CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR #2
Rhys was laughing. He was trying to contain it, trying to maintain the dignity appropriate to a wedding ceremony, but the laughter was escaping despite his efforts. His shoulders shook with it. His eyes crinkled at the corners. He looked happier than Mel had ever seen him.
“You just caught a toad mid-vow,” he managed. “And then asked the vicar to continue as though nothing had happened.”
“Something happened. Brutus escaped. I addressed the situation and returned to the matter at hand.” Mel felt her own lips twitching despite her best efforts at composure. “That seemed like the practical approach.”
“It was the most practical approach I have ever witnessed.” He reached out and cupped her face in his hands, his expression shifting from amused to tender.
“I cherish you with all my heart, Melanie Langford. Toad-catching abilities and all.”
He kissed her then, there at the altar of the small chapel, with their daughters watching and their friends applauding and one decorated toad observing from his owner’s arms.
It was not a long, passionate kiss, given the audience of children and clergy. But it was real, and it was theirs, and it sealed the vows they had just spoken in a way that words alone could not have accomplished.
When they parted, Thistle was bouncing with excitement, Anna was attempting to restore dignity to the flower basket she had dropped during the toad pursuit, and Viola was crying silent tears that she wiped away with the back of her hand.
“Are you our mother now?” Viola asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Mel looked at the child who had given her a shell, who had trusted her with nightmares, who had learned to speak above a whisper because someone had finally shown her that her voice mattered.
“I am your stepmother,” she said carefully.
“Your mother will always be Celeste. But I am here, and I cherish you all dearly and I will take care of you for as long as you’ll let me.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
Viola threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around Mel with the fierce desperation of a child who had finally found something permanent.
Thistle joined a moment later, and then Anna, and then Rhys, until they were all tangled together in an embrace that was awkward and wonderful and exactly right.
“This was the most chaotic wedding I have ever attended,” Benedict observed from the pews, his tone carrying evident approval.
“It was the most perfect wedding I have ever attended,” Serena corrected, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Chaos is simply enthusiasm expressed creatively.”
The wedding party that followed was small and warm and full of laughter.
There were toasts from Benedict and tears from Mrs. Kemp and a cake that Cook had prepared with evident pride.
Brutus was confined to a terrarium for the remainder of the festivities, though Thistle visited him frequently to report on the proceedings.
As evening fell and the guests began to depart, Mel found herself standing at the window of the drawing room, looking out at the garden where so much had changed over the past months. Rhys came to stand beside her, his hand finding hers with the easy familiarity that had developed between them.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Duchess of Trevane.”
“I feel like myself,” she said. “With a different title and a ring on my finger.”
“Is that enough?”
She turned to look at him, at the man who had been London’s most notorious rake and was now her husband. The father of three remarkable children. The person she would spend the rest of her life beside.
“It’s more than enough,” she said. “It’s everything I never knew I wanted.”
He pulled her closer and she let him. They stood in the quiet of the drawing room while the sunset began its slow work outside, and for a moment neither of them spoke, because there were, finally, no more arrangements to be made.
“I have been thinking,” he said, after a time.
“That is a dangerous admission from a duke.”
“It is a reckless admission from any man.”
She laughed, quietly, into his shoulder. She had been doing that with increasing freedom over the past weeks, and she did not know when she would stop being surprised by the sound.
“Tell me your dangerous thought.”
“I have three daughters,” he said. “I did not expect them. I did not plan for them. I arrived at them by a route I would not recommend to anyone. And I would not give up a single one of them for the entirety of my former life.”
“Yes.”
“I have been wondering what it would be to have a child whose arrival I did expect. Whose presence I did plan for. Whose first breath I could be in the house for.” He paused. “A child of ours. If you wanted one. If we wanted one.”
Mel was quiet. She had not expected him to say it first. She had, to her own considerable surprise, already been thinking it, though she had filed the thought away to be considered at a later date.
“I have been a governess for six years,” she said. “I have raised other women’s children with great care, and I have been very good at it. I did not permit myself to want children of my own, because wanting them would have required hoping for a life I did not expect to have.”
“And now.”
“Now I have the life.”
“Is that a yes?”
“That is a yes, subject to the ordinary interventions of fate.” She drew back far enough to look at him.
“I should like that very much. When it comes. If it comes. I should also like to continue teaching the girls their Latin, so I give notice now that the position of Duchess will be performed part-time at best.”
“Anna will demand a written schedule.”
“Anna will draw it up herself and submit it for my approval.”
“I accept your terms.”
“I thought you might.”
She rested her head against his shoulder again. He rested his cheek against her hair. Outside, the sunset continued its quiet arithmetic on the garden, indifferent to the two people who had just added a future to the several they already had.
Their family. Their home. Their future, just beginning.