“And yet you married me willingly.” he smiled.
Her blush deepened beautifully. Victor leaned slightly closer as they continued along the stone path together. “You realize, of course, that there is no escape from me now.”
Charlotte lifted her chin with mock dignity. “I suppose I shall endure somehow.”
Victor’s gaze darkened at once. “Endure?”
“Perhaps… tolerate,” she teased.
“Careful, wife.” His voice lowered dangerously. “You may wound my pride.”
She laughed softly then, and the sound struck Victor directly in the chest.
God help me, I want to hear that laugh every day for the rest of my life, and that is key to my undoing.
The thought startled him enough that he nearly frowned at himself.
Charlotte glanced up at him curiously. “What are you thinking?”
Victor looked down at his bride in the sunlight and realized, with sudden dangerous certainty, that he had never wanted anything more than he wanted the woman beside him now.
“You truly do not wish to know,” he said quietly.
* * *
The Wedding Breakfast
“Your grandmother appears quite taken with her new granddaughter,” Morgan remarked lazily beside Victor.
Victor glanced toward his friend, who looked entirely too amused by everything. “You say that as though it surprises you.”
“It surprises me that you married at all,” Morgan replied. “I half expected you to leap from the chapel window before the vows were finished.”
Victor snorted softly. “There were no windows large enough.”
Morgan laughed outright at that and lifted his glass in salute. “Well, you looked miserable for only half the ceremony, which is an achievement.”
“I was not miserable.”
“No,” Morgan said thoughtfully. “You looked content instead?”
Victor stood near the long breakfast table with a glass of champagne in his hand as laughter and conversation filled the dining room of Mulford Manor.
The wedding breakfast had become delightfully noisy, exactly as Elizabeth had wished, with Charlotte’s sisters speaking over one another while servants hurried in and out carrying fresh dishes. He had never imagined his home could feel so alive.
Elizabeth dabbed at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief while Harriet Brown patted her arm sympathetically beside her.
Charlotte knelt beside the dowager’s chair, smiling softly as she whispered something that made the older woman laugh through her tears.
Victor watched the scene from across the room and found himself strangely pleased by it, though pleasure had never been something he trusted for long.
Charlotte looked radiant in the pale ivory silk of her wedding gown, and even now, after the ceremony had ended, he could not stop staring at her.
His breath tightened unexpectedly at the sight of her smile. She had smiled at him during the ceremony as though she truly wished to become his wife, and that expression had stirred something dangerously warm inside his chest.
He disliked that warmth immensely.
Did she truly want to marry me, or was it merely to save her reputation and family?
