When he would have pulled away, she clutched his head, refusing to allow him to retreat.
“I love you,” she whispered against his lips. “I love everything—”
He stole her words with his mouth, as if desperate to store them within his own chest.
She reciprocated in kind.
Silence reigned for several minutes, as Viola reacquainted herself with the heady pleasure of kissing Malcolm Penn-Leith.
Finally, she kissed him one last lingering time before leaning back against his arms around her waist.
“Ah, lass,” he breathed against her mouth, “how I love ye. I dinnae want to scare ye with the force of my affections—”
“Impossible!” Viola shook her head.
“Impossible?”
“Aye. I shall never fear your love, Malcolm Penn-Leith. ’Tis mine that might send you running—”
“Never!” he scoffed.
“Then what are we to do?”
“Marry me?” he replied. “Could ye do that, lass? I ken I’ve shamelessly compromised ye but—”
“Yes,” she whispered, licking a tear from her lip. “I would love nothing more in this world than to marry you, Malcolm Penn-Leith.”
His eyes went bright. He took a slow breath, swallowing loudly. “My life is here. I cannae imagine leaving Scotland, but I also feel I cannae ask ye to abandon your life in England—”
Oh, the foolish, dear man!
“Ask me,” she ordered, laughing.
He paused, regarding her with a face so serious that she had to peck his lips.
Which led to more kissing.
“Ask me,” she repeated when they finally pulled apart.
“Viola Brodure,” he began, “will ye leave your friends, your literary colleagues, your amusements, and every other aspect of your life in Westacre, England to marry me and move to Fettermill, Scotland, spending your life as the wife of a gentleman farmer who loves ye more than life itself?”
“Yes!” she all but shouted, startling two pigeons from a nearby tree. “I would love nothing more than precisely that.”
“Truly?”
“Aye.” She kissed him. “I love you, and because I love you, I adore the land that formed you. I long to be a part of it myself, to weave Scotland into my own history—the crisp fresh air, the soaring vistas, the wildness creeping in at the corners—”
“Careful,mo chridhe.Scotland will make a poet of ye.”
She laughed in earnest, her heart on wings.
“No,” she replied. “I believe one poet in the family to be sufficient. In all honesty, I think I prefer to live my life firmly in this lovely reality. The poet can remain adjacent.”
“Poet-adjacent it is then.” He grinned, dipping for one more kiss. “But only just.”
The London Tattler
October 9, 1844
