The Madcap
Page 16
“Of course I did. Did you think I wouldn’t?” Alasdair held her close not caring about propriety. “I was worried sick that the boat wouldn’t be fast enough. I was worried you’d been harmed. You are all right, aren’t you?”
“I am fine” They’d originally decided on a December wedding in the country, to appease his mother, but suddenly December seemed too far away. “Do you know what I am thinking?” she asked quietly. “I’m thinking I don’t want to wait for Christmas. I want to be married when we get back to London or Devonshire, or wherever it is that we’re going next”
“I’m thinking you’re right.” Alasdair grinned in the dusky twilight.
Marianne drew back, shaky. Her hands swiped at the tears dampening her face. Alasdair chuckled and offered her a handkerchief. “There’s no reason to cry, Marianne. Hasn’t anyone ever told you there’s no use crying over spilled champagne?”
Marianne laughed through her tears. “I thought it was milk.”
“Not in this case.” He bent to catch her lips again, this time in a kiss that wiped away any thought of tears and promised only the very best of happily-everafters.
Three years later
GGMmmm, what smells so good?” Alasdair poked his head into the kitchen at Highborough, a room that had always been large in order to accommodate the amount of space needed to prepare food in massive quantities, but which had grown even grander the past three years with the addition of an enormous bread oven imported from San Francisco, along with several other modern culinary conveniences.
“We’re making bread, Daddy!” his two-year-old son, William, said as he looked up from his stool where he sat next to Marianne at the long worktable. She was instructing him in the art of bread making.
Alasdair strode across the room to join them. “It looks like you’re doing a good job,” he said, although Alasdair privately thought that William was more interested in making a dusty mess with the flour than he was in making a neat loaf of bread.
Marianne caught his eye. “Did you know, William, that when I first met your dad, he couldn’t make a bed or make bread?”
“Really?” William asked in amazement.
Marianne smiled softly across the table at Alasdair, her hand going to the gentle mound just starting to show beneath her apron. There would be another child in a few months, another child for his dream of having a real family. It was her dream, too, and he loved her all the more for it.
Each day Highborough became a place he loved more and more. He loved seeing William’s toys in the drawing room. He loved having to kick a ball out of his path as he made his way to his study. He loved having William play in his study as he did estate business while Marianne read a book just a few feet away. It was true that Highborough had benefited from his wife’s dowry, but not all of her dowry was financial. Alasdair could not begin to calculate the ways she’d changed his life-ways that went for beyond the value of a dollar. She’d changed the lives of those around them too.
Sarah Stewart, upon Marianne’s encouragement, moved into the dower house on their property and began traveling. Alasdair’s mother saw her dream of joining the Stewart and Pennington properties by marrying Sarah’s father herself, and moving into his estate, leaving Marianne and Alasdair alone at Highborough.
If Highborough had a few more nicks in the wood and a few more scratches on the floor, it was easily offset by the weekly smell of bread baking in the kitchens and the purple of Romagna blooming in the flower beds.
Alasdair reached across the table and wiped a smear of flour from Marianne’s cheek, and she smiled at him, her love for him obvious in her eyes. He was the luckiest of men and he knew it. Love had found him in the form of his sourdough heiress, an unlikely madcap from San Francisco. Alasdair smiled back at Marianne. Love had found him when he’d least expected it. Indeed, he’d never seen it coming.