“Do you not think I would catch you, my love?”
She disregarded that with an additional poke of her finger into his delicious left pectoral muscle, directly above his heart. “And I certainly will not permit you to cover my eyes in broad daylight where anyone could see.”
Now he did laugh, and the sound rippled through her, a steady tide of pleasure and affection. “But later perhaps? In the privacy of our room?”
She shifted her finger up slowly, coming to rest in the notch of his collarbone. With a sigh, she savored the feel of his warm bare skin. “I shall consider it.”
He laughed again, and caught her wrist, and pressed a kiss to the tip of her index finger. “I’ll hold you to that. Come then, Lady Strathrannoch. Let me take you to your wedding present. ’Tis on your own head if you’re not surprised.”
After their reunion at the Hope-Wallace residence, they had lost no little time in making for Scotland. Lydia did not, under any circumstances, mean to inform her mother and brothers that she and Arthur were not already wed. She had spent enough nights without him in her bedchamber—she had no desire to prolong that particular separation.
A journey to Gretna Green would have been shorter, for the purposes of a most expedient Scottish wedding. But Arthur had fixed upon the notion of returning to the coaching inn along the Great North Road where they had stayed after his escape from the Thibodeaux’s carriage. She’d been surprised by his insistence—she’d supposed he would want to put the entire escapade behind them, now that the Thibodeaux were to be tried for their crimes and Davis had disentangled himself from the Home Office.
Davis had written Arthur a letter, passed on through Jasper’s hands.
I know you’d wish for me to come back with you to Strathrannoch, Davis had said,but I must learn to make my own way. I’ve taken a post in Upper Canada, at a timber company. But I will write to you, Arthur. I swear it.
Arthur had been quiet for a time, then folded the letter and placed it in his coat pocket. He’d looked—not so wounded as she might have feared. Conflicted, perhaps, but at peace with Davis’s decision.
His mouth had tipped up at the corners when they’d arrived back at the familiar inn on their way home to Strathrannoch. Inside she’d found a rather smug-looking Selina and her husband, as well as Georgiana and Sir Francis Bacon.
They’d arranged it all—Arthur and Selina and Georgiana together. He’d wanted her friends to be there to witness their vows.
The thought seemed to glow inside her, a bit of starlight captured somewhere in the vicinity of her heart. They’d pledged their troth right there in the public room and then retired to their bedchamber promptly and at a most indecent hour of the afternoon.
The next morning, Arthur had informed her—looking nearly as pleased as when he’d removed her shift in their bedchamber the day before—that he had a gift for her, in honor of their wedding. He’d needed to take her to it down the street, a fact which struck her as slightly alarming.
He brought her, in the end, to a milner at the edge of town. The man—a round-faced fellow of perhaps twenty—came tumbling out of his house, face alight.
“You’re back!” he said happily. “And with your lady wife too! Ah, good. You’ll be here to take her home with you, then?”
“Aye,” said Arthur. A smile had made itself at home on his mouth, and Lydia wanted quite desperately to kiss him there. “We’ll be taking her back to Strathrannoch with us.”
She stared up at him in bemusement. “Taking whom with us?”
“Come, Lady Strathrannoch,” he said in answer. “Let’s see your gift.”
He led her around to the back of the milner’s cottage, whereupon she discovered a small stable yard that housed two dusty chestnuts, a sturdy gray, and—
Her mouth dropped open. Her gaze flew up to Arthur’s face. “My horse!”
He was grinning quite in earnest now. “Aye. I knew you’d not wanted to part with her.”
Lydia dashed toward the stocky roan, Arthur close behind her. She devoted a moment to pats and kisses, and then turned back to him. “How did you manage it? I thought never to see her again after you sold her.”
He wound his fingers in the horse’s red-brown mane. “As to that—well, in truth, I never sold her. I left her here, in this lad’s keeping. Told him, ah”—at this he looked a trifle embarrassed,his throat going pink—“that the mare belonged to my wife, the Countess of Strathrannoch, and to treat her as such.”
“I don’t understand.” The mare lipped at Lydia’s hair, and Lydia stroked her nose. “You came back with money—enough for the mail coach and more besides. How did you manage it?”
His mouth tilted, his smile just the faintest bit lopsided. “I sold something else instead. Something that mattered to me far less than your mare did to you.”
“What was it?”
He brushed her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “My father’s signet ring.”
Her mouth dropped open
Still smiling crookedly, he tapped her lower lip with one finger. “Dinna fash. I made a wee mold of the thing ages ago. I don’t need the ring to mark my letters with the Strathrannoch seal. ’Twas sentiment, I suppose, that I kept it for as long as I did.”
