Chapter Delaford, Dorsetshire #10
“You refused me so briskly, as if the idea of our marriage was inconceivable. The morning before, I told my sister that I meant to propose, and she said, ‘No woman could possibly fall in love with someone called Squibby. She’s not in love with you.’ ”
“We bungled the whole thing,” I breathed.
“The only thing that gave me hope was that your letters were addressed to ‘Hugh.’ ”
“Your sister is probably right,” I said, feeling as if I was overflowing with emotion. “Except it was too late for me. You don’t think that I’d eat a worm for just any old fellow, do you?”
Hugh breathed something that sounded like a grateful curse, and then he leaned even closer and kissed me.
I have been kissed, remember? Any number of times in the last year. I didn’t let anyone kiss me in my debut Season because… well, because. I was waiting. After Squibby left for France, I went through a phase of reckless kissing, trying to find out if love was a lightning bolt spurred by desire.
“You’re so beautiful,” Hugh said, sometime later, his hands cupped around my face. “You’re so damned beautiful.”
What I was feeling was so big—and so precious—that I couldn’t shape words.
“Your hair is like a flame,” Hugh said, clearly not as dazed as I. “I adore your legs and your toes.”
“My chaste bosom?”
We kissed for a while longer, and then he told me exactly how much he loved my bosom, and it turned out that he had paid very close attention to my every curve, and thought none of them chaste.
In fact, he recited most of that poem Andrew Marvell wrote. I mean to memorize it, but for the moment, this line stuck with me:
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest.
I shall never again worry about whether my “chaste bosom” isn’t large enough.
After more kissing and some promiscuous closeness, Hugh drew back and pulled a small book from his breast pocket. It was bound in worn leather, with his initials stamped in gold on the front.
I was surprised as, frankly, I was expecting the diamond to make another appearance.
I turned the book over and looked up at him. “May I?”
“I wrote it for you.”
It took me a moment to understand what I was reading. “It’s the record of your Grand Tour!”
(Gentlemen keep a commonplace book of memories, and if they are very clever, watercolors. It hardly needs to be said that Hugh’s was merely a list of scrawled notes with places and dates.)
He nodded.
I bent my head, feeling sun on the back of my neck because my hat was off, and read one page and then another, and then a page from the middle of the book. By then I felt as if I might burst with happiness.
“You really didn’t forget me when you were traveling,” I whispered.
His blunt finger came down on the page I was looking at. “Everywhere I went, I thought about what you would think of the place. This was when I visited that villa outside Florence, the one with The Birth of Venus.”
Botticelli’s Primavera has three red-haired women who are thin as shooting sticks and not nearly as beautiful as Snaps.
The one with her back to me has hair most like Snaps’s but the one to the left has an odd expression.
Snaps would say, a frightfully odd expression.
The one to the right has a nose like a poker.
“Oh,” I said softly. Whenever I turned the pages, I discovered that Hugh was having a conversation with me, except I didn’t happen to be next to him.
“I went to Fontainebleau, but I came away without going inside, as I didn’t want to see it without you.”
“Also because you don’t like Napoleon,” I said, poking him.
“Who could? Not a sporting sort of fellow at all. I wanted to travel on to Greece and Portugal, but not without you, so I came home to fetch you instead. I thought perhaps we might complete the Grand Tour together, Snaps. We could even start over, because it wasn’t as much fun as it could have been. With you.”
Happiness was burning like a comet in my chest.
“What if I had married another man while you were traveling?”
His jaw firmed. “Colonel Brandon would have dispatched the groom that I left in your household to fetch me, and I would have returned home immediately.”
I gaped, just like a romantic heroine on seeing a ghost. “That’s why the Colonel stamped all my letters and never mentioned the impropriety of our correspondence!”
“I asked him for your hand at the beginning of your Season, but I wanted to give you time to look about,” Hugh said, running a hand through his hair.
“Then I realized that your ‘looking about’ turned me feral, so I stopped going to balls. You might as well know that I’m jealous, Snaps.
No talking to other men on the terrace at midnight. ”
“I was always looking for you,” I admitted, which led to more kissing.
“It seemed to me that you didn’t bother to dance with me during the Season,” I said later, “and then when you hadn’t anything else to do, you pulled out a ring and gave it to me.”
“It wasn’t just that I wanted to knock down your dance partners. I wanted to kiss you, which would have been monstrously improper. It seemed best to stay away. I was so afraid that you would reject me that I couldn’t express myself at all.”
A long time later, I came back to my senses to find that Hugh and I were pressed together.
“I adore you,” he said in a raspy voice, pulling away just enough so that our eyes could meet.
“With a passion that is the backbone of my life, Snaps. I decided to marry you as soon as I realized that people could pair off, like animals in the ark. You were there when I learned about Noah and his ark. Do you remember?”
I swallowed hard. “When I was three and supposedly read the story to you?”
“Exactly. I bought Norland Park’s entire library so that I can give you your atlas back.”
“You what?”
“That foolish woman Fanny Dashwood decided to have the library torn out so she could do up a salon in the Chinese style, so I sent our estate manager over and scooped up all the books.”
“Oh, Hugh.” My eyes grew hazy with tears.
“I bought Dashwood’s hunters, too, as she’s decided they’re too expensive. Dashwood lives a dog’s life, that poor sod.”
“Poor fellow,” I said, gurgling with laughter.
And happiness.
“I have never wanted anything in this life except to be with you, to laugh with you, to learn with you, to argue and share things with you.”
“I didn’t let myself admit it, but I feel the same way,” I said. “You are magnificent, and I am hopelessly besotted. If you left now, for France or even for Bath, it would break my heart.”
His arms tightened around me. “You asked me a couple of days ago what I was meant to be, Snaps. Do you remember?”
“Yes. You said I was meant to be a novelist,” I said with a happy glow of memory. “And you didn’t tell me about you.”
“I was meant to be your husband, Miss Dashwood. Even when I was six years old and chasing you around the garden making blossoms snap at you, I knew it.”
He stepped back and turned to Belial, peacefully cropping grass. From a saddlebag, he pulled a slightly crumpled bouquet of snapdragons. “For my fiery snapdragon.”
As I took it from him, my lip trembled, and I almost started to cry. The only reason I didn’t is that he uncorked a small bottle of green liqueur and put it into my hand. One gulp of Pernod had me coughing so hard that tears really did come to my eyes.
A while later Hugh said, “After you read me the story of Noah’s ark, I told my mother that I was going to take you on board or not go at all—which is why she had nothing to do with my proposal years later.”
“You told the countess that?” I gasped. Then I realized that it might explain why she had always been so very kind to me, even when I was a little girl.
Everything he’d said had gone to my head, so much so that I reached up and drew down his head and kissed him, instead of the other way around. A very long time later, I realized that I was no longer sitting on the wall, but instead on Hugh’s lap.
“It’s my turn,” I said huskily, arms around his neck. “Will you marry me, Hugh?”
His eyes widened, and that beautiful, wicked smile spread over his face. “Yes, but only if you call me Squibby, and I call you Snaps.”
I nodded, because his expression made me unusually shy.
“Even on our tombstone,” I promised.
This time, I let him put the ring on my finger.