Chapter Twenty #2
“Were you thin and uncoordinated and all elbows and self-consciousness and spots?” she said. “You must have been adorable.”
Minx. He grinned to himself in the near darkness, though none of this was funny.
“Thirteen years is too wide an age gap,” he said.
Instead of denying it, she fell silent as they walked on.
“Yes, it is,” she said at last, and despite himself it felt as though his heart had dropped inside him like a leaden weight.
“I am—how was it you described me this morning? A sweet young twenty-or-so. You are an old man, as I told you then. But there is nothing we can do about our relative ages. I cannot suddenly pretend that I was ten years old when I was left in a basket on the orphanage steps. It creates rather a ridiculous image in the mind and would have made me nineteen when Mama and Papa adopted me.”
They strolled onward.
“Did you perhaps take up your military commission when you were eight?” she asked.
He smiled rather bleakly into the darkness. “Is it a possibility, then?” he asked.
She did not pretend to misunderstand him. She shrugged. “What is the alternative?” she asked.
“Never seeing each other again after Monday?” he said, making a question of it.
She sighed. “Colonel Ware,” she said, “I am a nobody. I have no pedigree whatsoever. Even if I pretend for a moment that Mama and Papa are my birth parents, that does not make a difference. Neither was born within a legal marriage. Papa was raised at the orphanage where I was found. Mama was the product of a bigamous marriage. You, on the other hand, are the very legitimate son of the late Earl of Stratton. You were raised here. You are a colonel in a prestigious cavalry regiment. I daresay all the other officers are sons of the nobility too. There is far more than a thirteen-year span separating us.”
“Yes,” he said. They had reached the summerhouse at the end of the alley. “Shall we go inside and sit awhile?”
“Yes,” she said.
She sat on one of the comfortable sofas while he closed the door.
After hesitating for a mere moment, he sat beside her.
They were silent for a while as their eyes adjusted to the greater darkness cast by the trees on the alley and the silvered treetops and deep blue of the sky.
In the distance there were the lights of lanterns in the stable block on the north side of the house.
“I asked you if you have dreams,” she said. “You told me what answer you would have given a couple of weeks ago. What are your dreams now?”
“The same ones they were before I squashed them and adopted practicality as more appropriate to my age and status,” he said.
“In my career and day-to-day life, I have goals, and they have not changed. But beyond that, in my personal life, I dream of love and marriage and fatherhood. I dream of a home in the country, not too far from London and my work but far enough that my children can grow up with space and the beauties of nature surrounding them and my wife can be comfortable. But it is not just any kind of love of which I dream. There are all sorts of levels of attraction that can pass for love, but I dream of…Oh, of that one woman without whom I cannot live with any degree of happiness. That one woman who feels the same way about me. I have not expressed it well enough, though. How does one describe that kind of love? Language is quite inadequate to do it. But—”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
He smiled and they sat quietly for a while, gazing along the alley and watching the silver tips of the poplar trees swaying in a breeze that had not been apparent while they walked.
“I dream of the sort of…oh, nonsensical love that does not recognize age and pedigree differences as being in any way relevant,” he said.
“As a young man I was afraid to search, afraid perhaps that I would find and then destroy the purity of the love with uncontrolled, promiscuous behavior. When I was in my thirties I settled for a sensible marriage with a friend whom I liked and with whom I could enjoy a comfortable sort of affection. A woman of the right age and pedigree. Now that I have been honorably released from that obligation, the dream has revived. With the power of a mighty storm.”
He took her left hand in his and realized that she was a bit chilly—and perhaps a bit dazed? He glanced around for the lap blankets that were usually left here and got to his feet to fetch one. He wrapped it about her shoulders and kept his arm about her.
“For me?” she said, her voice high-pitched and breathless. “You feel that way about me? As though you had been struck by a mighty storm?”
Had he misread the signs? Was she not ready for this?
“I do,” he said, and watched her close her eyes and bite her bottom lip.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, snuggling into the blanket. He could feel her shivering.
“Would you like me to take you back to the ballroom?” he asked. He did not want her to feel trapped by her agreement to walk outside with him.
She turned her gaze upon him then, her face a mere few inches from his own.
“I have dreamed of love too,” she said. “The love of which you speak. I did not expect ever to find it. I know I have nothing to recommend me to any man in whom I may be interested. Among other things, I am plain and lacking in femininity. But I have been unwilling to pretend to be what I am not. I lead a happy and useful life. I do not need marriage, as so many other women seem to do. I always feel so sorry for the poverty of their lives, which they cannot apparently live on their own account. Nonetheless, I would like to be married. But only if I loved, and if the man loved me. For a short while in London and even after we came here, I thought perhaps Owen…Well, I liked him exceedingly. I still do. And I know he likes me. We have a great deal in common. I thought we could work well together if there was a closer connection between us. I thought I could be happy, that we could be happy. But it was not the sort of love of which I had dreamed. It was more a practical love. Fortunately, I understood that in time to save both myself and Owen from making a dreadful mistake. He realized it too.”
“But he did ask you to marry him?” he said.
“Oh, yes.” She laughed softly. “In an impulsive burst of enthusiasm. His relief when I said no was palpable.” She laughed again. “Oh, I do love him. But not in that way.”
She looked at him again, and he looked back.
“That is the way I feel about you,” she said, and bit her lip again.
They fell silent. From the direction of the house came the faint sound of music. The dancing had resumed.
“You are beautiful,” he said. “And surely the most feminine woman I have ever known, for there is substance to your character, not just the sort of fluttering artifice that often passes for femininity. Remember that, Winifred, please. Always remember that you are beautiful.”
“Another thing to remember?” she said, smiling at him a bit tremulously.
“You will not need to remember if I am there to remind you each day,” he said. “And each night.”
Her smile faded. Her eyes grew more luminous. But she did not lower her gaze from his.
He sighed. There was no point in trying to tell himself that at any moment now he would recover his senses, or that she would recover hers. Now was the time to risk speaking truth, whatever the outcome turned out to be.
“I love you,” he said. And though his mind reached for more words, he knew there were no others. He had said it all.
“I love you too.” Her hand came up, and she caressed his cheek with her fingertips. “Nicholas.”
Ah. There was something about hearing one’s name on the lips of the woman one loved.
He drew her closer and kissed her.
And ah, the sweetness of it. His memory of their first brief kiss on the island in the lake had been all caught up with guilt. This kiss was different. Guilt free. Free. Her lips were soft and eager, her breath warm against his cheek. And ah, the rightness of it.
Though it was not entirely unforbidden, was it?
He drew back his head, and she opened her eyes to gaze at him, her lips moist in the dim light of the moon and slightly parted.
“I ought to have had a word with your father before we stepped out of doors,” he said.
“He will like it if you do it tomorrow,” she said.
“Though literally speaking, it is not necessary. I am of age. But perhaps this has been no more than a pleasant stroll outdoors to get away from the noise and stuffiness of the ballroom. A little flirtation with no commitment. Perhaps we ought to make our way back.”
He stiffened. What the devil—? What had they been talking about?
“Is that what you want?” he asked.
She searched his face with anxious eyes. “Is it what you want?” she asked.
And he understood her sudden fright. The depths of her lack of belief in her own charms were unfathomable, it seemed. Despite her confidence in other areas of her life and her forthright way of speaking, she believed her chances of attracting a man to be slim to nil. She had panicked.
“You goose, Win,” he said. “Has no one ever taught you that answering a question with a question is abominable? We could go on all night with What do you want? No, what do you want? What a bore that would be.”
“But I do not know what you want,” she said.
“What I want,” he said, “is to go back to the house, though preferably not immediately, and stand in the middle of the ballroom floor between dances and announce, in my parade ground voice so no one can possibly miss it, that I love Winifred Cunningham and she loves me.”
She made a squeaking sound, which might have been alarm but might also be suppressed laughter.
“Please do not,” she said.
“Would you be embarrassed?” he asked her.
“Horribly,” she said. “Nicholas!” She covered her mouth with one hand.
“You goose,” he said again. “Did you really believe I had suddenly developed a case of cold feet by bumbling on about not having spoken with your father? Just after telling you I love you? Ah, Win. Will you marry me? Do you want me to go down on one knee even though I am an old man in his thirties and may never get up again?”
She lowered her hand, her eyes riveted to his face. “Oh, I do,” she said. “Will you? But are you quite sure?”
He ignored the last question, went down on one knee before the couch, and possessed himself of her left hand.
“Win,” he said, “will you do me the great honor of marrying me, even though we are an ill-assorted couple and any connection between us would seem to be an impossibility? Entirely because I love you with all my heart and wish to devote the rest of my life to making you happy?”
She tipped her head to one side and regarded him with a slight frown on her face. Being Winifred Cunningham, of course she could not be expected to give him the obvious answer.
“I do not know how to be a cavalry colonel’s wife,” she said. “I cannot be at all what your colleagues and friends will expect of your wife. Perhaps we ought to talk more about this before you regret it in the morning.”
“Before I regret it,” he said. “Will you regret it?”
“Only if you do,” she said.
“Here we go again,” he said. “Will you regret it? Will you? Can we just take a leap of faith here, Win? That is all life is, you know, for we can never predict the future. But I do know that whatever the future holds, I want you at my side. As my wife. I am kneeling on my bad leg, by the way. Any moment now it is going to be hopelessly cramped. Will you marry me?”
She drew her hand from his and cupped his face with both hands.
“You poor wounded thing,” she said. “Yes, I will, Nicholas, though I am consumed with terror even as I say the words. But I do know that I cannot, I absolutely cannot, say goodbye to you on Monday, knowing that I will never see you again. My heart would break. I would endure that if you did not love me and had not offered for me, but I know that if I said no now, I would regret all my life that I was afraid to take the risk. I will love you always with everything that is me. I will live to make you happy. Despite all our incompatibilities, I will—”
“No,” he said. “We will, Win. There would be nothing one-sided in our marriage commitment. I daresay all marriages face difficulties as two lives attempt to meld into one. We will do it together. We will each work to make the other happy and, in the process, make ourselves happy too.”
He was well aware of the sentimentality of his words. But the thing was that he meant them with all his heart. He loved her. And, God help him, she loved him despite his age and the cruelty of his mouth—and his slightly lame leg.
They were smiling at each other then, his face in her hands, his hands braced on the edge of the sofa on either side of her. And she closed the gap between their mouths and kissed him, right on his cruel lips.
He surged to his feet, ignoring the twinge in his knee, swept her up into his arms, and seated himself with her cradled on his lap.
And he was conscious of feeling utterly at peace and happy, with the unlikeliest woman he could ever have dreamed of cuddled up against him, warm and relaxed beneath the lap robe he had rearranged about her, her head on his shoulder.
And she was with the unlikeliest man—a soldier with a career and a history in battle that was unthinkable to her.
He kissed her again, parting her lips with his own and sliding his tongue into her mouth. Warm and sweet and inviting. And trusting.
Her arm was about his neck, the fingers of one hand threaded through his hair.
“Happy?” he murmured against her mouth.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Happy.”
“And before you can ask,” he said, “so am I.”
“Mmm.” She sighed. “Kiss me again, Nicholas.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.