Wildfire Quest
Page 15
Maryan shook her head. ‘I shall be all right here. I still can’t make use of—’
‘And I say you shall, and the size of the pourboire I’ll offer to Marie or Thelie will bring them running to play chaperon.’
She gave in. ‘Then you are leaving now?’ she asked wistfully, reluctant to say goodbye to an evening which had brought such wonder to her.
But Raoul shook his head. ‘Not quite yet,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back. There was something else I told you I had to do—remember?’
When he had gone, she obeyed him and was waiting for him in her robe when he came back. ‘Marie is following, as soon as she has taken the rollers out of her hair. You could almost see her brain calculating how much my tip would buy at Prisunic,’ he announced and, bending to kiss Maryan lightly on the lips, he laid something she recognized on her lap.
She looked at it, then up at him. ‘It—it’s the old engraving, done from Feu-Follet, which you gave to Ninon,’ she said.
‘And which I would have taken back from her as a parting gesture if she hadn’t got there first. She tore it down from the wall and flung it at me. I’ve wielded a pretty pelota-bat in my time, but I fumbled catching it, and you’ll see that the frame has come adrift.’
Maryan fingered the broken corner, traced the star-rayed crack in the glass. ‘And now you’re giving it to me?’ she said softly.
‘If you’ll accept it at secondhand, and as your only claim to Feu-Follet in your own right, until I endow you with it along with all the rest of my worldly goods.’ Raoul took her again into his arms. ‘Content, ma mie?’
She arched back in order to look up into his face. ‘More than—just content,’ she told him.
‘Then “To be continued”—little wallflower? This time it’s coming true?’
‘I shall turn my face to the wall and do my embroidery until you come for me,’ she said—and knew from his smile that he understood.
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