“And London,” she added.
He shrugged as if the fate of the great city was neither here nor there in his conscience. “So…” he said.
“So,” Elodie agreed.
“You’re going to want me to kneel.” He made it sound likeshe required him to dance naked through the university grounds, singing of his love for her.
“I made no such suggestion,” she said.
“It’s proper.”
Now Elodie was the one to shrug. “Just be yourself, Gabriel.”
“Hm.” He seemed dubious as to the wisdom of this. “You’ll be able to fix me over time, I’m sure.”
She shook her head earnestly. “You don’t need fixing.”
“I agree.”
Elodie had to quickly bite her tongue to keep from calling him an arrogant sod considering he was, after all, in the middle of attempting a romantic scene. That would be undignified of her at the least, and at the most it would make a terrible mess of…
“Arrogant sod,”she said, nudging his foot with hers.
He just looked at her complacently. Then he took a deep breath, and Elodie held her own. This was it. The impossible dream, actually coming true.
But he paused, and Elodie watched as his jaw clenched. She sensed that he was waging a silent, internal battle against the spikiness that protected him from what everyone assumed was general botheration but she had come to understand was a painful sensitivity. He really needed to exist in a microhabitat, this darling grouchy man of hers, and the fact that he went about in the greater world teaching people, addressing conferences, and riding velocipedes when needed, despite the constant assaults on his tender spirit, made him heroic in her eyes.
“Don’t kneel,” she urged with a burst of feeling. “I don’t want a grand gesture. I wantyou.”
He looked through his eyelashes at her in that devastatingway he had, all midnight and secrets. “Here,” he said abruptly, holding the ring out. “Will you be my wife?”
There was no need to ponder it. “Yes,” she answered with a radiant smile. Gabriel took her hand with exquisite gentleness and slid the ring back on where it belonged. Then, while Elodie’s heart pulled her intellect into an exuberant waltz, he lifted the hand and kissed it.
Oh my,she thought, going warm and sparkling. Who needed grand gestures when a man did things like that?
“I hope you don’t have many possessions,” he grumbled, fastidiously turning the ring as if there were some exact place on the plain gold band that should face outward. “My lodgings are not expansive.”
“We should live at my place,” she answered, practically singing the words, so joyful did she feel. “It’s quite sizable, and I have only one neighbor, a venerable old lady who is so silent you’d never know she—”
Suddenly Gabriel pulled her into his arms and kissed her with all the fervor of a man who had waited years for this moment: love,andquiet accommodation! A soft breeze swirled around them as if in benediction. Sheets of ancient illuminated paper drifted on it, and as one brushed Elodie’s leg, she broke away from the kiss to watch anxiously as it tumbled away across the grass. “Oh dear, Amelia is going to be so cross.”
“Please don’t talk about my sister while I’m kissing you,” Gabriel said, and possessed her mouth again with determination.Such a tyrant,Elodie thought, and let herself sink into the delight of it.
“Oh my God, I’m going to be sick!”
The sudden exclamation made them look around irritably. Some twenty feet away a young man was sitting up the longgrass, wine bottle in one hand and hair fallen over half his face. Elodie recognized him as a student from her Dynamic Geography course (subtitled When Things Go Boom). He swayed, his throat lurching with nausea, then jolted as he realized two university professors were standing nearby, watching him. His face went white as he sobered instantaneously.
“Dr. Tarrant!” he said, voice shaking like a triggered fey line. “What are you doing here?”
“Canoodling with my husband,” Elodie answered at the same moment Gabriel growled, “Saving Oxford, young man.” Each shot a look of exasperation at the other, but their eyes gleamed.
“See, I told you so,” Elodie said, grinning. “If you lie in the long grass, no one notices you.”
“ ‘Feeling the world,’ ”Gabriel muttered with disapproval.
She shrugged. “Hiding from students.”
At that, unexpectedly, Gabriel laughed.
