, as though it did not matter. And it didn’t, not anymore. But it had then. “My father was very careful to keep it just between us. Between us Chances, I mean. I know you visited at the time, but we didn’t let you see us in the kitchen or anything like that.”
“But surely, your uncles would have—”
“Between us Pernrith Chances, I suppose I should have said,” Irene clarified with a smile.
“My father is proud, you know that. He wasn’t about to go to his half-brothers with a begging bowl.
No, we had no cook for…oh, about three months?
In that time, Mrs. Kinley did her best, and my sisters and my mother and I helped.
However we could. I learned how to boil an egg, make toast, roast a vegetable stew that required no actual skills, and brew tea.
We couldn’t afford much meat, so it didn’t matter that I never learned how to roast.”
She spoke calmly, without a need for sympathy because that time was past and it wouldn’t have put food on the table back then at any case. But she was not surprised to feel Wilfred’s hands on her shoulders and a delicate kiss on the side of her head.
“There is still so much I have to learn about you,” Wilfred said in a voice of almost wonder. “How is it that I can know you best of anyone in the whole world, and there is still so much that I don’t know?”
Irene smiled as she turned to the man she loved.
Oh, Wilfred. How she had ever thought she could go through life without him, she did not know—but now she would never have to wonder.
The bread slipped into the flames.
“Oh, blast!” Irene cried as Wilfred descended into desperate laughter. “It’s not funny!”
“All hail the Queen of Toast,” he said solemnly but with a wicked grin on his face. “Who’s the best at toast now?”
“Well, it’s certainly not you, you idiot,” Irene said with a laugh, carefully putting the toasting fork down with a rueful expression. “Ah, well. I hope you weren’t too hungry.”
“Oh, I’ve had my fill,” said Wilfred, the wicked look only increasing.
Irene flushed. He certainly had.
“Now, New Year’s resolutions,” he began.
“Not that again.” Irene groaned. “What makes you think that you are going to keep them this time?”
“Because I will be making them to you. And any promise I make to you will be one that I always keep. Because you are precious,” Wilfred said quietly. “You are precious and I will never let you down again.”
Irene’s heart tugged and she kissed him briefly before saying, “Chance is, indeed, a fine thing.”
He smiled. “So. What is it to be?”
She sighed, leaning against his chest and enjoying how his arms so easily moved around her. As though they had been married for years. As though this were their normal—and always had been. “I suppose I should take more of an interest in my family. Help them more.”
That was, evidently, not what her husband had been expecting. “I’m sorry—more of an interest? You Chances are one of the most insular families on the planet!”
Irene could not help but laugh at that. “I suppose that is true, but I think this year is going to be a challenging one for us all. Some of us more than others.”
She had not intended to sound so mysterious, so she was not surprised to see Wilfred lift an eyebrow.
“Which ones in particular? Not any of your siblings, surely?”
“No, it’s my cousin Samuel. He’s… Well. Our great-aunt died.”
Wilfred nodded, his arms warm around her. “My condolences.”
“Oh, we hardly knew her. She married into the family then had a falling out with our grandfather, apparently, and none of my uncles nor my father have ever met her. She sounded, in truth,” Irene said with a smile, “rather like Lady Romeril.”
She felt his shiver. “She must have been terrifying to behold.”
“She was probably a lonely old lady who regretted ostracizing herself from the family,” Irene guessed, without much evidence.
“I’ve heard from my cousin Samuel that her will is to be read in Brighton, and my father believes it might contain a most fascinating clause in it.
It’s going to be complicated for my cousin Samuel. ”
She had felt sorry for him when she’d heard the whispers. It was all very well for the old lady to attempt to be generous, but honestly, she should have thought about the wording a little better.
Precisely what Samuel was going to do, Irene could hardly think…
“Well, enough about them. I want to talk about us,” Wilfred said, pressing a kiss against her neck.
Irene smiled. “All we’ve done since we got married is talk about us.”
“Isn’t it marvelous? You’re my favorite topic,” said her husband, his smile warming. “So, how many children shall we have?”
“Wilfred!”
“What?” he protested.
“You say that so calmly because you are not the one who is going to carry and birth them!” Irene laughed, slightly irritated but mostly devastatingly in love with him. “And we don’t even know if we can have children yet!”
“Oh, we’ll have children,” said Wilfred happily. “Lots of them. Several.”
“Let’s attempt to have one and then take it from there,” Irene said warily, but with joy burgeoning up within her. “You never know, I may not… I mean, there is no guarantee that—”
“If we, because I would never blame you, if we cannot have children the… Well, the normal way,” Wilfred said, a hint of ferocity entering his tone that she adored him for, “then why, we’ll adopt.
There are plenty of children out there who need a home.
After all…your family gave me a home when I needed one. ”
Irene swallowed as affection for this man welled up in her. “We did.”
“And now I get to give you a home,” Wilfred continued, his eyes bright, but his voice firm.
“Whether or not we have children of our bodies, I’d like to adopt.
I’d like to show a child that there are good people in the world, people who want to open their homes and hearts to another.
I’ll work to make sure an adopted son can inherit, if we don’t have a son the traditional way.
Hang the traditions! The Chances and their titled brothers and dowager dukes have shown me we’re not bound by traditions entirely. ”
How could I have ever teased this man about loving another woman?
Pressing a kiss on his lips and almost wishing they never had to leave this nest of blankets and cushions and love by the fire, Irene looked into the eyes of the man she adored and knew that this was, in turn, a New Year’s resolution that she could keep.
One she would keep forever.
“Then here is my resolution for 1841,” she said fiercely, smiling at the way Wilfred looked at her with such adoration. “We will have a child. Whether it’s one I carry or one we find, we will have a child this year and we will love them like we love each other. Completely.”
“Completely,” echoed Wilfred as he leaned in for another kiss. “And forever.”