Over her sisters’ heads, George looked to Cecelia, still laughing, and when their gazes met, they only laughed harder together until the two sisters began to wriggle, frantically trying to find their feet again.
“Ouch! Watch where you put your elbow!” Catherine exclaimed.
“You watch where you putyourelbow!” Mary countered.
“That is quite enough of that now, girls!” Lady Westmere’s tone was only half-scolding as she swept into the room, a maid behind her carrying more than tea this time.
Cecelia looked to George as if questioning how her family had known. He shrugged and said, “Your family is very perceptive.”
“We were listening by the door,” Catherine whispered into his ear, and George laughed all over again.
Cecelia’s scowl at her sister suggested she had heard her.
A playful clip around the ear made Catherine squeal as Cecelia demanded, “Hasn’t mother told you a thousand times it is rude to eavesdrop?”
“Come! Up with you all,” Lady Westmere insisted. “We must celebrate. Mary, make yourself useful and pour everyone a glass!”
“But what about—” Mary began, but their mother glowered at her.
“The maids have more important things to be getting on with than pouring your drinks for you,” her mother insisted, clapping her hands to hurry her daughter along. Mary dipped a curtsey to her mother, as if to placate her, before she hurried to the tray where the maid had placed it on a nearby table.
“A bottle of our finest champagne,” Lady Westmere explained as Mary carefully shared out the glasses. She looked to Cecelia as she added, “One that your father insisted we save for this very moment.”
There was an edge of sorrow to her voice, and George inched closer to Cecelia, laying a comforting hand upon the small of her back.
The tears in her eyes still remained from his proposal, though George suspected that after their conversation on the bridge, they were likely far more than that now.
She glanced at him as if she, too, remembered.
“I do so wish he could have been here to see this,” she admitted aloud, and George braced himself, fearful that the widow and his younger children might have some kind of horrifying reaction to her words.
Yet, instead, they bowed their heads and said, “As do we.”
Feeling as if he knew exactly what might help the situation, George raised the glass that Mary had given him and said,
“To your father, and your husband, may he be with us in memory and may we carry him in our hearts and in our thoughts daily. He was a good and kind man, a man who made all of this possible in his last will and testament, and to him I shall forever be grateful for being part of the marriage that brought my beloved Cecelia to me.”
“Oh, Georgie,” Cecelia gasped, and the tears started to roll down her cheeks all over again as she leaned into him, wrapping her arm around his waist in the process.
“I shall raise my glass to those fine words, George,” Lady Westmere said, “or must I now call you son?”
George offered a half-smile as he responded, “You may call me whatever you wish in the privacy of family, My Lady, just as long as it is not Your Grace.”
At that, Cecelia pushed up onto her toes and pressed a kiss to his lips. Where ordinarily Lady Westmere might have offered a terrible scowling, she merely clucked her tongue against her teeth.
“It is lucky for you both that I have always liked you,” Lady Westmere said, eyeing him as if she held great affection for him yet would burn him alive were he to harm even a single hair upon Cecelia’s head.
“The feeling is mutual, My Lady.”
“Mother, please!” she insisted before she raised her glass and cheered, “To my beloved Jeremy and to the beautiful couple he has brought together!”
Chapter 29
The next several weeks passed by as if in a dream, and Cecelia had to pinch herself over half a dozen times to be certain that it wasn't.
Never in her life had she felt such happiness, her heart swelling further each day as almost every waking moment was spent preparing for what many were calling the wedding of the year.
The banns were read, every fine detail of the wedding planned out, invitations written, signed, sealed, and sent off with a wish that everyone they cherished would be in attendance.
