Page 54

“I suppose it might have been fancy once, when it was first built. But now it’s a working house. The windows in the front don’t face pleasure gardens or a long winding entrance. They look onto fields, wheat and sugar beets, though a very clever person told me that I should try clover, so I mean to switch crops. Instead of stately elms, we have gnarled horse-chestnuts.”

Her lips slid up his jaw, and she nipped him.

Jonah was no longer half-erect but throbbing and stiff again. He eased her up his body until he could see her face. “Are you in pain?”

Bea’s hair was tousled around her face, and her lips were bee-stung with kisses, but she wrinkled her nose at him and laughed. “Don’t be silly. You know exactly how I feel. I told you.”

“You did, didn’t you?” He kissed her. “There’s a marsh to the west that turns purple with heather and then gold with gorse. Some of the buildings have fallen down—the granary and the buttery, for example. Maybe we can mend them someday.”

“Beer doesn’t appeal to me, so I don’t care about the buttery, but how is the creamery? For me, cheese is close to divine.”

“The creamery is thriving,” Jonah said smugly. “Turning out a Lennox variant from a recipe going back to 1530. We have special cellars, and we deliver to hotels as far away as Congleton and Macclesfield.”

“Red, white, or blue cheese?”

“Red, of course.” He snorted. “The others are nouveau pretenders, dating back a mere hundred years or so.”

“I can see that I’ll have to spend time teaching you that the modern age is here. I love blue Cheshire.”

Jonah had no complaints about that. She could do as she wished. “The barns are big and as old as the main house, made of stone that has stood the test of time.”

“Like you,” Bea said.

“I’m not old!”

She had her elbows propped on either side of his head now, so she could kiss him between sentences. “You will stand the test of time. You went to war, Jonah, and you came back here, to us.”

“That wasn’t my choice. I mean, I wanted to, but not all my men managed to return,” he said. “Local lads, most of them. We all wanted to come home. My childhood friend—” He broke off.

“What was his name?” Bea asked.

“William Edward Stanhope. Or just Ed. He was brilliant. He was going to go to Oxford and study philosophy, but the war came.”

She kissed him again. “You were together?”

He nodded.

“I didn’t mean to say that men didn’t want to come home from war,” she said, tracing his bottom lip with one finger. “I simply meant that some people go through life without connections, weightless. You have all these responsibilities, and you’ve come through. You’re coming through. I’m proud to marry you.”

Jonah never cried—well, only the once, when Ed died in his arms—but he felt that warning prickle in his throat now. This bright-eyed woman would go through the rest of it, the rest of life, with him. Next to him.

“I’m proud to marry you too.” His voice was rough.

Bea grinned at him. “Remember what I told you about my dowry?”

He scowled at that. “We’ll put it in a trust for the children. I’ve no need of your money, Bea.”

“It’s not my money,” she said, kissing him. “It’s our money.”

Damn it. The prickle was a little harder to choke back; Jonah couldn’t help comparing what Bea was saying to Regina’s declaration that her dowry would belong to her, and never mind the laws of England.

“Don’t you want to know the size of my dowry?”

He shook his head. “We’ll save it for the younger children. My lands are entailed.”

“No, we won’t,” Bea said impudently. “Remember how I told you that my father delighted in the stock market, gambling on the prospects of foreign companies?”

“Yes. You rope in his more extravagant ideas.”