Epilogue
“We should have gone to Scotland,” Ezra muttered to Iris, who stood at his side, bouncing on her toes with barely contained energy. “Just you, me, and Letitia. It would have been so much easier.”
Iris gave him an appalled look. He had forgotten to consider his audience when lodging this particular complaint.
“What is Scotland?” she asked. Apparently, her objection was not based on dislike of their northern neighbors. “Also, this is so fun. Don’t be silly, Uncle Ezra.”
“I am just being silly,” he told his niece, chucking her under the chin. “This is so fun.”
“I know,” Iris said before skipping off and abandoning him to his fate.
His house was packed with Lightholders.
The announcement of the betrothal between the Duke of Rutley and some common-born woman that nobody had ever heard of had, as predicted, caused a great deal of upset among the people of the ton.
Greater outrage sparked with each successive detail.
The bride was a former governess. She had red hair. She was over thirty years old.
Ezra had been deeply angered by the gossip, which had amused Letitia to no end.
“I told you!” she had crowed whenever he had shown any sign of his temper. “I told you that everyone would talk. And you said, ‘I don’t care, Letty. I love talk, Letty.”
“I don’t think I said that second part,” he grumbled.
“And I don’t care what they think. I just think that they are saying it all wrong.
I like your hair. And you are a bloody wonderful governess.
That is not a bad thing. And I should not want to marry some half-grown girl barely out of the schoolroom.
I have seen those debutantes, Letty. They are children. ”
She had laughed even harder, and she looked so pretty when she laughed that, really, any man in his position would have taken the opportunity to drag her up to his bedroom.
Still, he positively refused to let Letitia’s wedding day be tarnished by the nattering of ill-tempered gossips, so he had obtained a special license, which allowed them to be married in the privacy of their own home.
But Letty had mentioned it to Clio and Persephone. It really would only have taken telling one of them, but Letitia had become fast friends with both of them.
And once the two women knew, all the Lightholders knew.
The fact that they had not been formally invited did not affect any of them. They flocked from far and wide. And they all ended up in Ezra’s parlor.
There were Catherine and Ariadne, Xander’s two sisters, standing with David, Ariadne’s husband, while Catherine cooed over Clio’s new baby.
Clio, visibly exhausted but happy to be here, sat on a nearby settee, her husband hovering protectively as she spoke to Daphne, Hugh’s younger sister.
Hugh, Aaron, and Jason watched over a distressing number of children while their wives gossiped nearby.
Catherine’s husband looked haunted as the triplets explained to Iris that, even though he was named Percy, they called him “Uncle Other Percy,” since Persephone had been granted her nickname first.
It was noisy. It was chaos.
Xander watched it all, gently rocking a baby, looking extremely pleased with the scene before him. Ezra didn’t even think that was Xander’s baby, though God only knew whose it was. He felt like another child appeared every time he turned around.
He could not even be angry about it, though, because they had all come to celebrate Letty. Well, him, too. But the part that mattered to him was the way his love—the woman who, as of an hour ago, had become his wife—was blooming under their outpouring of adoration.
Like now. Now, Letty was standing with Helen and Phoebe, Aaron’s wife. He could not hear what they were saying from here, but she was laughing so hard that it looked like she could barely catch her breath.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Aaron, having evidently extracted himself from the snare of children, appeared at Ezra’s side.
“Hm?”
“These women.” Aaron’s face was intensely scarred from his time at war, but when he looked at his wife, the clear love in his expression made those scars seem far less terrible. “We are the luckiest bastards in the world, aren’t we?”
Ezra chuckled. “And not for the reason that anyone thinks, either.”
Aaron held out his glass to clink, and Ezra obliged.
As long as he talked to them one at a time, maybe it wasn’t so bad to have his whole extended family here.
That said, he would not be sorry when they all left and he finally, finally had Letitia all to himself.
Persephone had even volunteered to take Iris for a few days so that he and Letty could enjoy their newlywed bliss alone.
And that was why she was his favorite member of the family.
Aside from his wife and niece, of course.
“Oh, good afternoon, Duchess Rutley,” Ezra said when they had finally given Iris the last hug goodbye, then deposited her onto Jason’s shoulder. Xander’s younger brother had been drafted into helping rally the half-sleeping children back to the Blackwoods’ home.
Letty pressed a hand to her cheek, where a blush flamed. She had been going bright pink all day, at every single compliment delivered her way, which had been numerous enough that it was a surprise that she had any blood remaining in her body at all.
“I am the Duchess of Rutley,” she said, awestruck, shaking her head over this fact. “Who would have thought it?”
Ezra wrapped his arms around her waist. His face was tired from smiling, but he wasn’t about to stop now.
“I would have thought it,” he declared. “It was my very good idea to marry you, and I should like to receive credit for that, thank you very much.”
She laughed, then reached up to pull his face down to hers for a soft, lingering kiss.
“You did think it,” she murmured against his mouth, and he was struck by how perfect things were, that he could kiss this woman that he adored right here in his own foyer—in their own foyer—for the rest of his days.
“You believed when I could not, and I am so, so grateful that you did. I love you, Ezra. And I am overjoyed beyond reason to be your wife.”
He kissed her back again.
“Being your husband is the greatest honor I know,” he told her solemnly, but today was not a day for solemnity, so he let wicked glee back into his tone. “Except now I would also be very much honored if you would let me, at very long last, take you up to our bedchambers.”
Letty arched an eyebrow at him, then adopted so exaggerated an upper-crust accent that even the queen herself would consider it a bit too much.
“Oh, I am sorry, Your Grace,” she said, putting her nose in the air. “But proper aristocrats never share a bedchamber. You see, I am a duchess now, and I simply cannot abide—”
Whatever else she had to say was lost in a yelp of laughter as he swept her up into his arms and began carrying her upstairs.
“As impressed as I am with your aristocratic authority, Your Grace,” he said between kisses as they approached their room, “if you think I plan to let you sleep anywhere but at my side, you have gone quite mad.”
“A husband for less than a day and already a tyrant,” she sighed, but the effect of her complaint was rather undone by the smile on her lips.
Rather than explain himself in words, Ezra decided to make his case in deeds.
He lay her down on the bed with all the reverence he had in him, then crawled up the bed until he was lying at her side.
They rolled, facing one another, so that they could kiss and kiss, his hand in her hair, her leg thrown over his hip.
They fit together like this. They fit perfectly.
And once he managed to get this damned dress off of her, nothing would ever come between them again.
After he had done valiant battle with stays and ties and about a thousand tiny buttons—after Letty was naked before him, all strong limbs and the occasional smattering of freckles that he planned to chart with his tongue—after he was so hard and aching at the sight of her that it was a wonder that he had not swooned like a girl—
After all these things, she said, “Ezra, wait.”
He did, of course, but he could not say that he had a very good attitude about it. He was halfway through kicking aside his own trousers when he froze, groaning.
“Letty, my love,” he said, just a touch petulantly. “Surely there is nothing that is so important right now.”
There was a look in her eye, happy and anticipatory, but a touch nervous, too.
“Well, I don’t mean wait,” she clarified. “I just… There’s something I need to tell you first.”
“We already said the vows, love,” he said. “There’s no backing out now.”
She rolled her eyes at him fondly. “It’s not that. It’s just… I thought you might want to know that we have one more scandal ahead of us.”
Oh Lord. He could not even imagine what that might be.
At the end of the day, he didn’t truly care—Letitia was his wife, and that was not the kind of thing he would undo even if he could, and everyone else could go hang—but he still felt a strong desire to protect her from any gossip that might hurt her feelings.
She had had enough hurt feelings in her life, and now that he was here to stand in the way of any minor pain, he would do so.
“What is it?” he asked cautiously, though he did finish ridding himself of his trousers. He wanted to be next to her. He needed to be as close to her as possible.
When he was back at her side, their legs entwined with a form of proximity that was not nearly enough for Ezra, she smiled.
“I am afraid that we will give people reason to count the months after our wedding,” she said, biting her lip against her shy smile.
Counting the… At first, he didn’t understand. When he did, however, the knowledge hit him like a boulder. He pushed up onto his elbow so that he could look her over without untangling the places where they were touching.
“You are—” He broke off, a breath escaping him in a gust of wonder.
“Increasing,” she confirmed, touching her stomach lightly.
It was still almost as flat as it had always been—Ezra had enjoyed becoming an expert on all things pertaining to her body these past few months while planning their wedding—but if he looked very closely, he could see a slight roundness that had not been present before.
“I only just became certain, but I haven’t had my courses in ages.
I do not think that we are going to be able to pass off the babe as merely an early arrival. ”
He kissed her, surging for her mouth like a man dying of thirst, because there were no words in the English language that could possibly convey the depth of his love for her otherwise.
“I don’t care what people say. And if they dare to make comments to our daughter about timing, I will shoot them.”
He had never been in a duel in his life—he fought with words more than weapons, the incident in Belgium aside—but he would fight anyone who dared to hurt his family.
Letitia laughed, the sound a bit breathless. “A daughter, hm? You sound very certain.”
“Oh, I am,” he said, finding, strangely, that he was. “A playmate for Iris. A sweet, round-faced little girl with your red hair and freckles.”
“Or a boy with your storm cloud eyes,” she countered. He shook his head, but opted to kiss her instead of arguing. She would see, eventually.
When he was forced to come up for air, he looked down at her and felt his heart swell so big in his chest that it ached.
“I love you,” he said. “And I know that I have already gotten you with child...” He tried not to sound as though he was bragging, but he did not think that he managed it. “But, even so, tonight is our wedding night, and I think we should practice the deed, anyway. What say you, Your Grace?”
Her response was to pull him closer, wrapping her arms around him, and soon enough, letting him inside her until they were both unable to do anything but gasp and moan each other's names, allowing their actions to speak for them.
Later, when they were both spent, and his beautiful wife lay dozing in his arms, growing the tiny seed that would be their child inside her, Ezra wondered how he had ever thought that family was something that he wanted no part of.
He had built his own family, now. And it was the most glorious thing he had ever experienced.
No man, he thought, could ever be happier.
The End?