Ben grinned. “Then why is she marrying you?” he asked.
“You may ask her yourself later,” Nicholas said. “But not until after the wedding, if you please, Ben. It would be a bit of a humiliation if she abandoned me at the altar.”
“Speaking of which—” Ben pulled a watch from his pocket. “It is almost time for you to think of going. I hope Owen is ready.”
Owen was to be Nicholas’s best man. But even as Ben spoke, there was a knock on the hotel room door, and it opened to reveal their youngest brother, looking half throttled inside an elaborately tied neckcloth. But he was not alone. And that was the trouble with spending the night of one’s wedding eve at a hotel large enough to accommodate all one’s family members, Nicholas thought over the next several minutes as his hand was wrung and his epaulets were slapped by the men and his whole person was hugged by the women.
“Oh goodness, Nick,” Pippa said. “You seem twice as large in uniform.”
“And twice as gorgeous,” Stephanie said, grinning at him.
“Not possible, Steph,” Gwyneth said, and they both laughed.
His mother sniffed back tears.
But it was indeed time for at least some of them to go. The disaster of arriving at the abbey after the bride was not to be contemplated.
“You have the ring, Owen?” Devlin asked.
Owen patted a pocket. But even at such a solemn moment he could not resist playing the clown and whacking at himself wherever there might be a pocket, muttering a panicked “Now, where did I put it?”
Ben clipped his ear, Stephanie clucked her tongue and tossed a glance at the ceiling, and their mother shook her head and removed the hand she had clapped over her heart.
The family left first. They would occupy the seats on one side of the church together with Sir Ifor and Lady Rhys, Idris and Eluned, and the Havilands, who had been invited and had accepted. The extended Westcott family, of which the Cunninghams were one branch, would sit on the other side—vast numbers of them, Nicholas had been warned.
All the guests were in place when Nicholas arrived ten minutes early with his younger brother on a crisp winter morning brightened by the sun beaming down from a clear blue sky.
There was a murmur from the gathered congregation as they made their way along the nave to the seats that had been reserved for them before the altar. Their boot heels rang out on the stone floor. Nicholas felt awed and dwarfed by the size of the church, the dimness of its interior transformed by the light passing through the huge stained glass window behind the altar. If he had not fully understood the serious solemnity of the occasion before, there was no escaping it now.
This was his wedding day.
His wedding day.
Even as he thought it, he was aware of a renewed murmur and rustling from behind him, and he turned his head to see Mrs. Cunningham, on the arm of Robbie, take her seat across the aisle fromhis. She glanced over at him, raised her eyebrows as though in surprise, and smiled warmly.
There were other sounds coming from the back of the abbey, but they were soon drowned out by the majestic chords of the great organ.
Nicholas rose to his feet even as the clergyman, gorgeously clad in his clerical vestments, took his place in front of the altar rail and turned to face the congregation and motion for them all to rise.
And Nicholas watched his bride proceeding slowly toward him on her father’s arm, small and slight and dazzling all in white velvet, a long spray of winter greenery—Christmasgreenery—in her free hand. Her head was bare, her hair in its usual sleek style, with a knot high on the back of her head threaded with more of the greenery, in which there were tiny white flowers, he saw as she drew closer.
She looked nothing short of stunning.
Her eyes were on him, he saw as she came nearer, as his were upon her.
He was not smiling, he realized. Neither was she.
This was too solemn a moment. Too precious.
This was their wedding. No longer just their weddingday, but their wedding.
—
Winifred’s thoughts were thrown back to that day in June when she saw Colonel Nicholas Ware for the first time. Her first impression had been a certain degree of fright and an unacknowledged attraction. How much had happened since then to transform him into a man, apersonin her eyes, whom she could admire and like and trust and desire. Andlove.
Yes, he was a killer. And yes, he had killed. He was a militaryman, after all. He had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. But life was not as simple as it often seemed. He was also a defender of the helpless and downtrodden and innocent. He was a saver of lives. He also respected what made people different from one another. He went out of his way to understand and accommodate people many might see as handicapped when in fact they lived life according to their own reality. Andrew, who generally disregarded strangers, genuinely liked him.
Now, gorgeous and seemingly remote from her in his dress uniform, minus the bearskin helmet, he was about to become her husband. She had expected to feel nerves, even perhaps the last-minute desire to rush toward freedom before it was too late. But as Papa transferred her hand from his own to Nicholas’s warm clasp, she had not been surer of anything in her life.
