“There’s nothing wrong with you, and never was. Mind, you weren’t easy,” he said on a crooked grin that moved something in her heart. “Lord, no. I guess all your medical books have a thing or two to say about that. No, it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible. But this time, you did the drinking, and I did some distracting, and we did it. Yeah,” he said, smiling as he saw she did. “We did it, all right. I had the advantage of being sober, and knowing something might be needed besides desire,” he added, unwilling to remind her of her late husband, but too fair-minded to forget him.
“See,” he said gently, as she watched him with eyes as wide and deep as the night they were adrift in, “sometimes you have just got to get on that wild horse, no matter how scared you are. Because there’s nothing worse than fear. It can defeat men as well as women. But it didn’t get you,” he said with pride. “You got on two wild horses tonight and beat them both. Although,” he added with gentle rue, touching a feathery kiss to her cheek, “I suspect you feel more like one’s ridden you just now—even though you sure conquered him, too. It’ll never be that difficult again, I promise,” he whispered.
“That’s what you think,” she said, so joyful she couldn’t stay serious a heartbeat longer. “It will take far more than two glasses of champagne and a few kisses to get me next time. Yes,” she said breathlessly when he raised his head from her again. “It will take that—exactly right.”
“Hannah,” he said at last, as he gasped with the effort of stopping to get the words out again, “this is all a part of love, but it was never necessary for my love, you know that. Although it sure is good,” he admitted. “Still, it was pretty rough for you the first time; we have a world of time ahead of us, you sure you want this again now?”
“Now,” she insisted, “and later, and then again.”
“Lord!” he sighed with pleasure and expectation, “thePolice Gazettewas right about you actresses, you’re wild and wicked and depraved.”
“Of course,” she said smugly, “I just had to learn how to be. Show me again? Please?” she asked, suddenly shy, before he began to, and her words died against his throat, as he showed her how laughter could become something silent and even more pleasurable. And with all her lack of experience, she showed him what he’d always guessed: that their love would be something more than bodies meeting, and nothing less than beyond all his experience.
Mrs. Prescott woke, as usual, at dawn. She lay in bed, hearing the sparrows squabbling in the hedges outside her window, even though it had been closed against the December night. Mr. Evans, third floor, front, had begun his morning hacking and coughing in preparation to lighting up his first smoke of the day. And the milkman’s horse came clopping up the street, she heard him stop in front ofMrs. Henderson’s house on the corner, right on time. It was the usual morning song, muted by winter, but it woke her as readily as a rooster might.
But then she heard the gladsome sound of two people laughing uproariously: a man and a woman. Probably drunks coming home with the dawn, she thought with a sniff as she lay in bed, thinking of her morning’s chores. She could understand if not approve that, she was in New York City, and not far from the theater district, after all. But she never knew why it was that she then heard them merrily chanting in unison: “We did it, we did it, we did it,” until they stopped as suddenly as if they’d dropped down a well.
Because when she rose and went to the window to see what had happened to them, she saw nothing but the sparrows and the milkman’s horse and wagon, and the morning light, coming up to warm the world.
Chapter Twenty-One
They threw rice and petals and words of advice and congratulations at the newlyweds as they raced down the stairs of the Dylan mansion to their coach, and then off into the new decade’s first night. For once the wedding party lost none of its zest when the bridal pair departed, because New Year’s Eve was a time for both farewells and greetings, and there was still a new year to warm and welcome, even after all the goodbyes.
The bride flung herself into the groom’s arms and dissolved in merriment as soon as the coach door closed behind them.
“Your face,” she chortled, “when he asked if I do!”
“Lord!” Gray laughed. “I was sure you’d say, ‘I did!’ like you threatened to.”
“I was going to,” Hannah lied blithely, “Except then I remembered that I’d have to say, ‘I did, I did, I did,’ if I was going to be honest.”
“Add another ‘I did’?” he whispered before he kissed her. “Unless you’re forgetting the morning.” She never got to agree, because he kissed the breath and the question away from her.
“It’s very good,” he said, when she lay her head on his shoulder, as he stroked her hair and idly began to arrange the stray rose petals caught fast as stars in the dark cloud of it. “But darling, please believe its only part of why I’m so out of my mind happy now.”
It was simply said, and yet for all the dramas she’d seen enacted, and all the ready answers a woman of the theater should have for any protestation of love, Hannah could only say, “Oh, Gray!” as tears filled her eyes.
“Of course,” he added, “it’s a mightybigpart of it.”
The sound of laughter poured from the closed coach as it rumbled off, mingling with the tolling of church bells that were still heard sporadically everywhere in the city. Hannah and Gray had taken their vows in the old year and had them consecrated in the new, as they’d felt was fitting for them, and now 1890 was well underway. Pans and pots were being banged by late revelers, and now and againfirecrackers were still being set off to usher in the new decade. Yet their unbridled laughter rang out joyously, high and clear above the din, as though to also cheer the infant year.
Josh Dylan watched the coach go down the street, and was smiling widely as he came back into his house. His baby brother had never looked happier than when he’d kissed his new bride—except. Josh though as he kept his arm about his own wife’s promising waist, for perhaps the moment just before the ceremony when he’d looked into his big brother’s gravely serious eyes and murmured, “No need for worrying anymore. Everything’s just fine. Everything’s all right. Doc had words of advice, and turns out they’re no longer needed. Yeah,” he said, nodding at the dawning expression on his best man’s face, “I’ll be an uncle again before the summer, but there’s no reason why, with any luck at all, you couldn’t be one yourself, by next year.”
He wouldn’t say more, and he couldn’t have said less, because he was as much a gentleman as he was about to be a husband. But neither would his brother violate either code of honor. Nor did he have to. Josh had understood right enough. Grinning from ear to ear, he swatted his brother on the shoulder hard enough to have sent him reeling halfway down the aisle if he hadn’t been holding onto his other hand, shaking it. And he’d only said, “That’s just fine!”
But it had been there in her eyes. All brides were beautiful, but Hannah was spectacularly so. And for those that looked for it, her triumph as well as her joy and satisfaction were there to see in the secret smile on her lush lips, and the dazed, slumberous look awakened in her great dark eyes. Newly lost innocence and newly kindled desire paired with love and made for a rare new beauty in an already beautiful woman. She dazzled so, in her cream-lace gown, with her black hair done up high on her proudly held head, that the guests hadn’t an eye for her father or any of the other rich or famous that were there. And there were many of both in attendance, because the wedding list kept growing, until it became—as those members of the press that sneaked or were invited in were to write—possibly one of the most glittering affairs of the decade, even though it was held on its very first night.
“Everything will be fine with them,” Josh whispered to his wife, but she only smiled, because she’d spoken a word to the bride before she’d left, and already knew it.
“Goodness! Look at Delia’s face,” she said instead, looking at her eldest girl, where she stood, petulant, in the hallway, staring after the disappeared wedding coach, stupefied with sleepiness but too stubborn to show it. “I’ll just go and get her to bed,” Lucy murmured.
“You go sit down,” Josh commanded as he unceremoniously hoisted his surly looking daughter over his shoulder, to the ruination of her frilly frock and her dignity. “She doesn’t know whether to be angry at Gray for finding another girl, or amazed that she’s got such a beautiful aunt now—an aunt who said she’d be more than willing to teach her acting someday,” he added pointedly, and felt his burden cease wriggling. “But in the morning,” he said as he began to climb the long circular stair to the children’s quarters, “when she finds she can hold it over her sister and brother’s heads because she was the only one awake enough to see the wedding, I think she’ll get over it—even if she wasn’t really awake enough to see it herself,” he added, and howled convincingly when his cargo grabbed a handful of his golden hair to tug.
Josh came down the stairs again soon after, absently grinning at the way Delia had been asleep as soon as she’d gotten the “G’nite” out after she’d kissed him. As he descended, he could hear the sounds of the wedding-New Year’s party in the ballroom still going at full swing, even without its guests of honor. The strains of “Oh, Promise Me” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song” that had been played for them; “Down in the Valley” “Clementine” and “Whoopee-Ti-Yi-Yo” that had been requested especially for the groom and his brother, and selections from “H. M. S. Pinafore” that had been rendered in honor of the hostess, had given way to newer, more popular tunes for other guests.
Josh heard the lively finish to “Where Did You Get That Hat?” just before the raucous introduction to “Ta Ra Ra Boom Der Ay” was struck up again. He grinned, remembering that he had it on the highest authority—the bridegroom’s—that the song was actually not new at all, but from a famous brothel in St. Louis. He grinned wider, remembering all the mock sorrow in Gray’s voice as he tried to pretend regret for all he’d be missing now that he’d be walking the straight and narrow aisle of a groom—while all the time he could hardly keep his face straight for all the gladness in it.
But Josh’s smile faded, and he paused when he came to the hallway. Kyle Harper was there, being assisted into his evening cape.
