They were under the cover of the trees now. This was, therefore, as good a place as any.
He brought her round to face him and took her other hand in his, his heart thudding. He hadn’t practiced this, so focused had he been on the aforementioned inane planning. He’d written Effie and Simon with their roles in it—he’d been going to throw a party himself, at the London house, which he reasoned Sir Albert would not be able to refuse to attend, and Simon and Effie were to mount a distraction involving a broken heirloom soup tureen that they were meant to spill over Sir Albert, while Archie stole away with Clementine.
But here she was.
Herehewas, tongue-tied.
Well, what course did he have but to come out with it? “I think weshouldmarry.”
There was an echo. He hadn’t noticed that about this spot in the trees before.
Oh. Wait. That wasn’t an echo; that was Clementine, saying the exact same thing: “I think weshouldmarry.”
Was it to be that easy? “All right,” he agreed, as his heart soared.
“Wait.”
Ah. Apparently it wasn’t to be that easy. Clementine’s brow furrowed—deeply. “What is the matter, my dearest?”
“I won’t be tamed. I can’t be. I tried that. It didn’t work out.”
“I don’t want to tame you. I want to love you.”
Clementine burst into tears, suddenly and utterly, like Olive tended to do.
“Idolove you,” Archie clarified. “That is an unchangeable fact. What I want, I suppose, is to be able to do it publicly.” He grinned. “And privately, too. Repeatedly.”
She cried harder.
So he tried harder. “Not only do I not want to tame you, I want to be wild with you.”
More tears. Well, in for a pound . . .
“I want to have wild children with you. I want them to be christened in the pond at Mollybrook and for them to grow up in the forest. I want to feed them nuts and berries and walk through mud puddles with them, and I want them to know every day how much they are loved.
“They will have an aunt, a loving grandfather, and two honorary uncles. They’ll take their grandmother on picnics by the pond, and perhaps she will feel their love. Even if she doesn’t know them, perhaps she will know, somehow, that they arehers.
“At night, we will look at the stars together and make up our own stories about them. We’ll fall asleep outside, and I’ll carry the children into the house and kiss their foreheads. And that . . .”
Those were all the words he had. The contents of his heart, articulated as best he could. “That is all I have to give you.” He paused. “Well, there is the earldom, I suppose. You’d be a countess. But I rather fear that is not a mark in my favor.”
She laughed.
That was a good sign—he hoped. It seemed better than tears, anyway.
“What do you say, Clem?”
“I say yes,” she said quietly.
“Truly? You have abandoned your opposition to the notion of marrying?”
“I seem to have done,” she said in wonderment. “I think perhaps I wasn’t able to imagine being happily wed because I’d never considered marryingyou.” She shook her head as wonderment turned to bewilderment. “Though now I can’t imagine why. It seems, in retrospect, obvious that we are well suited.”
“We have both been rather dimwitted on the subject.”
“Indeed.”
“Of course, dimwitted goes without saying for me, but honestly, I expected better from you, Clem,” he teased.
