Megan reached out and took his hand in both of hers; the ring nestled between them.
“Ask me properly,” she said.
Something shifted in his face. “Lady Megan Fairfax.” His voice was low and certain in a way it had not been during any of the preceding speech. “Will you do me the very great honor of becoming my wife?”
“Yes,” she said. “As I said the first time. As I would have said any time you asked.”
He rose from his knees in a single motion, and she barely had time to draw a breath before his arms were around her and she was pressed against his chest with her face tucked against his neck and his chin resting on the top of her head. She could feel the rapid beat of his heart beneath her palm. She felt him press a kiss to her hair, just the one, brief and fierce, before hedrew back enough to find her face, and then he kissed her properly.
It was nothing like the desperate, survival-edged kisses of the road. This was slow and deliberate and very, very thorough, and when he finally lifted his head Megan was rather grateful, he hadn’t let go of her yet.
“The ring,” he murmured.
She had forgotten she was still holding it. She held out her left hand, and he slid it onto her finger, and for a moment they both looked down at it in the candlelight, the old gold warm against her skin, the green stone glowing like something caught in amber matching the color of her eyes.
“It was made for you,” he said.
“I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever worn.”
He lifted her hand and kissed the ring where it sat on her finger, and then he looked at her with an expression that she suspected she would spend the rest of her life trying to find adequate words for.
“We should go in,” he said reluctantly.
“We should.”
Neither of them moved for another moment.
The dining roomat Newbury House glowed with candlelight, the long table set with the family silver and the warm smell of beeswax and roasted meat drifting pleasantly through the room. Megan’s mother sat next to her son at the head of the table looking serene and happy in a way that made Megan’s chest ache with something she couldn’t quite name.
The Duke of Saxton and her brother had discovered a shared enthusiasm for horse breeding within the first ten minutes of their acquaintance and had settled into companionable conversation at one end of the table with the ease of men who had simply been waiting to find each other.
Oliver sat beside Megan.
His grandmother caught Megan’s eye across the table and looked down at the ring with an expression of profound satisfaction. “Well,” she said, in a tone that concluded an argument no one had been aware she was winning. “That is very nicely settled.”
“What is settled, Grandmother?” Oliver asked.
“Everything, my dear boy.” She reached for her wine glass. “Everything.”
Her mother was watching Megan with a warmth that had not dimmed for a moment since they had entered the room. Across the table she smiled, and Megan smiled back, and the fullness of it threatened to overflow entirely.
The evening unfolded with the gentle, unhurried ease of a family remembering how to be one. There were stories about Harry’s schooldays that made her laugh until she had to set down her fork. There were gentle enquiries about the Saxton estate that Oliver answered with a quiet pride he seemed only half aware of. The Dowager Duchess of Saxton told a story about a horse and a foreign diplomat that Megan strongly suspected had been considerably embellished for effect, and she didn’t care in the least because it made her mother laugh the way Megan had spent fourteen years believing she would never hear again.
At one point Oliver’s hand found hers beneath the table and he did not let go for a very long time.
Outside, London moved in its usual indifferent way, and somewhere in it a Welsh earl was no doubt occupied with his own affairs. But here, in the candlelit warmth of Newbury House, none of that existed tonight. Tonight there was only the table and the light and the voices of people who loved each other, and Megan sat in the middle of it with her mother’s pearls at her throat and a dead woman’s ring on her finger andthought that she had never in her life been so entirely, irreversibly, and quite unexpectedly home.
CHAPTER 21
Their case against Penharrow was growing. Webb had finally arrived back from Wales with Mrs. Griffth’s sworn testimony all witnessed by a solicitor from London who’d accompanied him. She was too ill to come herself, but she was thrilled when she heard Megan was safe and with her family.
Webb said they had encountered some hostility form Penharrow’s men but had managed to evade them.
In the letter Mrs. Griffth swore that James had been at the lodge and was escorted away by Penharrow’s men, but she had not witnessed his death. So they still didn’t have him for James murder. But the Bow Street runners had men in Wales and suspected that the minute Penharrow was arrested for fraud, someone would talk.
And as suspected Penharrow had filed his guardian documents which they could prove were fraudulent. They at least had him on that, but Oliver wanted more. Harry had hired Bow Street Runners to look into Penharrow’s operations they had collected evidence of unscrupulous behavior of violence and extortion and illegal trading.
Given all of that, they’d become too complacent. Megan thought that now she was a lady, and with her prestigious family welcoming her into their distinguished fold, Penharrow wouldn’t risk taking her again, given it would give her family the proof they needed to charge him. But once again she underestimated his desperation or was it his determination that she should not escape his clutches.
