The morning sunslanted through the porthole and painted Toby’s eyelids.
He woke and realized the warm body snuggled against his wasn’t a phantom of his dreams.
He and Diana lay locked together, warm skin to warm skin, in the rather cramped confines of the bunk in her cabin.
Memories of the night scrolled through his mind, and he smiled delightedly.
Despite Toby’s very real inclination to simply lie there and gloat, the sun was definitely up, and their time in private would, therefore, be running short.
Gently, he tightened his arms around her and, when she stirred, pressed a kiss to her temple.
Her lashes fluttered, then rose. On a soft “Oh,” she stared into his eyes, then she smiled. Gloriously joyful, that smile reassured him on every plane.
“I never actually asked you, not in simple words, to marry me.” He held her gaze, then blindly capturing one of her hands, he raised her fingers to his lips, kissed them lovingly, and said, “So, Diana Locke, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
Her smile grew more radiant until he would have sworn he felt the warmth of her love. “Yes,” she said. “I will.” As if to seal the pact, she added, “There is no position I want to fill more.”
“Good.” He kissed her fingers again. “That’s settled.”
The glint of gold on her finger—her mother’s ring that she’d been wearing as part of her disguise as his wife—caught his eye. He angled her fingers this way and that, then humphed. “Much as it’s served its purpose, I admit to being keen to replace it with my own as soon as possible.”
She laughed softly and drew his lips to hers, then pulled away to say, “I like the sound of ‘as soon as possible.’ When do you think that might be?”
He frowned in thought. “We have to take the children to Fellows’s aunt.” A glance at Diana’s eyes confirmed that she wasn’t looking forward to that any more than he was. “After that, however, I believe we’ll be able to rush to the altar as fast as”—he grimaced—“my family and yours will allow.”
She promptly informed him that she had few relatives still alive and that none were likely to strew any hurdles in their path. “However, we can’t forget those wretched dispatches, either.”
“Hmm. Perhaps we’d better extract them from Rupert before we leave the ship.”
They’d only just agreed on that course when a scratching sounded at the cabin door.
She looked at him, her eyes widening with incipient consternation.
He shrugged, then tipped his head toward the door, encouraging her to answer. It was her cabin, after all.
She cleared her throat, then called, “Yes?”
“We want to know when we can go to breakfast,” Roland said.
“We’re hungry,” Bryce unnecessarily added.
Diana looked at Toby.
He held her gaze, then they both dissolved into silent laughter.
“W—I’ll be out in a minute,” she managed to reply, pushing up from his embrace. “Just let me get dressed.”
“We can’t find Papa,” Evelyn piped. “But we can hear other people up on the deck, so perhaps he’s out there.”
“Can we go and look?” Bryce asked.
Toby shook his head and mouthed, “No.”
Diana sighed, then said, “Papa is here with me—he’s helping me to do up my gown.” Toby obligingly performed that task while she added, “We’ll be out in a moment. Just wait.”
Mutters reached them, but after a rushed toilette, when they opened the door, three young faces smiled angelically up at them.
As they herded the group along the companionway toward the mess, Toby caught Diana’s gaze and murmured, “There has to be some way.”
