“A man can change his mind, can’t he?”
“Not for the reasons prompting your actions now. I don’t want the words ‘For guilt, and pain inflicted, I do,’ included in your wedding vows.”
“Then perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. My asking you to marry me is not driven by a need to atone for my past sins.” He cupped her face in his hands and looked deeply into her eyes. “Last night I told you I love you,” he said, inching closer until his mouth was caressing hers. “I still love you this morning. I have loved you for weeks and I will go on loving you for the rest of my life.”
“This isn’t fair,” she sighed. “You’re not supposed to be able to seduce me like this. Not again…and not so easily. You’re hard and mean and undeserving…I’ve told myself so a hundred times. You have…no right…proving me wrong.”
But her protests were all for show. Her body and her lips and the dreamy expression in her eyes told him she no more believed what she was saying than she did that the moon was made of green cheese.
“I know,” he said, backing onto the nearest chair and drawing her down on his lap. “I need a good woman to whip me into shape. Think you’re up for the job?”
She wriggled out of his hold and put the safety of the work island between him and her. “I’m not sure.”
A flicker of nervousness rippled through him. “Jeez, Lily, I’ve laid my heart on the line. What more do you want? I can give you a good life, the kind you deserve. There’s nothing to keep you in Vancouver—no business, and certainly no family. Why can’t you just say yes, and put me out my misery?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Thoughtfully she folded the dish towel and hung it over the oven door. “Maybe because I’m an old-fashioned kind of woman who wants an old-fashioned kind of proposal from the heart.”
“You mean, you want me down on one knee?”
She planted her fists on her sexy little hips and glared at him. “After all the grief you’ve put me through in the last few months, Sebastian Caine? You bet I do! I want roses and violins and moonlight and promises of happy-ever-after.”
“That kind of promise is hard to keep, Lily. Will you settle for me promising to love you as long as we both shall live, and then some?”
She nibbled the corner of her lip consideringly. “If you’ll let me do the same for you.”
“Oh,” he said, striding around the island and reaching for her, “I think I can safely promise you that.”
“In that case, yes, I’ll marry you, Sebastian,” she said, brazenly pulling open his bathrobe and creating mayhem in places no well-brought up young woman would dare to trespass until the ink was dry on the marriage certificate.
“Better make it soon,” he muttered unsteadily. “I don’t fancy having to tell Hugo he’s about to be a grandfather before he becomes a father-in-law.”
They were married six weeks later, in an evening ceremony in the middle of November, two days after the first snowfall had turned Stentonbridge into a winter wonderland and one week after Natalie received a clean bill of health from her doctor.
Dozens of candles illuminated the old stone church. Giant white chrysanthemums and dark green ferns adorned the altar and hung from satin ribbons at the end of the pews.
Cynthia wore midnight-blue silk and wept happy tears all over her orchid corsage. Natalie made a delectable maid of honor in cranberry brocade. And Lily came down the aisle on her father’s arm, radiant in an exquisite full-length white velvet wedding gown.
“Hey,” Sebastian murmured over the dying chords of the organ, as she came to a stop next to him at the altar. “This is your last chance to run.”
“I just did,” she told him, her smile dazzling. “How else do you think I wound up here? I’ve finally come home.”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-0304-4
MISTRESS ON HIS TERMS
First North American Publication 2001.
Copyright © 2001 by Kathy Garner.
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Mistress on His Terms Page 17
