Chapter Eighteen The Best of Them #3
“Without authorization.”
“I married badly.”
Mary Beth sat beside him. “Very.”
The beck below the bridge had narrowed to a clear summer run. Sunlight moved over the stones where they had once stood soaked through, angry, frightened, and too attracted to behave sensibly.
Ambrose rested his forearms on his knees. “Do you remember what I said here?”
“You said several irritating things.”
“I said I would not be an afternoon under a bridge.”
“Yes.”
“I was very solemn about it.”
“Painfully.”
He smiled. “I had known you approximately ten days.”
“You were presumptuous.”
“I was terrified.”
That surprised her enough that she turned toward him.
Ambrose picked at a blade of grass. “I knew what happened to men like me when women like you became tired of being brave. I thought one morning you would remember exactly how much easier your life could be if I vanished.”
Mary Beth considered pretending offense, but marriage had made unnecessary performances harder to sustain.
“I considered easier,” she said.
“I know.”
“I nearly chose it.”
“I know that too.”
“And you still married me.”
“I have poor judgment around beautiful widows.”
“Former widows.”
“Dangerous distinction.”
She leaned against his shoulder.
For a while they listened to the water.
Mary Beth had once believed freedom meant never needing anyone enough to be hurt by them.
She no longer believed that, though she had no intention of making a speech about it.
Ambrose already knew. He had seen her furious, frightened, aroused, jealous, unreasonable, calculating, tender, and half asleep with her hair caught under his elbow.
There was little value in becoming eloquent now.
“I am glad you came back,” she said.
Ambrose turned his head and kissed her temple. “I am glad you ordered me to.”
“I did not order you.”
“You threatened to come to Leeds and embarrass us both.”
“That was encouragement.”
“Of course.”
They returned to the house after the last carriage had gone.
That evening, rain began after dinner.
It was a soft rain, nothing like the storm that had broken the wall or the downpour that trapped them beneath the bridge. Mary Beth stood at the bedroom window in her nightdress and watched it darken the terrace.
Behind her, Ambrose set aside the book he had been pretending to read.
“You are checking the drainage,” he said.
“I am admiring the rain.”
“You have been married to an engineer for four months. You are checking the drainage.”
Mary Beth glanced over her shoulder. “Perhaps.”
“It will hold.”
“I know.”
“Come to bed.”
She turned from the window.
There were still days when the sight of him there startled her. His shirt lay over the back of a chair. His watch rested beside her hairpins. His boots were beside hers. Nothing about the room had been rearranged to hide him.
Mary Beth crossed to the bed and climbed in beside him.
Ambrose drew her close under the sheet. The kiss began lazily and became less lazy when her hand slid beneath the open collar of his nightshirt. He laughed against her mouth, then caught her wrist and kissed the inside of it.
“No locked door?” he murmured.
“The door is closed.”
“Not locked.”
“We are married. Anyone who enters deserves instruction.”
“That sounds threatening.”
“It is.”
His hand moved along her back, unhurried. Mary Beth kissed him again, and there was something almost decadent in having no deadline attached to desire. Dawn could come when it pleased; there was no separate room waiting for him, and tenderness no longer carried questions she was afraid to answer.
They made love slowly, with more laughter than urgency, and afterward Mary Beth lay with one leg tangled through his while rain tapped the glass.
Ambrose was nearly asleep when she said, “You still snore.”
His eyes opened. “You waited four months to tell me?”
“I was gathering evidence.”
He rolled over and pulled the pillow partly across his face. “Cruel woman.”
Mary Beth took the pillow away. “You knew that before you married me.”
“Yes.”
“And yet.”
“And yet.”
He kissed her once, sleepy and warm, then settled again with his hand at her waist.
The next morning the rain had stopped.
By noon the lawn shone, the drainage held, and three carriages arrived unexpectedly because several guests from the previous day had decided Blackthorn was safe enough to visit twice in one week.
Mary Beth found this excessive but endured it.
She and Ambrose were crossing the terrace when a newcomer near the roses lowered her voice to the woman beside her. She was not quite quiet enough.
“Is that Mary Beth Blackthorn?”
Her companion followed the direction of her eyes. “Yes.”
“I’ve heard terrible things about her.”
Mary Beth stopped, and Ambrose stopped with her. The newcomer flushed when she realized she had been overheard. Mary Beth considered rescuing her, then decided the woman could survive the discomfort she had created.
“Most of them are true,” she said.
Ambrose glanced at her. “Not most.”
Mary Beth slipped her hand into his.
“No,” she said. “The best ones happened after I met you.”