“Then pluck a daisy for me,” she said. “It is not the roses that make me happy, Gabriel. It is the fact that you give them to me. That you care a little bit.”
He turned his head to look out the window.
“Gabriel,” she said. “We will make our own memories at Brierley. From the moment we arrive there. It is our home. The space is ours. The servants and neighbors and potential friends are ours. The future is ours. The past is gone. The future is bright if we want it to be. And the present is lovely. We are together.”
“Is it lovely?” he asked, looking at her. “I have just taken you away from your family.”
“Youaremy family,” she said.
And, ridiculously, he felt the heat of tears prick at his eyes. It seemed to him that he had spent most of his life without family. Since he was nine years old. And only briefly had he found it with Cyrus. He had spent most of his life lonely, though he had rarely called it that.
He was not normally a self-pitying man.
Now he had a family. Jessica. The Westcotts. Sir Trevor and his wife—and Bertie. Mary.
“My uncle had daughters,” he said. “They are my first cousins. They all married years ago. They probably have grown children.”
“I will write to them during my first week at home,” she said.
At home. She meant Brierley.
“I will invite them to come and visit us,” she said.
“Philip had a wife,” he said, “and two daughters. Mary mentioned in a letter some years ago that they had returned to her family and that she had remarried.”
“I will write to her,” she said. “We are almost never quite alone, you see. Not unless we choose to be.”
“You will be a good countess,” he told her. “It is why I married you.”
“I will not disappoint you.” Her tone sounded a little brisk even though she smiled.
“But I persuaded you to marry me under false pretenses,” he said.
“Oh?” Her eyebrows were up. She looked haughty. It was an expression of self-defense, he realized.
“I think,” he said, “I fell in love with you at Richmond Park when you scolded me for seeing nothing when I looked at you butLady Jessica Archer.When you demanded that if I wanted a chance with you, I mustromanceyou. I am still not sure that word is a verb. I had no idea how to go about doing it. I still do not. I am a dull fellow, Jessie. But I fell in love and have not fallen out since. Indeed, I have fallen so far in that I am quite certain I am a hopeless case.”
She snatched her hand away, turned sharply on the seat so that her knee was pressing against the side of his leg, and crossed her hands over her bosom.
“Gabriel!” she exclaimed. “Youidiot!”
“Yes, I know,” he said, grimacing ruefully. “But it need not matter. We will still do a good job as earl and countess. We will still make a happy home, for ourselves and, if we are so blessed, for our children. We will—”
“Gabriel!” she said. “You are a double idiot.”
He stopped talking. He looked warily at her. Had he gone and ruined everything? He had hoped she might be cautiously pleased.
She pointed a finger at his chest and waggled it as she talked.
“If you do not tell me and show me every single day for the rest of our lives that you love me,” she said, “I will leave you and go home to my mother. Or else I will go about performing my duties with a permanent pout. And if I do not tell you and show you the same thing every day, then, then—Oh, stop!”
Because he was laughing, at first quietly and then helplessly.
“Stop it!” she said when he set one arm about her shoulders and the other under her knees and lifted her across him to set her on his lap. “Stop it this minute, Gabriel.”
But she was laughing too, and they were still laughing when he kissed her.
“Stop it,” she said against his mouth.
