“Put your arms around me,” he said. She had her hands clutched about his upper arms. She tipped her head slightly to one side in a familiar gesture before releasing her hold and sliding one arm beneath his about his waist and wrapping the other about his neck.
“Charles,” she said. “I am no good at this. I will only make a cake of myself.”
“I do not believe there is a manual,” he said. “Or any rules at all, in fact. Just kiss me, my love, and I will kiss you.”
“You ought not to call me that,” she said.
“My love?”he said. “Why not?”
She pursed her lips, looked as though she was about to say something, and changed her mind. “I keep waiting to wake up,” she said at last.
“So do I,” he told her. “But while we are both asleep, shall we share the dream?”
She tightened her arms about him. “Very well,” she said so primly that he almost laughed.
He smiled instead and kissed her again, drawing her against him, moving his hand lower down her back to draw her closer yet. He probed the seam of her lips with his tongue, and when they trembled apart he explored the inside of her mouth, stroking and circling her tongue. She moaned low in her throat, and he could feel one of her hands tangling in his hair.
And though she was different from the way she had been at the age of twenty, there was something about her that was unmistakably Matilda, and he knew he had never really stopped loving her. It was why he had never fallen in love with anyone else. For always, somewhere in the recesses of his being, there had been Matilda. And now—yes, it was like a dream—he held her in his arms again.
They were gazing into each other’s eyes then in the dim, pink glow of the lantern, her head tipped back.
“I never did ask you to marry me,” he said. “Your father said no, and then you sent me away, and the question remained unasked.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am so sorry, Charles. I know now that you suffered just as I did.”
“Can we put the omission right at last?” he asked her. “Will you marry me, Matilda?”
Her eyes widened and she took a step back, dropping her arms to her sides. “Oh,” she said. “But it is impossible.”
“Why?” he asked.
“There is your family,” she said. “And mine. There is … our age.”
He turned his head to eye the bench inside the wooden shelter and led her to sit there. He took one of her hands in his and held it on his thigh. “Shall we dispense with the last objection first?” he said. “Is there an age limit upon love and marriage? If we wish to spend the rest of our lives together, does it matter whether we are twenty or fifty-six—or eighty?”
“People would laugh,” she said.
“Would they?” He stroked his thumb over her palm. “How strange of them.Whichpeople, exactly?”
“They would laugh atme,” she said.
“I cannot think of anyone who might,” he said. “But in the unlikely event that someone did, would you care?”
She frowned in thought, her eyes upon his. “I think I might,” she said. “If I became the subject of a sneering on-dit with thetonI believe I might mind.”
And the thing was that such a thing was possible. Lady Matilda Westcott was known to thetonas a staid, fussy, aging spinster who hovered constantly over her mother.Wouldshe be seen as a figure of fun if she suddenly announced her betrothal and went about looking as she looked now? Like a woman in love? All April and May?
“Then I suppose you will have to decide which course of action you would prefer,” he said. “Would you rather keep your familiar image and thus be largely invisible to theton? Or would you prefer to announce your engagement to me and become the sensation of the hour and very muchnotinvisible?”
“Oh,” she said, still frowning. “Oh dear.”
“Thirty-six years ago,” he said, “you were given no choice at all. You were told what to do and you did it. You have lived with the consequences ever since. Now, after all these years, you do have a choice. You can continue as you are. Or you can marry me.Youhave the choice, Matilda.”
“But it is still impossible,” she said. “For we are not the only ones concerned. There is your family. And mine.”
“My children like you,” he told her. “I know Adrian does. He has told me so. And I sense that Barbara and Jane do too. They do not often like the women I escort. For they always look upon them as potential wives, and they all come up wanting in one way or another.”
“Surely I would quite as much as anyone else,” she said. “They cannot help but compare other women to their mother. They surely cannotwantyou to marry again.”
