Slightly Tempted (42 page)

Morgan bowed her head and lifted both hands to cover her face.

"And so," he said, "I come to the end of the only defense I can make-a poor one at best. I cannot ask you to forgive me,chérie -that would be too easy and too glib. I do not deserve forgiveness. I can only assure you-again too easy and too glib, I am afraid-that I love you with all my heart and would spend my life loving you and being your friend if I could. Only you can decide if youwill forgive me. Or if you will trust me."

She walked to the bank of the river and a few yards along it, away from the willow and the cherub. The landscape darkened suddenly, and she looked up to see that a small cloud had covered the moon. But even as she gazed upward it moved off and her face was bathed in moonlight.

She had told him that he must forgive his father or forever be burdened by the darkness of his hatred.

She had told him that he must forgive Marianne and Henrietta or forever be bowed down by the terrible hurt they had caused him.

She knew that he must forgive Wulfric-just as she knew that Wulfric must now forgive Marianne.

Hatred, grudges were a deadly poison to the soul.

She must forgive Gervase, then. But was forgiveness enough?Could she trust him?

But one could notalways be without trust. What immeasurable harm one would do to oneself if one viewed every person in one's life with cynical suspicion. And she was, she knew, in danger of becoming such a person. She had been hopelessly naive until very recently. Was she now to allow herself to swing to the opposite extreme? Was she to guard herself against future hurt-and in the process also deny herself present and future happiness?

Those final days in Brussels had beenreal .

He had liked and admired and respected her. He had searched for Alleyne for her sake. He had made love to her because he had wanted to share her pain and bring her comfort. He had been her friend. And her lover.

It had all been real.

When she turned to look back, he was standing exactly where she had left him.

She had sworn to herself that she would not be weak.

But was being intractable its own form of weakness?

She walked back toward him, still not sure what she would say. And so she said nothing. She walked right against him until she could set her face in the intricate folds of his neckcloth and feel the warm, solid strength of his body and his thighs against her own.

After a few moments she felt one of his arms come lightly about her while the fingers of his other hand stroked the back of her head through her hair. A few moments after that she felt his cheek come to rest against the top of her head.

"I am sorry, Morgan," he said. "Ah, the inadequacy of words. I am so very, very sorry,ma chère ."

"If you had not seen me at the Cameron ball and discovered that I was Wulfric's sister," she said without lifting her face, "we would never have met, Gervase. And I would have hated that."

He turned his head and kissed the top of her head.

"Ido trust you," she said. "I really do."

He kissed her-softly and warmly-and she kissed him back with all the yearning of someone who had steeled herself to reject what she loved and who had discovered that the sacrifice was not necessary after all. And then he hugged her very tightly before letting her go. He stepped away from the grotto wall, took both her hands in his, and went down on one knee on the grass.

"Morgan." He gazed up at her. "I love you for everything you are and will become. I admire you as a woman and as a person. I treasure you as a friend and companion. I love your intelligence and your artistic vision and your insights into life and spirit. I adore you as a lover. I would nurture your freedom for a lifetime if you will have me. And I would offer all that is the essence of my true self in return. Will you honor me by marrying me?"

It was terribly theatrical-and marvelously, soul-shatteringly romantic. He had said nothing about possession, nothing about not being able to live without her, nothing that would bind her except the marriage commitment itself. And love, whose bonds could only ever be freedom if it was real love.

"Yes," she said.

Perhaps she ought to have said more. Perhaps she ought to have said something to match what he had said to her. But her chest and throat were sore with unshed tears, and somehow the one word encompassed everything there was to be said anyway.

Yes, she would be his friend. Yes, she would be his lover. Yes, she would be his wife. Together they would seek companionship and physical union and joy-and together they would nurture and cherish each other's uniqueness and freedom.

He got to his feet, wrapped his arms about her waist, lifted her off the ground, and spun her about, tipping back his head and baying at the moon as he did so. She tipped back her own head and laughed.

It was a cleansing, heart-deep laugh that restored to her the treasure of her youth. Though he stopped it soon enough with a kiss.

"I hope you brought something with you to light the lantern again," she said after a while. "The night is getting cloudy. It is going to be very dark on the wilderness walk."

"That settles it, then," he said. "We will solve the problem by not walking it until daylight,chérie ."

"It iscold, " she protested.

"But not for long," he told her. "Lovemaking is warm business, and Ido intend to make love to you-probably for most of what remains of the night. But though I had very little hope this morning, you see, I did not quite despair either. And so I prepared for what I hoped would be the ending of our private talk together-ifI could persuade you into it. I brought some blankets very early this morning, before anyone was up, and put them inside the grotto. They are there now."

She opened her mouth to speak, outraged by his presumption. But he waggled his eyebrows at her and then looked sheepish, and she found herself laughing again and wrapping her arms about his neck.

"This," she said, "is probably not what Aidan had in mind when he permitted me to come out here to say good night to you."

"Now there," he told her, "I would wager you are wrong. He would have had to be stupid not to guess my intent, and I do not believe Lord Aidan Bedwyn is stupid."

It was a startling idea to Morgan. Were betrothed couples really allowed such freedom?

But Gervase was already retrieving a pile of neatly folded blankets from the grotto and spreading one of them on the grass. And then he was waggling his eyebrows at her again and opening his arms to her.

It was a cool, almost chilly night, and they did use the blankets, though only for brief spells while they caught their breath and allowed the world to slow to its regular speed on its axis again, as Gervase put it. For the rest of the night, until dawn grayed the eastern sky and even a little beyond that, they made hot, vigorous, joyful love and would have been warm even floating in Arctic waters on an iceberg-also according to Gervase.

They crept back into the house not long before the servants were up. Morgan heard them just before she fell asleep.

CHAPTER XXIII

MORGAN WAS THE FIRST ONE DOWNSTAIRS.She ought not to have started dressing so early. It was ridiculous really to imagine that dressing was going to take so much longer than usual merely because this was her wedding day. But perhaps she had not imagined any such thing. She had simply not been able to wait any longer. She was so excited and so nervous that she thought she might vomit if she dwelled upon the significance of the occasion.

She ought to have remained in her dressing room. She could remember how last year, when Freyja had wed Joshua, they had all crowded into her dressing room to comment on her appearance, to wish her joy, to hug her before leaving for the church so that they might be decently seated in the pews before she arrived with Wulfric.

But here she was downstairs, alone except for a silent footman who forgot himself for a moment when he first saw her and half smiled at her. The great hall of Lindsey Hall, which had been preserved as a medieval banqueting hall, had always been one of her favorite places in the world. She ran her hands over the smooth old wood of the great table as she walked around it, and gazed at the old banners and coats of arms and weapons hanging on the walls.

The enormity of what was happening hit her like a blow to the stomach. After this morning, Lindsey Hall would no longer be home. It would be Wulfric's home, but not hers. She would never again be Morgan Bedwyn after this morning. She would come here in future only as a guest-as Lady Morgan Ashford, Countess of Rosthorn. She shivered and wondered for a moment if she reallywas going to vomit. It did not help, she supposed, that she was very probably with child. Certainly her courses, which should have come two weeks ago, still showed no sign of coming at all.

Wulfric strolled into the hall from the direction of the minstrel gallery and raised his eyebrows at the sight of her. He even stood still to take a better look and raised his quizzing glass to his eye.

"Breathtaking," he said softly, an unexpected pronouncement coming from him.

She had decided to wear white with lavender embroidery about the hems of her skirt and sleeves and lavender ribbons to trim her bonnet and the high waistline of her dress. Lavender in remembrance of Alleyne, for whom she had shed tears last night after retiring to bed. It made her heart ache to realize how life went on after the death of a dearly loved one much as it would if he had lived. Except that if he had lived she would not have remained in Brussels and today would not be happening this way at all.

"And so I am to cheerfully give away the last one of my family to someone who believes he needs her more than I, am I?" Wulfric asked.

He was in a strange mood. When had Wulfneeded any of them? And yet it struck Morgan suddenly that he would be all alone here now. Would he be lonely? Was Wulf capable of loneliness?

She hurried across the space between them and wrapped her arms impulsively about him, rather as she had done in Harwich.

"You will crease your finery," he said with his customary cool hauteur as he put her from him-but only after hugging her so tightly that she felt the air whooshing out of her lungs.

She could have cried then. She could have bawled with grief for him, for Alleyne, for the sadness of having to grow up and realize that change was part of the very nature of life, that nothing was permanent and immutable. But before she could do anything so strange or potentially embarrassing, Rannulf appeared in the hall with their grandmother on his arm, looking terribly frail though she had insisted upon coming all the way from Leicestershire for the wedding. Judith was with them, and Eve and Aidan and the children were just behind. Becky came hurtling past them and flung herself at Morgan.

"You look so pretty, Aunt Morgan," she cried. "I am going to have bride clothes just like yours when I grow up."

"Trust Morgan to be first to her own wedding," Freyja said, coming into the hall with Joshua behind everyone else.

"We went to your dressing room but the bird had flown," Joshua said with a grin.

"It is a good thing you did not run all the way to the church, Morg," Rannulf said. "You would probably have been there before Gervase, and we Bedwyns would never have lived down the disgrace."

"You look delightful, Morgan, my dear," their grandmother said. "Come and give me a kiss."

Aunt and Uncle Rochester had appeared too.

"And then we must all leave for the church, except Morgan and Wulfric," Aunt Rochester said in her usual strident tones that somehow commanded attention even from a full gathering of Bedwyns. "It would be just as disgraceful, Rannulf, if we arrived after Rosthorn."

Almost as suddenly as they had all arrived in the hall, they were gone again, though they all invited the wrath of their aunt by hugging Morgan first, Rannulf quite bruisingly. Judith actually had tears in her eyes.

It was real, Morgan thought as she turned and looked at the silent figure of Wulfric, elegant and severe in black with white linen.

This was her wedding day.

TOGERVASE IT SEEMED AS HE WATCHEDMORGANcome toward him on Bewcastle's arm along the nave of the church, beautiful beyond belief in white with touches of lavender, that every moment of the past nine years and more had been worth living through just so that there could now be this moment.

What likelihood was there that it would have happened otherwise? Quite possibly he would have married someone else several years ago. Even if he had not, he might not have noticed Lady Morgan Bedwyn this spring. No, correction-he would surely have noticed her even as he had in Cameron's ballroom. But he might not have approached someone so young, so obviously fresh from the schoolroom. And even if he had, without motive to entice and attract her, he might not have causedher to granthim more than a fleeting moment of her attention.

It was strange how life worked.

Her eyes were on his, and they were bright with warmth and eagerness and love. By what miracle had she forgiven him? He smiled and, aware as he had been just a minute or two ago of Pierre at his side, of the churchful of family and guests filling every pew, now he saw only her.

His beloved Morgan.