“You’re so beautiful,” Hugh said, sometime later, his hands cupped around my face. “You’re so damned beautiful.”
What I was feeling was so big—and so precious—that I couldn’t shape words.
“Your hair is like a flame,” Hugh said, clearly not as dazed as I. “I adore your legs and your toes.”
“My chaste bosom?”
We kissed for a while longer, and then he told me exactly how much he loved my bosom, and it turned out that he had paid very close attention to my every curve, and thought none of them chaste.
In fact, he recited most of that poem Andrew Marvell wrote. I mean to memorize it, but for the moment, this line stuck with me:
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest.
I shall never again worry about whether my “chaste bosom” isn’t large enough.
After more kissing and some promiscuous closeness, Hugh drew back and pulled a small book from his breast pocket. It was bound in worn leather, with his initials stamped in gold on the front.
I was surprised as, frankly, I was expecting the diamond to make another appearance.
I turned the book over and looked up at him. “May I?”
“I wrote it for you.”
It took me a moment to understand what I was reading. “It’s the record of your Grand Tour!”
(Gentlemen keep a commonplace book of memories, and if they are very clever, watercolors. It hardly needs to be said that Hugh’s was merely a list of scrawled notes with places and dates.)
He nodded.
I bent my head, feeling sun on the back of my neck because my hat was off, and read one page and then another, and then a page from the middle of the book. By then I felt as if I might burst with happiness.
“You really didn’t forget me when you were traveling,” I whispered.
His blunt finger came down on the page I was looking at. “Everywhere I went, I thought about what you would think of the place. This was when I visited that villa outside Florence, the one withThe Birth of Venus.”
Botticelli’sPrimaverahas three red-haired women who are thin as shooting sticks and not nearly as beautiful as Snaps. The one with her back to me has hair most like Snaps’s but the one to the left has an odd expression. Snaps would say, a frightfully odd expression. The one to the right has a nose like a poker.
“Oh,” I said softly. Whenever I turned the pages, I discovered that Hugh was having a conversation with me, except I didn’t happen to be next to him.
“I went to Fontainebleau, but I came away without going inside, as I didn’t want to see it without you.”
“Also because you don’t like Napoleon,” I said, poking him.
“Who could? Not a sporting sort of fellow at all. I wanted to travel on to Greece and Portugal, but not without you, so I came home to fetch you instead. I thought perhaps we might complete the Grand Tour together, Snaps. We could even start over, because it wasn’t as much fun as it could have been. With you.”
Happiness was burning like a comet in my chest.
“What if I had married another man while you were traveling?”
His jaw firmed. “Colonel Brandon would have dispatched the groom that I left in your household to fetch me, and I would have returned home immediately.”
I gaped, just like a romantic heroine on seeing a ghost. “That’swhy the Colonel stamped all my letters and never mentioned the impropriety of our correspondence!”
