Irresistible (41 page)

“Of course.” But she did not look at him.

The same question, the same answer as they had exchanged yesterday.

“Do you know why I brought you here?” he asked her. “And why I showed you around the house yesterday?”

She looked at him then, though she did not answer him.

“I did not want you here at all, you know,” he said. “I sent you an invitation and of course it seemed very likely that you would accept for Lewis’s sake and for the sake of his family. But I hoped you would find some way of refusing.”

She jumped to her feet.

“I did not want to call on you at Lavinia‘s,” he said. “I did not want to have to invite you to tea yesterday. I did not want you inside Bowood.”

“Let me pass,” she said. “I must get back to Lavinia’s. I must pack my things. Edwin wishes to make an early start in the morning.”

She could have passed him without his moving, but she might have brushed against him had she tried. He did not move.

“But once you were here,” he said, “I knew that I had wanted it all the time. I knew that I wanted to saturate my home with memories of you. I wanted to be able to picture you in every room. You touched the headrest of my chair in the library. You ran your hand over the top of my desk. You stood at the window there admiring the view.”

She sat down again and spread her hands in her lap.

“I wanted you just here,” he said, “so that for the rest of my life I can come here and sit where you are sitting now and feel your presence.”

“Nathaniel,” she said. “Please—”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I am being dreadfully ill-mannered. I am hanging a millstone about your neck with this self-indulgence of a confession. I will feel guilty, fearing that I have upset you. But I believe I would feel worse if I let you go from here without telling you that I will always be thankful that you came.”

Her head was bent downward. She said nothing. But watching her, he saw a tear splash onto the back of one of her hands. She lifted the hand and brushed at her cheek. He lowered his head to avoid bumping it on the low doorway and stepped into the magical shade of the folly. It always seemed lit from within—something to do with the light from the lake reflecting off the ceiling, he believed. The folly was fragrant with the scents of sweet peas and other flowers.

“I
have
upset you.” He set one booted foot on the bench beside her and draped one arm over his raised thigh. He bent his head closer to hers.

“Nathaniel,” she said, “what are you
saying?”

“That I love you,” he said.

“It is sympathy, pity, affection,” she said. “Think of who I am, Nathaniel. I am the daughter and sister of coal merchants. I have never had any claim to beauty, accomplishments, wit, charm. Whereas you ... You have everything—gentility, wealth, property, elegance, charm, good looks. You could have ... Have you seen the way women—ladies—look at you? Beautiful women? Your peers?”

He touched her at last. He cupped his hand softly about one of her cheeks, the heel of his hand beneath her chin. He did not raise it. He ran his thumb across her lips.

“Terrible harm has been done to you, Sophie,” he said. “I wish I had known you when you were seventeen years old. Would I have found a wide-eyed, lovely girl who considered herself worthy of the best life had to offer? Would I have found a girl who believed that she had everything to offer the man who would love her? And would I have known even then what a priceless treasure I had found? Perhaps not. Perhaps I needed to be older. Perhaps you did. Perhaps you needed to suffer what you have suffered so that all the perfection of your beauty could shine through you. Don’t let the harm be irreparable, my love. Trust yourself. Trust love. Perhaps you can never love me. But there will be someone for you. Someone who will perhaps be almost worthy of you. Meet him as an equal.”

She lifted her hand and set it over the back of his against her cheek.

“Nathaniel,” she said, her voice revealing the fact that she was still very close to tears, “I have something I must tell you, something I must burden you with, though I promised myself I never would. Oh, forgive me.”

He lifted her face to his then and gazed into her tear-filled eyes. “Sophie?” he whispered.

“I told you I knew how to prevent it,” she said. “I told you it simply would not happen. But that last night—I knew it would be the last—I wanted it to be the most wonderful night of my life. It was too. But I forgot about practical matters. Nathaniel—”

He stopped her mouth with his own.

“My God,” he said. “My God, Sophie. You are with
child
?”

“It does not matter,” she said. “I will go somewhere where I can say I am a recent widow. And I really do not
mind.
I am really rather happy. I will have a tangible memory for the rest of my life. What are you doing?”

He was swinging her up into his arms. He strode out of the folly with her into the sunshine. He set her down on the bank, hidden from the house, sheltered by the trees. A little piece of wilderness fragrant with trees and grass and water, loud with birdsong and insect chirpings, warm with the late August sun. He stood beside her, looking out across the lake.

“I want to know something,” he said. “You will be marrying me now, of course, as fast as I can procure a license. I told you when we began our affair in London that you would have to marry me if there were a child. But I want to know your feelings for me. I
need
to know. The truth, please, Sophie.”

She did not speak for a long time. He steeled himself. She would be honest now, he knew. But she was a kind woman who cared for people. He knew that she cared in some special way for him. She would be choosing her words in order to give him as little pain as possible.

“I remember the first time I saw you,” she said at last. “It was at a party in Lisbon given by Colonel Porter. Walter had introduced me to all the other officers. I thought Rex and Kenneth and Eden particularly handsome and charming. You were speaking with someone else, your back to me. But you turned when Walter spoke your name and you looked at me when he presented me—and you smiled. You have been told, I suppose, that you have a quite irresistible smile. My heart was yours in that moment. It has been yours ever since. You lent me a handkerchief once and I never gave it back. I used to keep it between lavender bags and take it out frequently to look at it and hold it to my face. I was in a way, you see, unfaithful to Walter. I put the handkerchief away after his death. I thought I would never see you again. I thought you had become merely a wistful memory until you wrote me that letter two years ago and until I saw you again in Hyde Park this spring.”

He turned his head to look at her. She was looking back. “I am not sure,” she said, “if for even one mad moment I convinced myself that having an affair with you would help me get over you. I believe I knew from the start that I was wreaking dreadful havoc on my life. I dreaded coming here, Nathaniel. I dreaded seeing you. Yet since I have been here I have been storing memories so that for the rest of my life I can picture you in the setting where you will live your life. I touched your chair where your head rests, and the top of your desk, where you work. I sat inside the folly, where you sit, and looked out at the lake, on which you gaze.”

He smiled slowly at her and reached out a hand for hers.

“Come, my love,” he said.

She placed her hand in his and he drew her to her feet and into his arms. But he did not hold her close at first. He set his hands at her waist and moved them inward and down, looking into her face as he did so. He could feel the soft beginnings of swelling in her womb. He slid his hands upward and about her breasts. They were fuller, heavier. They would suckle his child.

She was smiling at last, softly, dreamily.

“It is a good thing you like my extra weight,” she said. “There is going to be much more of it.”

“Oh, I like it,” he assured her. “And it terrifies me. What have I done to you?”

“You have made me feel like a woman again,” she said. “Like a desirable, even beautiful woman. Years ago you gave me a dream to dream against the bleakness of reality. And now the dream has become reality. You have made me fruitful. And you love me too. Nathaniel, you
do
love me? You were not just—”

He kissed her hard.

“I have a feeling,” he said, “that healing is not going to be instant with you, Sophie. You are going to doubt yourself for a long time to come, are you not? I will be your healer, my love. This is going to be your medicine every time you voice your doubts.” He kissed her again. “I love you.”

She wrapped her arms about his neck and laughed as he picked her up off her feet and twirled her once about. It was a rash thing to do. They were not far from the water’s edge. He laughed too.

Someone was loudly clearing his throat.

“We are not interrupting anything of, ah, importance, are we?” Eden asked.

His fingers, Nathaniel was interested to note, were laced with Lavinia’s.

“When a man and a woman are in a secluded spot wrapped in each other’s arms,” Nathaniel said dryly, “they must be merely waiting with impatience for someone else to come along to make life more interesting, Ede.”

“Quite so.” Eden grinned. “You have two witnesses, Sophie. If I were you, I would demand that Nat make an honest woman of you.”

“She never was dishonest.” Nathaniel frowned. “And that is my
ward
you are clutching, Ede.”

Eden’s grin did not falter. “And so it is,” he said. “Muzzle me if I am speaking out of turn, but would we save a great deal of time and energy if we celebrated a
double
wedding? Within the week?”

“I have not heard anyone asking me for Lavinia’s hand,” Nathaniel said.

“Nat.” Lavinia was engaged in that activity she normally avoided at all costs—she was blushing. “Do try not to be ridiculous.”

“I have not heard you ask for Sophie’s either,” Eden said. “Not that you need to, of course. But I will stand her friend. Has he asked you, Sophie? Nicely? On bended knee?”

“You
did not go down on one knee, Eden,” Lavinia said.

“I make it a practice never to make a spectacle of myself,” he said. “Well, Sophie?”

“You, Eden,” she said, wagging one finger at him, “may mind your own business.”

Nathaniel set an arm about her waist and drew her against his side. “Shall I let him have Lavinia?” he asked her. “And
shall
we make it a double wedding? Our families can remain here instead of having the tedium of bringing themselves back in a few months’ time. We can send for your brother in haste—ah, and he can bring Lass with him, since I daresay she is there and you are pining for her—and any of Ede’s family that he has always stayed very quiet about. I daresay Moira and Ken will stay, though I suspect they are longing to return to Cornwall. But they will have to stay. This is all their doing after all. What do you say, love?”

Sophia and Lavinia had been smiling at each other.

“I say yes,” Sophia said, tipping her head sideways to rest on his shoulder despite the presence of an audience. “I say yes, yes, yes.” She was laughing softly.

“I rather think, Lavinia,” Eden said, “our presence here is severely
de trop.
They had not finished kissing when we interrupted them. Shall we slink off back to the house and see if Moira has recovered from her sprained ankle or her headache or torn hem or whatever it was that took her back there?”

“Sunstroke,” Nathaniel said.

“Ah. Nasty.” Eden led Lavinia away.

“I am not at all sure about those two,” Nathaniel said, lowering his head to Sophia’s.

“You do not have to be,” she said, wrapping her arms about his neck. “They have their own lives to live and their own marriage to forge, Nathaniel. As we have. You must stop worrying about people who are old enough to see to their own futures.”

“Soon enough I will have new people to worry about,” he said. “A new person anyway. Will it be a daughter, do you think?”

“Heaven protect her from an overprotective father,” Sophie said, laughing. “Perhaps it will be a son. You can teach him to smile.”

He laughed with her until laughter faded as they felt again all the wonder of having discovered a love they had shared without knowing it for some time and would share with full awareness for the rest of their lives.

They moved together to close the distance between their mouths.