AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘The same, I suppose.’ He flexed his left hand. ‘And feeling a fool.’
‘A – No, that is ridiculous. What do you have to feel foolish about?’
‘The way I kept proposing marriage to you.’ The rising sun caught the right side of his face, gilding it, sparking amber lights in his eyes, in his hair. The other side of his face was shadowed. It made it hard to read his expression.
Oh. Well. That answers the question I was asking myself. She kept her chin up, her lips firm. I am not going to weep about it.
‘What I should have said was that I love you,’ Jared said as though she was not standing in front of him as speechless and responsive as a gatepost.
‘You – ’ He was speaking English, why couldn’t she understand him?
‘I love you,’ Jared repeated patiently. ‘You do not seem very happy about that.’
‘You never said it before.’ Guin picked her way through the words that were tumbling into her mouth, clogging her tongue.
‘I told you I was a fool. I didn’t realise. I haven’t been in love before, you see. It takes some getting used to.’ This was not a joke. He was perfectly serious and, she realised, nervous. The tension ran through him, shivering under his skin, sending the pulse at his throat beating hard where his shirt lay open. ‘Will you marry me, Guinevere? Not because you should, not because I think it is honourable to ask you, but because I cannot imagine living without you now.’
‘Yes,’ she said and reached out to put her hands on his, feeling the beat of his pulse, feeling the moment of stillness, of shock, before his fingers closed around hers. ‘Yes. I love you. Yes, I want to marry you, Jared.’
‘Before, you said no.’
‘Before I thought it would be an unequal match, that you were proposing out of duty because you thought it was right, that what had been between us had somehow changed when you became the heir to an earldom. Last night I looked around that room and I saw not an earl and his heir but two men. One I loved, both I liked.
‘I looked in the mirror over the fireplace and I saw a woman who had thought she was not worthy of a title, on whom Society had looked down for marrying a nobleman for protection,’ she said, the words coming easily now. ‘And she looked back at me and I saw someone else, a woman who had fought back, a woman who had stood up with you. I saw a woman who loved you and I remembered your voice when you held me and called me my heart. And I resolved to say yes when you asked me again.’
She was in his arms then and he was kissing her, lifting her, carrying her across the terrace. ‘Your arm,’ she managed.
‘I can carry you up to bed, my love. I could carry you to York and the Archbishop and a licence, if I had to.’
There was a muffled shriek as he shouldered through the door into the hall, then a giggle and a flap of skirts, the crash of a dropped dustpan, the sound of servants scattering before the sight of the new-found heir carrying Lady Northam up stairs with obvious, wicked, intent.
Jared stopped kissing her only when he dropped her on his bed. She looked up at him standing over her, possessive, frowning.
‘What is wrong?’
‘Damn it. We will cause a scandal if we marry so soon after Northam’s death.’
‘There is going to be a monumental scandal once the trial begins. You will be marrying me to protect me, everyone will believe it. Augustus…’ Guin blinked. She was not going to start weeping now. She knew what the poor, darling man would have said. Don’t be a goose, Guinnie. Marry the man. ‘Augustus would have given us his blessing, you know that.’
‘In that case I will ride to York for a special licence tomorrow. I would go today.’
‘But your father needs you here, I know. I need you here, just for one more day, Jared.’ She untied the strings of her cloak, the ribbons at the neck of her nightgown.
‘I won’t be long.’ His sword belt and scabbard hit the floor with a clatter and he pulled his shirt over his head. ‘Two days, perhaps three. Then we can be married here, Theo can give you away,’ he added as he unfastened his falls, pushed off his breeches.
‘Theo can believe that, but I gave myself away to you a long time ago.’
‘Twenty one days, to be precise,’ Jared said as he knelt on the bed and dealt with her nightgown by the simple expedient of tearing it from neck to hem.
It was an outrageous thing to do, as bad as carrying her upstairs in front of half the staff, and they were both ridiculously romantic things and she loved them for it.
‘Three weeks? Is that all?’
‘That is all,’ he said as he came down over her, his body warm and hard and demanding.
Guin curled her legs around the narrow hips and her arms around the strong shoulders. ‘I need you inside me now, fast,’ she said.
‘Fast,’ Jared agreed as he slid home, his forehead resting against hers. ‘And then slow. We have the rest of our lives, Guinevere. Thousands of days, who knows how many thousands of minutes, of seconds, of breaths to share. And a million kisses, my love.’
