Chapter 8
Rosalind Murphy was no stranger to nervous energy. She had spent her life bouncing on the heels of her feet or tapping her fingers on her thighs or pacing back and forth.
She could not comfortably do any of those things today.
Her wedding day.
The bruise was preventing her from putting her nerves anywhere useful, and as a result, she was sitting on the vanity stool, repeatedly blowing a single curl that hung over her forehead away from her face and letting it land again.
“Please stop that,” Hannah begged, not for the first time.
“I can’t,” said Rosalind, and did it again. “Is the statue gone yet?”
“No,” said Vix. “Mae, lift with your knees.”
“Is something stopping you from helping me?!” Mae demanded.
“Yes,” said Vix, without further elaboration.
Rosalind blew the curl again.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Hannah said, throwing her hands up and pushing herself around Rosalind toward the door out into the church. “I will get Thaddeus.”
When the door shut, Rosalind twisted around to look at Vix, then immediately moaned in distress as the statue’s face came partially into view. She closed one eye and locked the other one on her friend.
“Yes?” said Vix, looking begrudgingly amused by the display.
“Please just tell her,” Rosalind said softly, her plea reduced mostly to a whisper. “I cannot keep a secret on top of everything else.”
“Tell me what?” Mae demanded. “Victoria Beck! Tell me what?”
“Aster,” said Vix. “Victoria Aster.”
“Oh!” Rosalind huffed, coming to her feet and immediately crying out in pain as both women lurched forward to support her. “No!”
She flapped her arms to get them away, frowning at both of them and at the statue besides. “No! I am going for a walk. Do not stop me!”
“Rosalind,” Mae said, clearly attempting to be the voice of reason.
“No!” said Rosalind again, and marched out of the room as best as she could with her limp as it was.
She gathered up the glossy layers of her skirt, her brand-new skirt that Vix had so kindly had made for her, and shuffled sideways out into the hall, past Mr. Beck and Hannah, both of whom looked surprised to see her as she passed them.
She sniffled, not knowing where exactly to go, and simply turned away from the sanctuary and made her way deeper down the hallway, avoiding the distorted ripples of her own reflection in the glossy surfaces she passed and how they reflected the oddness of her gait.
This was all wrong. All so very wrong. She knew she was going to cry and she was angry at herself for it. Furious.
It was already so wrong, and crying was only going to make it worse, and yet here she was, welling up like a silly little chit, wandering blindly and making her leg worse all the while.
Her breath stuttered, her hand coming up to cover her mouth before she could make too loud a sound, but it wasn’t quite quick enough.
“Rosalind?” came his voice.
“Oh,” she moaned into her fingers, squeezing her eyes together. “Oh, no.”
Matthew Everly emerged from the room at the end of the hall, only a few feet from where she stood. He was wearing an emerald-green suit but hadn’t yet put on the jacket. The gold buttons on his waistcoat gleamed.
“Rosalind, are you well?” he said, his tone immediately shifting to concern as he covered the space between them in two rapid strides, his hands coming up to cup her elbows and turn her toward him. “What is wrong?”
She shook her head, mortified, and tried to avert her eyes. She couldn’t bear to see him gazing at her like that, with such concern.
“Come in here,” he said immediately, turning and pulling her toward the open door. “It is my office. Come. I’ll get you something to drink.”
She followed him, because what else was she to do? She followed him into a room covered in an assortment of chairs made from many different materials and in every color imaginable, all scattered about the floor as though to accommodate any sort of guest who might arrive.
She blinked, a breath of wonder catching in her throat as she looked around at them all, until her eyes fell on a white one, made of polished wood, with a faded pink cushion. She felt herself moving toward it before she had even decided, like it was her chair all along and she belonged in it.
“Ah,” he said, glancing over at her as he poured her a glass of water from a carafe. “That one is pretty, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, sinking into it and immediately sighing with relief at the way her leg unclenched at the release of weight on its muscles. “Yes, it is lovely.”
He smiled, walking toward her and handing her the glass. “It matches your dress.”
She took the glass with both hands, holding her fingers over his for a moment as she looked up at him thoughtfully, standing above her. “Matthew,” she said. “I am very nervous.”
His smile softened as she pulled the glass away and raised it to her lips, her eyes still tilted up on his as her words lingered between them.
She thought as she gazed up at him, standing over her like this, that he looked every inch the vicar, even combed and buttoned into that emerald waistcoat.
She shivered a little, uncertain if she was reassured by this posture of authority and wisdom or somehow thrilled by the fact that she was soon to possess it in a way she had never before considered.
She blinked, reminding herself that he was only a man.
Only a very lovely man, who just so happened to lead a flock and wore a collar and all that other nonsense.
“So am I,” he said at last. “But only about the ceremony. I am not nervous at all about the prospect of being your husband.”
She pulled the glass away and forced herself to swallow. He looked very earnest as he said it. “You aren’t?” she said. “Even though you hadn’t a choice in the matter?”
“I had a choice, Rosalind,” he replied. “There is always a choice. I am happy with the one I made.”
“Happy?” she echoed, still not entirely convinced.
He released a little huff of breath, reaching up to scratch at his curls, ruining their neatly pomaded order as he tugged a few loose from behind his ear. He gave her a hesitant little smile and glanced upward once as though considering his answer before meeting her eye again.
“I have … long admired you,” he said carefully, twisting the brown curl he’d freed around his finger as he said it. “From a distance. I did not think the match a realistic one, so I did not pursue it as I wished to. But I suppose what I am trying to tell you is that I did wish to. Most fervently.”
She stared. Her heart had grown warm and slid a ways down her torso, she thought. It burned somewhere just above her stomach, sinking and lodging in place like a stone.
“I did not know,” she managed to say, somehow, over the ache of temperature.
“How could you?” he replied kindly, giving a little chuckle. “That is my fault. But here we are and I’ve been given a chance to do it properly, if not in the customary order. So yes, Miss Murphy. I am happy.”
“You are happy and nervous at once?” she said, giving a hesitant little curve of her lips. “Isn’t that something? I thought only I ever felt that way.”
He shook his head, turning back and pulling a stool closer so that he could sit across from her. “I think nervousness always sits alongside something else,” he confessed, “at least when I feel it. Which bits are you nervous about? Perhaps I can allay some of your nerves.”
She winced, drawing her lip between her teeth. Was he counseling her now? Counseling her as a leader of people, or as a husband? Offering her comfort in professionalism, or in affection?
And did it matter?
“There are strange people here,” she said.
“Milling about in the garden. I don’t know them.
I think they are looking for Miss Manners.
They have been showing up at the clinic.
Mae and Vix chase them off, but they keep hoping I will return.
It is awful. I don’t want them to see me hobbling down the aisle. ”
“Not a concern,” he assured her. “Reed and Tod will ensure no one comes into the sanctuary who hasn’t been invited. I promise you that.”
She blinked, surprised that such a thing could be done. “Won’t that only make the scandal worse?” she asked.
“I don’t care,” he told her, his voice firm on the simplicity of how he felt. “It is not something I am going to allow. You will not be terrorized or intimidated on your wedding day. On our wedding day.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice gone a touch breathy at the gallantry of it. “That is good.”
“Anything else?” he asked, as though she could list things for the next several hours and he would not mind.
“Yes,” she said, coloring a little at just the little syllable as it escaped her. “I … well, you know … we all imagine how this day will be, don’t we? I … hm.” She cut herself off, shaking her head. “It is silly.”
He reached out, taking the tips of her fingers into the warm fold of his hand. “It isn’t,” he assured her. “Please tell me.”
The warm sliding stone in her stomach bobbed again, larger this time, radiating outward. She blinked several times and swallowed, steeling herself to just say the thing, since she had begun it anyway.
He likely did not hold hands when he offered counsel to others, she thought. He likely didn’t.
And that ferocity when he’d said he wouldn’t allow those people, those awful curious people into the church. Did he show that for just anyone? Or was it only for her?
“I do not want to have my first kiss in front of my brother,” she blurted out, rapid and tight. “I always thought it would be a magical, private thing, not … not—” She cut herself off, wishing her other hand weren’t holding the empty glass so that she might hide her face with it.
She squinted, glancing up at the ceiling and then down at the floor before making her way back around to her bridegroom’s face. His … smiling face?
“You want me to kiss you?” he asked, sounding a bit cheeky about the prospect, a bit lower and warmer than a vicar’s voice had any right to be. “Before the wedding?”
“Oh, I …” She paused, that hot stone back and all the way in her stomach now and sending a great deal of heat radiating out directly into her cheeks.
There were little crinkling lines around the bright green of his eyes.
His cheeks had lovely vertical lines when he smiled that emphasized the cut of his jaw.
She couldn’t look away from him, from all those details on his face that had been hiding from her prior to this, from the sparkle in his eyes that seemed to her a little more dangerous than it should be, given who he was and where they sat.
“Yes?” she managed to get out, somehow.
“Well,” he said, sliding off the stool and coming to kneel in front of her, one of his hands coming up to retrieve the glass from her grip and setting it gently against the floor. “I would be delighted.”
“You would?” she whispered, already immediately wishing she could take it back as her heart lurched into a rapid cadence against her ribs.
He was still smiling, coming up taller on his knees so that they were eye to eye.
He watched her for a moment before reaching up and stroking his fingertips over the curve of her cheeks.
He studied her face, those green eyes of his darting back and forth over her eyes, sliding over her cheeks, lingering down on her lips.
The sparkle didn’t quite dim so much as it scattered into a glow, something deeper and wider beneath the surface of his gaze.
He drew in a short little breath and leaned forward, pressing his forehead against hers so that she could feel the presence of him so close first, before he took the kiss. Before he gave it.
Her lungs ached, unable to draw more than tiny little wisps of air as she attempted to keep her thoughts steady in this onslaught of sensation.
When she could breathe, she could only inhale his scent, like linseed oil and sweet herbs mingling with the almond pomade in his hair.
And when she smelled him, her vision went too.
“Good?” he asked softly, his breath warm against her mouth, the pads of his fingers caressing her temples and sliding along the frame of her face.
She gave a little nod, licking her lips. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“Good,” he said again, his voice gone thick and raspy, and then tilted his mouth into hers, warm and soft and sweet.
She gasped into it, her hands coming up to rest on his shoulders, on the crest between the slick green finish of the waistcoat and the thin linen crumple of the shirt beneath.
She could feel the warmth of his skin pressed under the shirt.
She let her fingers curl around the fabric, answering the movement of his lips with her own as her eyes flickered shut.
He gave a gentle little sigh, shifting a bit closer to her, his fingers sliding around to the back of her neck. He almost trembled, she thought.
Was this only one kiss? Or two or three?
When he pulled back, he only did so in fractions of movement, still close enough to share their breath. He stayed there, waiting, until she opened her eyes again.
They breathed together in the quiet for a moment, a shared, careful moment, just watching each other at this close angle, their eyes locked.
And then she inhaled, and blinked her eyes, and let her hands release their grip on his shoulders.
“Better?” he asked, his voice gone deep and breathy, his lips curved into a hopeful little smile.
“May I tell you something funny?” she answered in wonder. “I don’t think I am nervous anymore.”