A Precious Jewel

by Mary Balogh

  She shook her head.

  “I can’t live without you,” he said. “I don’t know how, Priss. I keep thinking to tell you something or ask you something. Or I keep thinking to come to you with some problem or with a headache or a cold or something. And then I remember that you are not there. Or I walk past the park or the British Museum and miss you until it hurts. I can’t sleep properly at night. And I keep thinking of how you always used to be there last summer when I was awake and kept me company and put me back to sleep again. And when I am sleeping, I wake and reach out for you. And you are not there.”

  “Gerald,” she said, lifting her hand from his lapel to cup his other cheek.

  “I came to trust you,” he said. “I never thought to trust again after my mother and after Helena. I never told you about Helena, did I? My stepmother? I’ll tell you someday. I trusted you, Priss, because you were always good to me and never demanding and always so sweet and even-tempered. When you lied to me and disappeared and I thought it was because you had not liked to tell me that you had grown tired of me, I wanted to die. I didn’t, of course, and I went about my daily business and then went down to Severn with Miles and the countess. But all the time there was the feeling in me that I would prefer to die if only it could be arranged.”

  She bit her upper lip.

  “You aren’t crying, are you, Priss?” he said, brushing a curl back from her face, blotting a tear from her lower lashes. “It makes a pathetic story, doesn’t it? I didn’t mean to put it quite like this. What I meant to say was that perhaps this afternoon you did not realize fully that this was the reason. That you are the only thing in my life that makes me want to live it, Priss. Like some priceless little jewel in the middle of a desert. Or something like that. I never was good with words.”

  “No,” she said, swallowing to take the high pitch from her voice. “I didn’t realize what you meant this afternoon, Gerald.”

  “I thought you didn’t,” he said. “And then it struck me, Priss.”

  “What did?” she asked.

  “You didn’t read the license, did you?” he said. “I mean, you saw it was a special license, and you gave it back to me because you didn’t want to use it. But you didn’t read it, did you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Read it,” he said, reaching into his pocket while she dropped her hands away from his face. “Look at the date, Priss. The date it was issued.”

  She looked down at the paper and followed the direction of his pointing finger. “April,” she said.

  “You can check it with Kit if you like,” he said. “It was before I went to Wiltshire, Priss. I took it with me just in case you decided you would settle for me instead of that swain who wanted you back. I thought that perhaps, after seeing him again, you would realize that you were no longer fond of him. I thought perhaps you would take me instead.”

  She bit her lip again for a moment. “You said this afternoon that you were going to offer me a higher salary,” she said.

  “If you did not want to marry me,” he said. “If perhaps you wanted to take me on only for another year or perhaps two or until you really did grow tired of me.”

  “Gerald,” she said.

  “And you can see that I had the license long before I knew about the child,” he said. “I got it for only one reason, Priss. You must see that now.”

  “Yes,” she said, handing it back to him. “Yes.”

  “Come back to me,” he said. “Please, Priss. Marry me. Or if you don’t want anything so permanent, well, come back to me anyway. And when you want to leave, I will provide for you and the child. I know I’m not much, but I will look after you. If only things had been different, I know you could have done so much better for yourself. You are so intelligent and knowledgeable and accomplished. I know I have nothing much to offer someone like you, but …”

  “Gerald!” she said, and her hands were rubbing hard against the lapels of his coat. “You have everything to offer me. Everything in the world. In the whole universe. Your love. A loyal and a warm and kind heart. Yourself. You are so very worthy of being loved, and all I can offer you is a soiled life.”

  He covered her hands with his and held them flat against his chest. He was shaking his head. “You survived, Priss,” he said. “You worked for your living. And I am glad you did or I would never have met you. It is in the past, those months at Kit’s. In the past, where it will stay.”

  “You are a baronet,” she said. “I will never be accepted, Gerald. Never received.”

  “I think you are wrong,” he said. “There are perfectly respectable people in society who have a far more scarlet past than yours. But even if you are right, it does not matter. It’s you I want, Priss. Only you. We will live it through together, whatever may be facing us. And I know Miles will receive you, and the countess, too. She hugged me when I was leaving and even kissed my cheek. I was never so surprised in my life.”

  “Gerald.” She looked at him with troubled eyes. “Are you sure? Are you very sure?”

  He smiled at her suddenly, more radiantly than she had ever seen him smile before.

  “You are going to say yes, aren’t you?” he said. “I know that you are. Say it, Priss. I want to hear it. I have dreamed of this moment for months and never believed that it would really come. Say it. Will you marry me?”

  She leaned her head forward and rested her forehead between her hands against his chest. “Yes,” she said.

  “Tonight,” he said. “I called on the vicar before I came here, Priss, and asked him. We can go tonight. You are going to be my wife before another hour has passed.”

  “I thought you did not believe that I would say yes,” she said.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “But a fellow can dream. It was a good part of the dream, talking to the vicar and watching his wife throw her apron over her head and burst into tears. I think they must be fond of you, Priss.”

  “Gerald,” she said, lifting her head and patting one hand against his heart. “Tonight. Tonight? Now?”

  “There is one thing I want to do first, though,” he said. “May I, Priss? One thing I long to do.”

  He took her by the shoulders, turned her, and drew her back against him. And he put his arms about her and spread his hands over her, moving them slowly, feeling the new contours of her body, the enlarged firm breasts, the swelling beneath.

  “Is it heavy, Priss?” he asked. “The child is heavy?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And active. Always kicking and punching me.”

  “I wish I had been with you the whole time,” he said wistfully, setting his cheek against her curls as she rested her head back on his shoulder. “I wish I could have watched and felt it grow along with you, Priss, our child.”

  “I have told it about its father every single day,” she said.

  “Have you?” He turned his head and kissed her. “Priss, I do love you. It was not a ruse to get you to say yes.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know that, Gerald. I loved you even before I left Miss Blythe’s, you know. You were always very special to me, right from the first moment I saw you.”

  “I don’t know why,” he said. “There is nothing at all special about me, Priss.”

  “Then we have a quarrel,” she said, turning her head so that their mouths could meet more comfortably. She smiled warmly into his eyes. “And I shall spend the rest of my life proving that I am right, Gerald. I can be a dreadfully stubborn opponent. I never lose an argument. And I say you are very, very special.”

  He kissed her.

  “I can’t even turn you around to do this more thoroughly, can I?” he said. “It’s not triplets by any chance, is it, Priss?”

  “No,” she said, turning anyway in his arms and watching him look down in wonder and delight at the bulk that came between them. “Just a few too many cream cakes, Gerald. And jam tarts, of course. I never could resist a jam tart.”

  He set his arms gently about her, afraid of hurting
her, afraid of squashing their baby, and kissed her.

  AND IT WAS a very good thing, too, he told her several hours later when he lay behind her in her bed at the cottage, supporting her aching back against his own body, his arms about her, one hand spread again over her bulk—it was a very good thing she said yes. By the time they arrived at the church, it had been half filled with smiling, nodding villagers—almost all of them elderly.

  “A very good thing, Priss,” he said, rubbing his cheek against her curls. “I have the strong feeling that they would all have been severely disappointed if you had said no.”

  “I am glad you told them all that we would stay here for the birth of the baby, Gerald,” she said. “The baby belongs to this village almost as much as to us.”

  “We will bring him down on his birthday every year,” he said. “And maybe once or twice more each year, too. Time to sleep now, Priss. You must need plenty of rest.”

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh of contentment, turning her head to kiss his arm beneath it. “Gerald, I am so very, very happy.”

  “Are you?” he said. “Are you really, Priss? I still can’t quite believe what a lucky devil I am.”

  She sighed again.

  “Good night, Lady Stapleton,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes, I am, aren’t I? How strange and how lovely it sounds. Lady Stapleton! Good night, Gerald.”

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  A Precious Jewel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2009 Dell Books Mass Market Edition

  Copyright © 1993 by Mary Balogh

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Dell Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DELL is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in paperback in the United States by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., in 1993.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33899-4

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