Chapter Twenty-Two #3
The ash… She hadn’t realised. Ismay glanced over her shoulder at the ash-slide that had stopped miraculously mere feet from where she’d fallen.
She gave a shaky laugh. ‘The work of San Gennaro?’ She’d no more than said the words and the pile began to move again, crashing into a powdery heap where she’d lain.
She shuddered, laying her head against Alistair’s shoulder.
San Gennaro or not, Alistair had been the one to drag her to safety.
‘You’re always carrying me to safety.’ Even when he hadn’t liked her, he’d rescued her that night in the dining room.
She looked up at him in awe. ‘What are you doing here? You hate heights.’ This made little sense. Perhaps she was dead after all. If he was here, she didn’t mind.
‘I hate heights, but I love you. Your father told me you’d gone up the mountain.
He was worried sick.’ He helped her to her feet, letting her use his body as a crutch.
‘I don’t think I can carry you all the way down the mountain, Iz, but we need to get you to clean air. If you lean on me, can you walk?’
It was slow progress to the inn, filled with frequent stops to rest and—unfortunately—to be ill once more, but the air got cleaner the lower they got, and her strength gradually returned.
They took a long break at the inn. Alistair paid the exorbitant price charged for a mediocre omelette and the bad wine.
‘I came because your father was worried. But I also came for another reason.’ He fed her small bites of the eggs with his fingers as he talked. ‘Your father apologised, and he gave me permission to ask you to marry me.’
Ismay stopped in midchew. ‘He did? Are you telling me you climbed a mountain to propose to me?’
‘Yes.’ Alistair grinned, and the euphoria of knowing she was alive and they were both safe swamped him. ‘If you would like me to?’
She laughed, teasing him. ‘You want me to answer before you ask the question? That seems backwards to me, Alistair.’
‘Well, we’re pretty good at doing things backwards.’ Alistair gripped her hands, his grin turning sombre. ‘Ismay Elizabeth Rose, will you do me the great honour of becoming my partner in business, in life, in love?’
His partner. Not his wife. It was perhaps not an ideal proposal by romantic standards, but it was perfect by hers. More importantly, he had known it would be. ‘You’ve thought about how you wanted to word that,’ she commented.
‘All the way up the mountain, Iz. Once I knew it was possible, all I wanted to do was reach you.’ He squeezed her hands, and she saw the depths of his devotion in his eyes.
‘Then you fell just before I got there. The ash moved, and I thought it was over, that happiness had been within my grasp and I had lost it. I have never been as frightened in my whole life, not even when I told you I loved you that night in the library.’
‘But you acted. You raced towards the danger anyway, and that made all the difference.’ She bracketed his face with her hands. She wanted to soothe him, wanted to ease the fright in those beautiful eyes.
He smiled at her words. ‘Like you did at the boar hunt. I figured I owed you one.’
‘Actually, you owe me two.’ She laughed softly. ‘I pulled you up that first night on the mountain.’
‘I saved you in the dining room that very first night,’ he replied with a chuckle, their words whispers for each other alone, their mouths close. ‘But who’s counting?’
‘We are. It’s what we do, Alistair. We save each other.’ She feathered a kiss over his lips.
‘Is that your way of answering my question?’ He responded with a kiss of his own.
‘It most certainly is,’ she murmured against his mouth, wrapping her arms about him as they straddled the worn wooden bench in the inn yard. ‘How soon do you think we might wed?’
‘I think the sooner the better.’ Alistair’s tone was playfully cryptic as if there was one more secret waiting in the wings.
‘I like the idea of that, but why sooner?’ she asked curiously.
‘Because we do things backwards, Iz.’ He chuckled.
‘Most people marry and then find a home and establish a career and a family. But we have a home, we have our careers.’ She liked how he said that, how he thought the journal and her science was her career along with helping at the warehouse.
‘And we just might possibly have our family, too, Iz,’ he said meaningfully.
‘I’d wager it’s not bad fish or noxious fumes that has your stomach turned inside out. ’
She punched him playfully in the arm. ‘Of course you’d know I was pregnant before I did.’ She laughed, but the truth was she’d already begun to suspect it was a possibility. ‘So, sooner it is.’
‘Christmas Eve,’ Alistair whispered into her sooty hair. ‘No later.’
‘Four days?’ She drew back to give him a hard stare. ‘That’s not much time.’
‘It’s the season of miracles, Iz. Anything is possible.
If dried blood can liquefy, if an avalanche of ash can stop feet from burying the woman I love, if two stubborn people can find love together, then planning a wedding in four days is possible.
We don’t need much, just each other.’ He was right. She’d just been slow to realise it.