“Okay,” her daughter answered happily.
“Caroline, I am asking you to be my wife, if you will have me.”
“Yes,” she said without even having to think. “I promise that I will never keep another secret from you and I will not even consider a deception. You will always know what is in my heart and what I am thinking. I never want to make that mistake again.”
“I know you will not, and neither will I.” He then placed his palms against her cheeks and kissed her.
It was the sweetest and most wonderful kiss she had ever received.
Epilogue
Six years later
Caroline held ontightly and she leaned over the rail of the ship and tossed up her accounts. Sterling rubbed his hand up and down her back in a soothing manner.
“How soon will we get there?” She had been vomiting daily since a month into their trip.
“The captain says we will be there by today. We just need to watch for the port.”
“It has happened again,” Livia observed.
“What’s happened?” her younger brother Joseph asked.
“We’re going to have another sibling.”
Caroline looked over her shoulder at her daughter, who was now eleven years old. How could she know? She was too young to know about these matters.
“She did the same before you came along, and before Lily,” Livia answered.
Lily was barely two years old and she was down in the cabin napping with the nursery maid.
“It could be sickness from being at sea,” Caroline said.
“Did that happen to you before?” Livia asked.
“No, it did not,” Sterling answered for her.
“See, I told you.”
“Is it better?” Sterling asked quietly.
Caroline nodded and he pulled her close so that she could rest her headon his chest.
“I promise that we will not leave until you are feeling better even if that means we have to wait until this child is born.”
She tilted her head and looked up at him. “Lord Wyndham, does that mean that we will stay away from Trade Wynd for nearly nine months because this child will not arrive for six and then it is a three-month journey back?”
“I have before and I will again. I find the best things happen to me when I am away from Southampton longer than intended. Maybe we will stay away for an entire year.”
“What do you think Damian would say?”
Damian was the brother who took care of the imports and exports leaving and arriving on ships and kept his offices near the warehouse.
“He will do well enough.”
“So you say but he has been rather preoccupied of late as well.”
“With the best of things,” he said before he kissed the tip of her nose.
