Emma turned sharply to her friend, showing him a pathetic unease. No part of her imagined that his Fiona had anything to do with his very pointed query. To Callum, it was easy to give the truth. She nodded, silent, willing to give up nothing else.
“Shame then, that you look so outrageously miserable.” Callum made a face, wrinkling his brow and twisting his lips, all without harshness. “If I were you, I wouldn’t want ever to regret that I hadn’t at least tried.”
She didn’t bother to pretend that she knew not of what he spoke. “I am frightened,” she whispered, thinking she might not have admitted as much to many other people.
“But that man is sitting here, rather without fear. It’s not too his liking, but he’ll do it, probably a hundred times more if you ask, for you.”
Primly, she said, still keeping her voice low, “It’s all for show, I’m sure.”
“Might be, but the point is, he’s doing it. You think an earl wants to dine with us? He don’t, trust me.”
Emma felt compelled to confess, “I think it’s beyond repair at this point.”
Callum shook his head. “He’s here, so that cannot be true. But let’s find out.” He straightened, pulling away from Emma, and called across the table, “Hey Lindsey, you ever get to fishing in that big lake of yours?”
The earl did not even blink at Callum’s nearly rude address, only shrugged his broad shoulders and answered, “Not as often as I’d like. But I’ve been assured there’s good brown trout, and plenty of eels. Feel free to test it out.”
“I might, at that. Care to join me?” Callum persisted.
“Sure. Let me know when. I’m home for the remainder of the year.”
Callum smiled, first at the earl, and then at Emma. When Mr. Smythe brought Zachary back to their conversation about the orchard, Callum said to Emma, “There, now you know. I’ve got a bloody fishing date with an earl, but at least you’ve got your answer.”
Emma swallowed, digesting this, everything. She didn’t think he’d come specifically to sit down to dinner with persons so far below him in class to prove a point to her. He couldn’t have known he’d have found them here. She’d been an absolute harridan on the last two occasions that they’d met, and yet here he was. He had, by now, said that he loved her and that he desired to marry her. She’d be a fool to at least not investigate the possibility that he might be telling the truth.
He won’t marry you. He cannot marry you.
But as she learned so depressingly today, Lady M liked to tell lies when she deemed a certain part of a pair unacceptable.
With her hands flat on the table, one on each side of her plate, she closed her eyes. She felt as if her mind could not yet sort and analyze and assess everything that she did know to be true.
Emma lifted her gaze, found the earl watching her, even as conversation continued around them. His gray eyes, made golden by the candles burning overhead, warmed her with the serenity of his gaze.
Mayhap, the only thing that was important was that she loved him.
“I don’t want to be Caralyn Withers.”
The table fell silent.
Emma’s attention was fixed with such constancy on Zach, that she didn’t think she misread the ever-so-slight quirk of his lips.
“What’s that, dear?” Inquired Mrs. Smythe.
Fiona, bless her and curse her, offered, “She said she doesn’t want to be someone named Caralyn Withers.”
“Is that the miss who sells the oysters on High Street?” Asked Mr. Smythe, with a furrowed brow while he tried to place the name.
“No, that’s Mary Mac-something or other,” recalled Mrs. Smythe. “Remember the grocer told us about the accident she’d had, something to do with a saw and rowboat? Made no sense to me, but there she is, limping along the lane to the lake.”
Zachary grinned at Emma. She wasn’t there yet, could not respond in kind.
“Do you want to take this somewhere private?”
Emma shook her head, panicked. She could not be alone with him, not for so weighty and decisive a conversation. She didn’t trust herself. My God, if he kissed her, even touched her at all, she might find herself upon her knees, begging him to just keep pretending that he loved her, that she could live with that.
“I apologize for my most recent unseemly behavior,” she said to him, from one end of the table to the far corner of the other. “On the last two occasions that we’d met.”
The quality of her expression and tone, both being rather severe, might have been what quieted everyone else.
“After some consideration,” the earl returned, his voice level and sure, while all eyes turned toward him, “your reaction this afternoon seems to have been warranted, the cause of it so damnably intolerable. Regarding the first incident of which you speak, I will allow that the circumstances were unprecedented, neither of us having been in that exact position ever, not once, in all our lives.”
Five sets of eyes swiveled toward Emma. Bethany was picking the remaining potatoes out of the stew with her fingers and putting the pieces on Zachary’s plate.
It took Emma a moment to understand, to deduce that he meant because it had been her introduction to sex, and his first declaration of love.
“I don’t want to be Caralyn Withers,” she repeated, and explained, “acting and reacting on the probably false words of another.”
Here, his mouth did tighten marginally. “Might I inquire what probable falsehoods you were given?”
She summarized, “I was told that you only toyed with me, that your career would prohibit you from wedding me. Yet, I was informed that you would say that you would like to marry me, as that was part of the game you played.”
The dinner guests turned their rapt gazes to the earl, awaiting his rebuttal.
“That sounds frightfully familiar to words I compelled from another earlier today, after you and I had parted, so I needn’t ask from whom they came. Do you believe them still?”
“I don’t...want to believe them.”
In her periphery, Emma thought she saw Mr. Smythe lift a finger, as if he’d like to contribute to the discussion. Mayhap he had a question. Mrs. Smythe, saying not a word, covered his hand with hers and lowered both to the table.
“I didn’t bring you to London only to be of assistance with the Hindrance, but because I wanted you there with me,” the earl said, “because I didn’t like the idea of being away from you. I wanted you to stay, even as I realized you were pining for Bethany. And I understood, even before I brought you to London, that I wanted to marry you. Lady M tried to dissuade me, it’s true. And when I found you talking to Beckwith, yes, I reacted poorly. And when I kissed you at Clarendon’s ball, I’ll admit that was brutish and unpardonable.”
Fiona made a sound; Emma couldn’t say if it were a gasp or a sigh.
The earl went on, “I cancelled your employment with the modiste because I thought it too dangerous, and unnecessary. True I should have gone about it differently. Christ, this list is getting on to be shamefully long,” he acknowledged with a twitch of his lips, to which Mr. Smythe and Callum nodded, with some commiseration.
Mr. Smythe interjected idly, “Makes a man wonder what you might have done right by the girl.”
Several nods followed this speculation.
“Oh, surely, many things,” Mrs. Smythe cooed. “Wrote her some lovely letters, he did, which she’s likely read a hundred times by now, always grinning like a silly fool when Langdon came with the notes. Set her up nice in this house,” she added, nodding to accent her words, “could’ve just tossed the money at her and sent her on her way.”
Langdon inserted, “Didn’t have to give me the fine work up at the big house, but mayhap only did so to please her, I always thought. Lent us the fine rig and nag. We’d probably, all of us, have to save for a year just to buy the horse.”
Zach was grinning outright now, pleased by the unexpected support.
Emma remained expressionless, even as her breathing
had quickened while her heart raced.
“But I meant what I said, then and now. I am in love with you.”
This time Fiona, and Mrs. Smythe as well, clearly made sounds of blissful sighs.
She accepted all this with a thoughtful nod, absorbing it slowly. “Do you realize, or admit, that you are high-handed and autocratic, sometimes unreasonably so?”
“I do not like this spoon,” Bethany said, to no one in particular. Langdon replaced it with his own, which Bethany then handed to Zachary.
The earl took the spoon and set it on the table. When Bethany then lifted her arms, Zach pushed his chair out a bit and took Bethany into his lap.
When his compelling gaze met Emma’s again, she detected a hint of a smile therein.
“I do. Do you, likewise, admit that you are stubborn—at times purposefully and irrationally so—and unwilling to accept that in some areas I might actually know a thing or two more than you?”
“That may be true,” she acknowledged. “Occasionally.”
Callum snorted next to her, trying without success to control his chuckle over this.
“So now,” said the earl, “I’ve several times told you that I am in love with you, and just today I asked you to marry me—”
This summarizing was interrupted by Langdon’s hoot of surprise and Mr. Smythe’s quietly given, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Mrs. Smythe and Fiona sighed again, the older woman clasping her hands to her bosom.
“—and you’ve yet to respond appropriately—certainly not favorably—to either of these,” the earl finished.
“Oh, why not, dear?” Mrs. Smythe asked sadly, her hands falling away from her breast, listlessly onto her lap.
Emma only briefly considered other eyes, fixed on her with varying degrees of disbelief and question, before she met Zachary’s tender and confident gaze. Emma realized that he knew he would triumph, even as she knew she must finish it properly.
She needed to tell him all, admit her foolishness. She was nervous still, likely wouldn’t be cured of that until he took her in his arms.
“Of course, I have been in love with you for quite some time.”
Fiona clapped her hands together, a faint whimper of joy escaping.
Biting her lip, Emma considered what else he should be told. “I am sorry that I believed not your words, but those of a nasty old woman. I was afraid, of course, as you so astutely guessed. And I should like to marry you, if you are still agreeable, even if it means that one day you will break my heart.”
“Should’ve led with that negative, not finished with it, I’m thinking,” Callum said, finally entering the dialogue. When Emma turned a good frown on him for his critique, he shrugged. “Just saying.”
Zachary Benedict stood with Bethany in his arms, and said, “Here are many witnesses who can hold me accountable to this vow: I will never break your heart.”
“He won’t, I’m sure,” concurred Mrs. Smythe.
“He better not,” Callum cautioned.
Fiona turned to Callum and glowered with some aversion to his words. “Clearly, he will not.”
“Mrs. Smythe, would you kindly hold Bethany,” the earl said as he walked around the table, “while I take my future wife in my arms and seal this betrothal?” He handed Bethany off to the giggling, teary-eyed woman, and continued around the table until he stood beside Emma.
Zachary held out a hand to her.
She hesitated only a moment, more embarrassed than anything just now, and rose from her chair. Evidently of a mind that if she’d insisted her friends witnessed all they just had, that they might as well see it through to its finale, Zachary pulled her possessively into his arms and met her lips in a fierce and not-so-chaste kiss. Emma’s knees failed her, but he held her firmly, and she knew the tightness in her chest was unbearable happiness, nothing more.
Cheers went up, laughter and joy sounded throughout the room, but they ignored them all. When finally he pulled his lips from hers, he said against her mouth, “Say it again, for me alone.”
“I love you, Zachary,” she whispered.
Another kiss followed, energizing the delighted watchers.
When he next looked into her eyes, shiny and wet with her elation, he said, “Tell me you always will. Tell me you won’t doubt me. I’ll love you forever and never give you cause to question it.”
Emma nodded shakily. “I won’t. I promise.”
Chapter Eighteen
Zachary Benedict sat in his sumptuous study at Benedict House and glanced once again at the ormolu clock. Still a half an hour to go.
Impatiently, he drummed his fingers on the desktop, and then tugged anxiously at his cravat. In thirty minutes, he would recite vows with Emma. Never in all his life had he imagined that he might one day marry a chambermaid from a traveler’s inn, or that she might come complete with a child.
A smile turned his mouth upward. The fingers stopped their tapping to smooth themselves in a fluid motion over the dark wood of the desk.
But then, never had he imagined that one day he would meet a woman who would turn his life upside-down in the most amazing manner.
I am the luckiest of men, he thought.
Further thoughts upon the exact extent of his luck and happiness were interrupted by the arrival of Thurman.
Zachary stood quickly, uncaring if the old butler read anything into his anxiousness. But Thurman was not here to call for his presence out on the terrace yet, where the nuptials were to be performed. He nodded precisely at Zachary and handed him a sealed letter from his silver tray.
“Delivered just now from your solicitor, my lord,” he intoned.
When Zach had accepted this, Thurman set down a wrapped item and note on his desk. Frowning, and wondering what business his solicitor was about today—the man knew Zach was to wed—Zach hastily opened one envelope, only to find another within.
He sat down again, the breath knocked out of him as he recognized the broad scrawl of his father upon this second envelope.
“To be opened upon the day of your wedding,” was written on this envelope.
Curiously, Zach unsealed the wax and took out a folded piece of vellum.
My dear boy,
Congratulations and felicitations!
When I first met her, I was captivated—not in the sense you are, but spellbound, nonetheless. Isn’t there just something about her that begs a man to love her? Have you ever met a girl so completely genuine and true as her? I thought not. I knew my bequest would confound and confuse you. But I was quite sure it would lead to this. I knew she was perfect. And meant for you.
I wish you joy and happiness—I know she’ll bring you this.
You can thank me when next you see me.
Until then,
Always Proud,
Father
Stunned, Zach re-read the letter twice.
The old man knew! My God, the old man knew. Zach gave a short bark of laughter, even as his eyes misted. He stood and gazed at the portrait of his father behind his desk, painted with such devotion by his mother.
“You old devil,” he breathed in wonder. Apparently, neither fate nor serendipity played any role in he and Emma finding one another, just the over-ambitious and hopeful will of his father.
Now, upon discovering this, and rather than feeling as if he’d been hoodwinked into his coming marriage, he only laughed yet more. He felt not deceived or tricked; he felt blessed. Just as it didn’t matter that Emma and he had different standings, or came from different backgrounds, it didn’t matter how it came to be. Zach was only thankful that it had come to be.
And yes, he would thank the old man when next he saw him.
It was several moments before he recalled that his butler had delivered two items. He scanned the words, penned in his bride’s pretty script, upon the second envelope, which was attached to a small and flat, neatly wrapped package.
To be opened after vows are said. I love you. E
Epilogue
“F
ather! Father!”
Zachary Benedict heard the shrill cry of Bethany, coming from somewhere deeper in the house, as he strode down the stairs, carrying his youngest, sweet little Anna, fresh from her nap.
Bethany burst into the foyer from the first-floor parlor. “Father! Oh, there you are.” She met him at the bottom of the stairs and turned her dazzling blue eyes to him. He saw an argument in his very near future. “Mother says I may not go to Amelia’s house for the weekend. She thinks their country house party is no more than a shallow ruse to mislead some young man into dastardly behavior which might see a poor, unsuspecting girl wed not to the man of her dreams.”
“Oh, dear,” he said, and bit back a laugh. He consulted Anna’s expression, to find his little blue-eyed sweetheart staring groggily at her sister. To Bethany, he mused, “She said all that, did she?”
He continued on, moving away from the stairs to find his wife, the one who was sometimes entirely too explicit with their children, even as it often worked to great effect.
“She did,” Bethany griped, following beside him, clearly wanting to state so much of her case before they were in the presence of her mother once more. “I’m fourteen now, father. You said yourself I possess solid judgment and a principled breadth of reason. You said you trusted me to always behave appropriately, so why should she—”
Her words stopped abruptly as she, the countess, appeared at the doors to the parlor only seconds before Zach would have pushed it open.
“She also trusts your judgment and decision making capabilities,” Emma said pointedly to her daughter, with a strict frown at her, “but she does not trust that of many young men, who are led not with their minds and hearts at this age.”
If I Loved You (Regency Rogues: Redemption Book 2) Page 26
