The Earl Claims His Wife (27 page)

Gillian charged after him.

“Where are you going?” she demanded, worried.

He stopped at the head of the wide, curved staircase. The play was over. She could hear cheering and some shouts. Any second, the crowd would come streaming out for an intermission.

“Not where you think,” Brian answered her.

“Gillian,” Andres’s voice said. She turned to see that he had come from his box and stood at the opposite end of the hall, not more than twenty feet from her.

“Go to him,” Brian said.

“What?” Gillian turned on her husband.

“Go to him,” he repeated.

She shook her head. People were starting to come out of the doors from every which way, but must have felt something of the tension in the air. They pulled up short. Heads swiveled back and forth as they took in the sight of Gillian and Brian on one end of the hall and Andres at the other.

If Brian knew they had an audience, he gave no indication. Instead, he took her by the arms. “I can’t live my life this way. He’s right there, Gillian, waiting for you. Leave. Be with him. I won’t hold you.”

Gillian’s throat tightened with the horror of what he was saying. He released his hold. A bit of the hardness left his expression.

“I’m not angry, Gillian. I want you to be happy. I want you to have the man you love. Go to him.”

He started down the steps. Andres moved toward her, but Gillian held him back with a shake of her head. She chased after her husband, who had almost reached the ground floor.

“Wright,” she shouted.

Brian kept moving, although a good number of people in the foyer looked up at her.

“You stop right there,” she ordered.

He didn’t obey.

In desperation, Gillian shouted at the top of her lungs, wanting him to hear her over the growing noise of the crowd, “You are the man I love, Wright. You are.”

That caught his attention along with the attention of everyone else in the foyer. Conversation stopped. Gillian had never been so humiliated but then, what else could she do? Her pride meant nothing if he left her.

And her sacrifice had not been in vain. Brian stopped. He looked up at her. “What did you say?”

He was going to make her repeat it. Gillian had never felt more vulnerable. And yet this time, the words were easier to say. She leaned over the railing, enunciating each word with honest emotion. “I love you. I have from the first moment we met.”

“That’s true,” Lady Liverpool’s voice chimed in from the staircase above Gillian. She and her husband had come to stand along the railing overlooking the foyer. “She told me exactly that before the play began.”

Heads looked to Brian for his response. If he noticed that they had become the center of attention for a good four hundred Londoners, he gave no indication, but climbed three steps toward her.

“I thought I’d killed that love, Gillian,” he said, “with years of indifference.”

Tears choked her. Did he believe she would make love to him without loving him? The idea made her angry. “You came close, but you earned it back and now, you are throwing it away. No wait. Go on. Leave. I can’t live like this, Brian. I can’t live with a man who would walk away from me.”

The crowd murmured its disapproval of him.

Brian ignored them. He climbed three more steps toward her. “I’m not walking away, Gillian. I want you to be happy. I love you too much to force you to stay if you don’t want to be with me.”

Where earlier the crowd’s sentiment had cast him as villain, it now started to change its perception.

Gillian changed hers, too.

“What did you say?” she demanded, taking a step down the stairs toward him.

“I said I won’t force you to stay with me—”

“No, not that part,” Gillian corrected him. “The part when you said you loved me.”

Brian rocked back slightly.

“I want to hear you say that again, Wright,” Gillian said. “I won’t believe it until I hear it clearly and distinctly from you.”

Her challenge was echoed with encouragements from their audience.

Brian looked around as if just now noticing the crowd gathered around them. Gillian braced herself, uncertain how he would react…but once again, her husband surprised her.

The tightness left his face. He leaned on the curved handrail so that he could look up at her and said in a voice that echoed throughout the hall, “I love you, Gillian. I love my wife.”

Claps and cheers met his announcement.

She closed her eyes, letting the words sink in. It hadn’t been her imagination. Everyone else had heard them, too. Still…“Say it again,” she pleaded.

This time, he charged up the last two steps to speak to her alone. “I love you. I have for so long now, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you. You are my heart. My soul. Without you by my side, my life is empty.”

The tension left her, replaced by joy at hearing her husband speak such wondrous things aloud.

“One more time, please,” she asked, daring to open her eyes. Yes, there he was, her noble, handsome, loving husband.

“I love you, Gillian.”

“Then why haven’t you said any such thing sooner?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. Pride. Stubbornness—”

Any other suggestions he would have made were cut off as she threw her arms around him, right there in front of the whole theater, and kissed him.

Incredibly, blessedly, he kissed her back.

Cheers around them grew louder and more enthusiastic clapping than had greeted the actors in the play.

Gillian didn’t care that they had created a scene. All she knew is that for the first time, she was completely certain of herself and Brian. Wrapped in his arms, she glanced up the stairs and saw Lord and Lady Liverpool clapping with the others.

Holburn and Fiona were there, too, and equally as happy.

The person who wasn’t there was Andres. He’d left. It pained Gillian to have hurt him so…and yet, her heart belonged to Brian.

Her husband added to the spectacle of the moment by swinging her up in his arms to the roaring approval of their audience, but instead of taking her back up to the box, he walked down the stairs, and through the crowded foyer. Well-wishers followed them.

“We’ve made a terrible scene,” she whispered to her husband as he carried her out the front door and onto the street where coaches and hired vehicles waited.

“Good,” he answered. “Let it be in the papers on the morrow that Lord Wright loves his wife. I’ll buy a dozen copies for your perusal alone so that you will never, ever doubt my love for you.”

“Perhaps we shall start a new fashion,” she suggested, “of husbands and wives truly caring for each other.”

“I hope that we do,” he answered, setting her into a hack.

The ride home was one of the most memorable in Gillian’s life. The man who had never spoken those simple three words to her, now couldn’t say them enough. Nor could she hold back from telling him how marvelous, wonderful, and precious he was to her.

At home, they hurried up the stairs, throwing off clothes as they went, laughing and giggling like children at a fair.

And then Brian made love to her.

Gone was the restraint, the doubts, the sadness. This time, their love was a celebration, a promise, a bond.

In the aftermath, as they both had returned from the heavens back to the earth of their bed again, they heard Anthony crying.

“Let me fetch him,” Brian whispered and slipped on breeches to do so.

Gillian brought the sheets up over her nakedness, waiting for him. She heard him speak a few words to Kate who sounded happy to fall back to sleep. A moment later, her husband returned with the baby. He settled Anthony on the bed between them.

The baby was very bright-eyed at this time of night, almost as if he shared his parents’ newly discovered love. He looked from one to the other, his eyes shiny in the candlelight and gave them a coo while he reached for his toes.

Brian and Gillian laughed. Her husband reached over to place his arm around her. “I’ve never been happier,” he confessed.

Neither had she. In fact, her heart, once so lonely and full of sadness, now seemed to encompass the world with its bounty. She took his hand, lacing his fingers with hers. “I think I could make you happier.”

“How could you do that?” he wondered, his smile spreading across his face.

“Not in the way you are thinking,” she chided, laughing. “Not with the baby in bed.”

“I can take him back to his room.”

“Leave him here for a moment. Instead, let me tell you this.” She leaned over and whispered in his ear her belief she was pregnant.

Brian’s reaction was all she could have wished it. He bounded from the bed with a loud whoop of joy.

Taking Anthony in his arms, he said, “You will have a brother or a sister. It doesn’t matter which or perhaps both. We’ll have herds of children.”

Gillian came up on her knees, pushing her hair back. “Don’t be too excited. It’s just a suspicion I have.

I could be wrong.”

“If you aren’t, my lady, then let me take this wee one back to his bed and I’ll make certain you are on the morrow,” he promised her.

And so he did.

And so she was.