Not Wicked Enough (43 page)

“That’s your advice for me? Have a party?”

“We’ll invite everyone.”

“I’m not writing a single invitation.”

“Ginny and I will manage everything. Don’t worry. You won’t have to do a thing except pay the bills.” She patted the mattress, and he sat beside her.

“What am I to do about this, Wellstone?”

“Which?”

“Any of this. You.” He stretched himself over her, laying her back on the mattress, then drew back with a sigh. “I haven’t got a sheath with me.”

“Another time, Mountjoy.”

“I want you now.” He kissed her and kissed her some more and only just recalled himself. “If we were married, Wellstone, we could dispense with sheaths and withdrawal. I could come inside you again right now.”

“That seems rather shortsighted of you, don’t you think?” Her arms were around him, and she spoke in a low voice. “Is that worth a night or two of pleasure?”

“It’s morning.”

“A day then. A day of pleasure.”

“Do you think as badly of me as that? Why not you for my duchess? We get along. You amuse and delight me. I never know what you’ll do next. And you would be a splendid mother to our children. They’d be exceptional. How could they not be with us to raise them and lavish them with love?”

“A point, sir.”

He pulled her close enough that she could not fail to know he was aroused. “You see?” he said. “I want you. I always do. I have from the day we met. I won’t behave anymore as if I don’t adore you more than Nigel adores Jane. I want the right to touch you, kiss you, to make my life with you in public and in private.”

“You’re overwrought, Mountjoy. Swept away by your brother’s grand gesture.” She gave him a look. “Or is it lack of sleep that’s made you like this?”

Mountjoy bent to kiss her forehead, then let her go and slid off her bed where he stood staring at her with his heart racing. “Will you wait here?”

“Where would I go? I should like a few hours’ sleep.” She covered a yawn.

“Don’t sleep.”

“Why not?”

“Promise me?”

She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “I don’t believe it’s wise for me to indulge your whims like this, but if you insist.”

“I do.”

Twenty minutes later, Mountjoy was outside her window wrestling a ladder into position. It scraped against the wall and listed dangerously far to the right. Several of his groundskeeping staff watched him. He saw one of them scratch his head. One of the gardeners who’d been pruning the roses came to lend a hand. “Ground’s too soft here, your grace. Begging your pardon, but that ladder will fall over, and you’ll break your neck.”

Mountjoy pointed. “I need it there. At that window.”

“Your grace.” Between the two of them and another of
the staff who came over to assist, they got the ladder into place. The top rails banged against the windowsill. He stooped for a handful of pebbles, but that proved unnecessary since the noise had brought Lily out of her bed to see what was happening.

Mountjoy climbed the ladder but before he got to the top, Lily had already opened the window. He gripped the top rung with one hand and threw his handful of pebbles at the glass. Most of them showered to the ground below, but a few ended up on the sill and one or two inside her room.

“Mountjoy?” She brushed away the pebbles that had landed on the sill. “What are you doing?”

“There’s no easy way to say this so I’ll just say it.” He took her face between his hands. “Lily. Lily, you are mine.” He knew from her frown that he’d not spoken well. “I want you to belong to me. Mine,” he said. Which he knew was exactly the wrong thing to say to her, but the word fell from his lips as if it had been waiting there to send him to perdition and now the moment had come.

“Am I?” she whispered. The ladder wobbled and he had to let go of her to steady himself.

“Mountjoy?” someone called out from below.

Lily waved from the window. “Felicitations to you Lord and Lady Nigel.” She closed her eyes. “And our audience is now complete, Mountjoy. Here is your sister.”

“Mountjoy?” said Eugenia. He didn’t bother looking. “Good heavens.”

“Good morning all,” Lily said. “Your brother was concerned for my safety when he saw a crack in my window. He’s saved my life, I daresay.”

Mountjoy looked down and saw his brother and Jane on the lawn with the groundskeeping staff. The couple held hands. Eugenia was there, too, in her night-robe. He returned his attention to Lily. “Never mind them. Come away with me, Wellstone.”

“And do what? Scandalize your family and all of High Tearing?”

“Marry me,” he said, and where the demand had been hiding from him all this time, he did not know. He ought to have said it days ago. He ought to have made her understand days and days ago. “We shall deal with your father.”

She pressed a finger to his mouth. “It’s far too soon for that. Nothing is certain, Mountjoy. Not yet. You needn’t.”

He reached for her again and brought her head to his and kissed her, and as always, they were immediately in lust. In high passion. She pulled back. Below, he heard a whistle and applause.

“Come inside, you foolish man, before you fall and break your neck.”

“Don’t be absurd. What would everyone down there say if they saw me climb into your room? No, there’s nothing for it but for you to come down the ladder with me.” He reached in and got an arm around her waist. “Or,” he whispered in her ear, “I can go down alone and tell them it’s not the window that’s broken.”

“Mountjoy,” she said. “Oh, Mountjoy, what am I to do?”

“If you’ll take my advice, fetch your prettiest night-robe and come down the ladder with me.”

“I have a jade green one, with the most cunning darker stripes running through it.”

“You are spectacular in green. Fetch that one.” Ten minutes later, he managed to get them safely down to the lawn. “You see? You will always be safe and sound with me.” He used the sides of his thumbs to brush away her tears. “What’s this? More tears?”

“Impossible,” she whispered. “I’d never cry over something like this.”

“Marry me, Lily.” He pulled her into his arms. “I want to spend my life learning about you. Being with you. Trying to make you as happy as I will be with you as my wife.”

She gazed at him and blinked twice. “Good God, Mountjoy.”

“Marry me, my love.”

“Have you considered the negatives? You’d have me for
your duchess when I am sure to invent a ghost or two for Bitterward. What will people say?”

“That I’m a damned luckier man than anyone deserves. They’ll say I climbed a ladder to propose to the woman I love, that’s what they’ll say. Besides, after Eugenia tells you how sorry she is you’re going to have such a one as me for a husband she’ll be over the moon at having you as a sister.”

Behind them, someone coughed.

“Ignore them.” He gripped Lily’s shoulders. “Say yes, Wellstone. I’ll make you happy, I promise you that with my last breath.”

“It’s not your duty to make me happy.”

“It would be my joy. I want to. I want you to be happy.” He stared into her face and understood he had not been honest yet. Not with himself and not with her. “The bald truth. I love you.” He cupped her face between his hands. “You are the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met. I adore you. I want to be with you. I don’t care how short a time it’s been since we met, my life is no longer what it was, and I am unutterably grateful to you for that.”

She turned her head to one side and kissed his wrist. “That is because at last you understand the value of a decent waistcoat.”

“I love you, Lily. Marry me. Please make me the happiest of men.” He drew a strand of her hair away from her face, and she looked at him again, her gaze serious, unreadable except that she was not smiling and had not told him yes. Or no. Or that he needed to prove himself to her. “Love me,” he said. “Love me in whatever way a woman like you can love a man like me.”

More tears slid down her cheeks. “Oh, Mountjoy. Don’t say such things.”

“If you don’t love me, for God’s sake, refuse me, but if you do or if you think you could, then marry me. Be my wife, and my lover, and my friend. Be the mother of our children. Let me spend the rest of my life with you, and I will be the luckiest, happiest man on this earth. I love you,
Lily. I think I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, and all this time I’ve been too stubborn to admit it.”

She did smile, and he was grateful for that. “You are a very stubborn man, I’ll grant you that.”

“That I am.”

She held his face. “Do you mean this?”

“Lily,” he said. “I am prepared to make an enemy of your father.”

She leaned her head against his chest. “Oh, Mountjoy.”

“So tell me, is there room for me in your heart?”

She looked up, her eyes bright with tears. “My dear, dear man. I think I should very much like being a duchess.”

“Does that mean yes?” He kissed her once. On the mouth. “You’ll marry me?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Behind them, the servants hooted and cheered and applauded, and amid all that joy he heard Nigel and Eugenia cheering as well.

“I feel,” she said, “I ought to tell you that you have Fenris to thank.”

“Say it isn’t so.”

“But it is. Fenris was the one who told me I am in love with you.” She kissed his hand. “He was right.”

“About?”

“That I love you, Mountjoy.”

“I’ve always wanted a cousin,” he said.

She twined her arms around him and for quite a while they were lost to each other, and Mountjoy felt at last he’d done exactly the right thing.

Three weeks later. The Anglo-Saxon church at Bitterward.

E
UGENIA TRIED NOT TO SNIFFLE AS HER BROTHER, THE
Duke of Mountjoy, slid a ring onto Lily’s finger. Then the final benediction was over, and her brother and her best friend were married. Eugenia just couldn’t be happier. It was obvious to anyone that Mountjoy was head over heels for Lily and that Lily felt the same about Mountjoy.

The wedding was beautiful, and her brother looked so handsome in his new suit of clothes. He was smiling, her brother was. Smiling. The way he’d started smiling shortly after Lily arrived, only bigger and broader and at last without him trying to pretend he wasn’t. Beside him, Nigel elbowed him and whispered something Eugenia couldn’t hear but that made Mountjoy grin.

She heard a sniffle and glanced across the chapel where Miss Caroline Kirk had a handkerchief pressed to her eyes. The wedding was an intimate one, with only friends and family in attendance, a fortunate thing since the invited guests fit very snugly in the church.

The location had been Mountjoy’s idea and there had
been three weeks of frantic work so that the church could be used. The walls had a fresh coat of whitewash, pillows had been laid on the stone pews, and the break in the altar had been repaired. Banners with the Mountjoy coat of arms hung from the walls and another flew outside. The path had fresh gravel laid down.

Lily’s cousin, that awful man, the Marquess of Fenris, heir to the Duke of Camber, was in attendance as the lone representative of her family. He’d sat quietly during the ceremony, very proper and unapproachable. If he had tender feelings for the bride as she pronounced her vows, they were not in evidence. She resented Fenris for all that he had done, but she could not, after all, begrudge him a place at his cousin’s wedding. Their aunt and uncle were here as well, all the way from Haltwhistle, as proud of their nephew as any parent could be of a son. Two of Mountjoy’s close friends had come up from London and Cornwall respectively. A small gathering, but Mountjoy never wanted a fuss.

Eugenia dabbed a handkerchief to her eyes as Mountjoy bent to kiss his wife. Her aunt, who was sitting beside Eugenia, pressed her hand, but she sniffled, too. Silently, Eugenia wished Lily and her brother all the happiness in the world.