There was the first thing. She did not pull away from him and he gentled his grip and put her gloved hand on his coat over his left chest, over his heart, in the very place where she had put her palm when he had walked into her cottage in Dunburn.
“I love ye, Arabella Lovelock.”
There was the second thing.
He had done it.
“Ye are the woman of my dreams. Marry me.”
She looked up at him.
“Aye,” she said.
Thirty-Two
Despite the melting snow, Alasdair and Arabella—along with Paterson and Ewen McEwen—could not yet leave the Morpeth estate. Alasdair felt obliged to wait until another doctor could be sent for. The baron seemed largely out of danger but Alasdair pointed out that the whole surgery had been an experiment with a fortunate outcome.
“It could so easily have gone wrong,” he said. “It might still go wrong.”
Lord Morpeth continued to have pain but the fever did not come back and he was able to eat.
Even though Alasdair was the only one of their party with a professional obligation to stay, he was the one most anxious to leave. He had a wedding to get to and get through.
Alasdair wanted to be man and wife. He wanted to feel free to give Arabella the redheaded babies she longed for. And he thought he might very much like to spend inside her instead of on the sheets, which he had continued to do, despite knowing that it was not ideal.
Because he found now that he had had the ecstasy of coupling with Arabella, he could not give it up.
But he also wanted a baby that came nine or more months after a wedding.
Arabella said she didn’t care and urged him to spend inside her.
“I’m ready, Alasdair.”
Though the temptation was great and there were some very narrow margins in his timings, still he found himself caring. After what Arabella had been through with her scandal, he wanted the calendar of their child’s birth to be perfect. And he sensed Arabella had resented her mother’s confinement only three months after her marriage.
“And,” he said, brushing his lips over her tiny pink ear. “I’m still sensitive to the fact that ye are marrying a poor boy from Bailebrae. I dinnae want people to say ye had to marry me,mo leannan,my beloved.”
“But I do have to marry you,” she said, purring.
He looked at her questioningly.
“Because I love you.”
He kissed her then, deeply, slowly.
“When the roads are finally clear, let us get to Sommerleigh,” Arabella said many minutes later, her arms around his neck, “and be married there. Once we are there, we need only purchase a license and it will be seven days. Or we could have less expense with three weeks of banns.”
He growled. “We are getting the seven-day license. I dinnae care about the cost.” And despite it being the morning and both of them already being dressed for the day and breakfast waiting for them, he seized her and kissed her and discovered the pleasure of holding her and penetrating her in an upright position against the wall of the room in broad daylight where he could see every twitch of pleasure that danced across her face.
As he waited for the snow to clear, Alasdair found himself retiring to bed earlier and earlier every night because Arabella joined him there. He found that his long fingers could afford her a great deal of pleasure. And the long winter nights meant he accumulated what he thought of as a great deal of experience very quickly. Very little time was spent in sleep when there were hours of lovemaking to be had.
“Now,” Arabella said to him one night as she ran her fingers through the copper hair on his chest before moving to the auburn hair on his head. “I know why my mother needed so many naps.”
Arabella said that she really must leave the bed and have several hours a day in public view. If only to make you hungry for me again, she said teasingly even as he assured her that would be no problem. Arabella spent her time away from the bed with Rebecca usually, trudging through the slowly melting snow-covered gardens or sitting in the drawing room and giggling.
During those times, when the blood flow was finally directed away from his cock and toward his brain, Alasdair had some thoughts about Lady Morpeth’s condition and what could be causing it. He now had the books and the periodicals he had brought on his trip from Dr. Murray’s library and he pored over them, looking for hints. However, they did not provide him with the information he sought. He needed to rely largely on his memory for the unusual cases he had read about during his training and his subsequent career.
And finally, it came to him when he remembered Lady Morpeth said sometimes her vision had a yellow tint, and he felt that his diagnosis was almost certainly correct.
