by Liz Carlyle
He removed his boot to see that Osborne was now shaking. His work here was done. Rothewell threw open the door and started the long hike back through the village and up the hill.
Epilogue
T he gossip rags read that Duke and Duchess of Warneham were wed on a beautiful autumn day during a weeklong house party at the country estate of the notorious Marquis of Nash. Much was made of the duchess’s good fortune in reclaiming her old position, and the fact that her groom was the grandson of Malachi Gottfried, a Jewish money-lender.
What they did not say was that the bride wore cerulean blue to match her eyes or that the groom danced with her beneath the stars until midnight, or that they did not give a damn what the gossip rags said. Over a buffet of roasted sturgeon, fresh prawns, and very expensive champagne, old Malachi was toasted—not once, but at least half a dozen times—and mostly by the Neville family, who had been amongst the chief beneficiaries of his extraordinary wisdom.
After the sun had vanished, Lord Nash had ordered a bonfire built and a table laden with sumptuous sweets laid out. His bride Xanthia tried to ignore the trifles and cakes. Instead, she floated amongst the guests, attempting to keep her burgeoning belly obscured by her shawl, and her brother from flirting with the bride’s stepmother, a deceptively fresh-faced girl of perhaps twenty, who quite obviously had a penchant for dangerous-looking men. Lord Swinburne seemed destined to wear the cuckold’s horns in his May-December marriage.
“I have tried to distract Kieran, Gareth, but he is quite unmanageable,” Xanthia whispered to the groom as the evening drew to a close. “I shall ask him to give me his arm and escort me inside.” She turned then to Antonia and lightly kissed her cheek. “My dear, I am so glad you have given Nash and me the honor of hosting your wedding. I hope from this day forward, you will think of me as a sister, as Kieran and I think of Gareth as our brother.”
Antonia smiled and returned the kiss. She had not thought to like Lady Nash, but it was a challenge.
“Gabriel, does everyone save me call you Gareth?” she asked her husband as they strolled through the dark toward the house. “It sounds so strange to my ears.”
He was silent for a long moment, but he wrapped his arm a little tighter about her waist. “I changed my name when I arrived in Barbados,” he said. “In the West Indies, it is easy to—to reinvent oneself. To become someone else—someone stronger than you were.”
Antonia curled her arm beneath the warmth of his coat and hugged him to her. “I understand.”
As if by mutual agreement, they stopped beneath a canopy of trees and let the others proceed on in the gloom. Antonia set her head on his shoulder. “Shall I call you Gareth, then?” she asked. “Would that be better?”
He pondered it for a time. “No, I think perhaps that I am ready to be Gabriel again,” he eventually answered. “I think, Antonia, that I have found the part of me that was…lost. Or perhaps shut away is the better term? I begin to believe that with you, I can bring together the good parts of both my lives. I have begun to believe that perhaps—just perhaps—I can be whole again.”
Antonia did not know what to say. Gabriel had given her an inestimable gift—the gift of his strength and his wisdom. That she might have given him something in return had never occurred to her.
Gabriel looked down at her and pulled her fully against him. “Kiss me, Antonia,” he whispered. “Kiss me, and make me—for about the hundredth time today—the happiest man on earth.”
Gladly, she did so, rising onto her toes and cradling his beautiful face in her hands. “Gabriel,” she whispered. “Gabriel, my angel.”
