All for You (40 page)

“Shall I tell you tales about David Preston to inspire you?” she asked lightly.

He pursed his lips. “I think that might have done it right there, darling. Let’s see to Reggie, then I’ll go put the game into motion.”

“I’ll go mingle.”

He looked at her seriously. “Be ready to run, Peaches.”

“Do you think we’ll need to?”

“At this point, love, I wouldn’t be surprised by anything.”

She leaned up on her toes and kissed him briefly. “Play well.”

“Stay within reach.”

She looked up at him seriously. “That is the place I would like to be for the rest of my life.”

He hugged her quickly, then let her go before he either sobbed like a babe or told her he’d changed his mind about trying to save his hall and they would just have to move to Italy and work on growing olives. He exchanged one last look with her before she slipped out the door and he turned to the first task of the night, which was to get his ancestor out of sight.

He only hoped the rest of the night’s activities would be so easily accomplished.

I
t
was sunrise when he stumbled with Peaches up toward Artane’s gates. Modern Artane’s gates, his father’s gates—

Only they weren’t his father’s gates any longer. They were his gates.

“Are you okay?”

He looked at his wife of eight hundred years and smiled wearily. She was wearing her Regency clothes with a backpack over her shoulders, looking as if she’d spent the night rolling in the mud. He was also wearing Regency clothes, but instead of a backpack, he was carrying a sword. But he suspected he also looked like he’d spent the night rolling in the mud.

Which was exactly what they’d been doing.

“I’m numb,” he admitted, “from cold, terror, and lack of food.” He shook his head slowly. “If we’d had to eat any more of that slop Reggie was serving, I would have lain down right there at the card table and surrendered.”

She smiled up at him, a bit of dirt on her cheek flaking off as she did so. “I would say indigestion was what turned the tide in that very dodgy game—Lionel of Kenneworth suddenly coming down with food poisoning, I mean—but I think he would have feigned stomach trouble just the same to get out with his pride intact simply because you’d outcheated him.”

“I didn’t cheat,” Stephen said archly.

“Liar.”

He looked at her, then smiled in spite of himself. “Very well, I didn’t see any reason not to use his own ploys against him. But I’ll have you know and want it remembered for future generations that all the sterling I won at cards during my Eton years was won fairly.”

“Just Eton?” she asked politely. “Not at Cambridge?”

“I have an extensive collection of first editions,” he admitted. “You don’t think I would spend
my
money on them, do you?”

She smiled, then her smile faded. “You didn’t answer the question I was really asking.” She nodded toward the castle. “Are you okay?”

He took a deep breath, then nodded. “I will be.”

“Do you want me to catch a train—”

He started to make an offhand comment, then realized she was serious. “Of course not,” he said in surprise.

“But, Stephen, this is a really personal—”

“Peaches, darling, we’ve spent the past two days being really personal. And I spent days and days and days before then wishing that there was some way I could convince you to become very personal with me.” He stopped and looked down at her seriously. “I will hold my mother because I am her son, and I love her. But I want you there as well. Unless, of course,” he added slowly, “it would make you uncomfortable.”

She shook her head. “No, it won’t. I’ll stay, if you like.”

He studied her for a moment or two. “How long do you think it will take, my lady, before we don’t tiptoe around each other anymore?”

“I think you’ll need to date me a few times,” she said solemnly. “And scare up some of that wooing you keep promising me.”

He drew her into his arms, held her for a moment in silence, then pulled back and kissed her briefly. “We’ll attend to what we must here first, then I’ll see if we can’t indulge in a bit of the other. Will that suit?”

She turned to look at Artane sitting there in front of them, waiting. She took a deep breath, then nodded. He took her hand, then walked with her through his gates.

He nodded as they passed Mrs. Gladstone, who was at her post very early, wearing black. He almost continued on, then he stopped and poked his head into her booth.

“Good morning, Mrs. Gladstone,” he said politely.

“Good morning, Lord Stephen,” she said seriously. “I’m very sorry about your father.”

“Thank you,” he said simply, because he’d had two days to reconcile himself to the reality of what he would face when he returned home. “I am extremely grieved that I wasn’t here.”

She seemed to consider her next words carefully. “There’ve been those from Kenneworth nosing about,” she said with a frown. “Don’t much care for them.”

“Well, I’ll see to that for us.”

“I hope you will, my lord.”

Stephen nodded, then took Peaches’s hand again and started up the long path toward his father’s—

He had to take another deep breath. No, it wasn’t his father’s hall any longer. It was his hall. He looked at Peaches.

“They haven’t had the funeral yet,” he said, intending that it come out as a statement of fact.

“They wouldn’t have,” she said in a low voice. “Too many people know where you went to allow it.”

He nodded. “We might have to tell my mother.”

“Probably.”

“But not your parents.”

She smiled. “They would just congratulate us on a good trip and go back to their cannabis-laced brownies. I’m not sure it’s worth the phone call.”

He looked at her seriously. “I won’t be that sort of father.”

“It’s one of the reasons I married you, my lord.”

He stopped and started to turn her toward him when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

He uttered an obscenity.

It was his grandmother, striding toward him with a purpose. His first instinct was to pull Peaches behind him, but he chalked that up to too much time spent in the past. Instead, he kept hold of Peaches’s hand in spite of her efforts to pull it away.

Lady Louise Heydon-Brooke of Chattam Hall came to an abrupt halt in front of him and looked at him down her aristocratic nose—which was no mean feat considering she was a foot shorter than he was.

“Where,” she said crisply, “in the bloody hell have you been, Stephen? Camping? With this
girl
?” She wrinkled her nose. “You smell terrible.”

“Thank you, Grandmother,” Stephen said politely. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, my lady and I are on our way to the hall where we will make ourselves presentable and take up the duties awaiting us there.”

“Let go of her, Stephen.”

Stephen felt Peaches’s eyes on him. He definitely felt his grandmother boring a hole into his head with her gaze. He looked at his wife, lifted a single eyebrow, then turned to his grandmother.

“I was hoping to ease you into this, Grandmother,” he said evenly, “because I love you dearly. You have been a constant in my life, guiding me through the sometimes thorny paths I’ve trod thanks to my station in life.”

His grandmother paled. “Don’t tell me.”

Stephen looked at Peaches again, but she was only watching him solemnly, as if she were silently telling him to do whatever he thought best. Actually, he knew that’s what she was thinking because they’d had long conversations about many things whilst hiding in the beach grass, trying to avoid being killed by not only lads from Kenneworth but Reginald de Piaget’s footmen. He took a calm, measured breath, then looked back at his grandmother.

“I won’t spread this about. In fact, in order to show you the place that you have had in my life and will continue to have in my life and the lives of my wife and children, I will share a detail that only you will know.”

“I need a brandy.”

“Later,” Stephen said, offering her his arm. “You see, Grandmother—yes, take my arm and let’s walk back to the hall—I decided that what I was missing in my life was someone who would have married me if I’d had nothing.”

“But Irene,” Lady Louise said faintly. “Lady Zoe, or even that vapid Brittani—”

“Were terribly fond of my trappings, but they didn’t particularly care for me. And as you know, I can be difficult.”

“Don’t be polite, Stephen,” his grandmother said with a heavy sigh. “You can be an unmitigated ass when it suits you.”

“Then aren’t you happy I found an exceptionally beautiful, well-mannered, intelligent girl who was willing to take me on and love me in spite of my flaws?”

He watched his grandmother look around him and size Peaches up. She looked up at him, then.

“That lovely girl there?”

“That lovely girl there.”

“You eloped?” she asked, sounding as if she most definitely needed something strengthening.

“We did,” Stephen said cheerfully, “but I’m sure a wedding in a fortnight’s time will put that all to rights in your mind, won’t it?”

“A fortnight? Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll need a month to send out proper invitations. Six weeks would be more suitable.” She shot him a warning look. “And you’ll put this elopement behind you until then, sir, or you’ll deal with me.”

Stephen pursed his lips, then began to curse when he heard Peaches laugh. He looked at her, not quite understanding why she found the thought of casting him from her bed so amusing, then at his grandmother, who he was quite sure found the thought of Peaches casting him from her bed
extremely
amusing.

“Have you two been plotting behind my back?” he asked sourly.

His grandmother abandoned him and went to link arms with Peaches, who he had to admit smelled much better than he did.

“Forgive an old woman her prejudices,” Lady Louise said bluntly. “He is my favorite grandson, you know, and I have many to choose from. But I’m the first to admit he has flaws, not the least of which are those rather fetching gray eyes of his.”

“They are lovely,” Peaches agreed.

“I’ve heard rumors that you went through a time where you didn’t care for him much.”

“I had my prejudices as well,” Peaches admitted. “But your grandson is hard to resist.”

Stephen found his grandmother looking around Peaches to catch his eye.

“A month.”

“A fortnight,” he insisted.

“Don’t be daft,” she said. “I’ll never manage that.” She considered, then pursed her lips. “I suppose you could have adjoining rooms until then. If you were discreet.”

“Thank you, Grandmother,” he said dryly.

“Of course Peaches will need to come stay with me whilst we see to her trousseau, leaving you here to see to your father’s affairs. I think that will take at least a month.”

Stephen promised himself that he would put his foot down very soon. But his grandmother was on her best behavior and Peaches was still holding his hand, so perhaps he would just herd his grandmother toward the cooking sherry and his wife upstairs and see if he couldn’t have his way after all.

I
t
had been, he conceded as the sun was setting many long hours later, an eternal day. He stood on the roof of the castle, leaning against the parapet as had been his habit for as long as he could remember, and looked out over the darkening sea. He had made up interesting tales for his grandmother and the servants about his recent activities, comforted his mother with promises of more interesting stories another day, then seen to the details of his father’s funeral.

And he hadn’t seen nearly as much of his wife as he would have liked.

He felt arms go around his waist, but he didn’t jump. He merely turned, leaned his hip against the wall, and gathered his companion against him, wrapping his arms securely around her.

“I hate heights,” Peaches said, her words muffled against his jacket.

“I won’t let you fall.”

“You haven’t yet.”

He smiled and held her tightly. “I won’t in the yet to come, either.”

She stood with him in silence for quite some time, turning her face so she could look out over the sea as well. She finally pulled back far enough to look up at him.

“How are you?” she asked seriously.

He sighed. “Grieved,” he admitted, “though there is something about the timing of this that strikes me as being fated. I would never tell my mother that, but there it is.”

“I think she feels it, too,” Peaches said quietly. “She said she is very fond of the wee house at Etham.”

The house at Etham was anything but wee, but it was in the south and the gardens were spectacular. Stephen sighed deeply.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “I’m not sure she’s ever loved the north, or the sea.” He looked down at her. “What do you love, my lady?”

“You,” she said simply. “And the sea. And the walls of your keep that whisper with wind and history and ghosts that don’t do anything but bow when I walk past them.”

He laughed uneasily. “Do they, now. How fortuitous that they seem to know already who and what you are to me.”

“I have the feeling that entry we made in the big book of de Piaget genealogy under Lord Robin’s watchful eye has been looked up before.” She smiled at him. “Not many Peaches in the past, I don’t imagine. Maybe we should have used aliases.”

He shook his head. “We’ll let our children puzzle it out.”

“And your relations, all of whom have been giving me knowing looks all afternoon,” she said with a shiver. “Megan already asked me if we were staying in your room or if she should make up one for me just for appearances.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I told her that your grandmother said we could have adjoining rooms.”

“We don’t have any adjoining rooms at Artane.”

“Well,” she said looking up at him, “so you don’t, which solved that problem fairly well.”

He smiled dryly. “Did you tell Tess?”

“Yes. She said it wasn’t nice to inflict payback that way, though she did remind me that I had been a witness at the local clerk’s office when they were married, well, you know.”

“We’ll send her an invitation to our other, well, you know.”