A Wedding Story (28 page)

The trees looked too flexible to satisfy her, so she wound the rope from Jim’s pack around the tower itself. Twice, because Jim had always told her that caution was not fear but wisdom. And then she worried over the knot he’d taught her until she heard distant hoofbeats on the road. She couldn’t let anyone else get ahead of her, there were too many there already.

She didn’t look down. Didn’t look anywhere, except at her precious rope, her hands frozen around it.

The sun might have set as she inched her way down the cliff face, her feet planted against the wall as he’d taught her, her skirts rucked up around her thighs. It took forever. And yet she was surprised when she finally hit the bottom—on her rump, because she hadn’t checked to see how close she was. She groaned and scrambled to her feet, her hands burning, the muscles of her arms trembling.

She spun and hit chest. A very solid one at that.

“Jim!” She blinked, wondering if fatigue could spur hallucinations of senses other than sight. He’d felt very real. “You’re supposed to be in bed!”

He looked a little pale, a color reminiscent of the cliff beneath his tan, his hair clinging damply to his temples. But he stood steadily, smiling at her. “No fun without you,” he said.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Good as new.”

“Good. Remind me to tell you how stupid you are later, when we’ve time to do it properly.” If she hadn’t thought he might tip right over she’d have slugged him. “Did you just watch while I dangled there?”

“Well, part of the time I was climbing down, too.” His smile widened. “You were doing just fine. Didn’t want to interfere.”

“Right past me?”

“Well…yes.”

She tried to scowl at him. He deserved it. But try as she might, the frown kept turning the other way. “Don’t we have a clue to find?”

He held up a curl of paper. “Done.”

Had it taken her
that
long to crawl down that stupid cliff? “Where are we going?”

“London.”

Thank God, she thought. No cliffs in London. “Where in London?”

“Big Ben.”

“I don’t think I can do it,” she said moments later, her hand on the rope, the vast, sharp cliff rising above her. “My arms are still shaking.”

“That’s why I’ll be right behind you.”

“So we
both
can fall?”

“Oh, it’ll hold us. I checked the knot on yours before I came down another rope. Good job, by the way.”

“But—”

“Move it, Kate.” He whacked her on the rump. “I didn’t put up with you for all this time to lose.”

Going up was easier than down. How could it not be, with Jim right behind her, murmuring encouragement, ready to catch her if she slipped. Gasping, she hauled herself over the edge and lay there for a minute until Jim stood over her and extended a hand to help her up.

“I’m not dead,” she said, too tired to be more than vaguely surprised.

“Nope.”

He pulled her to her feet.

“Who…” She started toward the figure she glimpsed kneeling near the ledge at the edge of the trees, breaking into a run when she saw who it was. “What the hell are you doing?”

Knife halfway through the rope, Hobson glanced up at her, then did a double take. “Miss Riley. You look…different.”

She didn’t care if she looked like Medusa. “
What
are you doing?”

His head jerked back at her tone. Then he shrugged. “There are two competitors still down there. Two ropes. With one less…it’ll get more interesting. Oh, don’t worry!” He held up a hand, all friendly innocence. “There’s no one on there now. I checked.”

“Well, wasn’t that ever so thoughtful of you.”

“The major,” Jim said from behind her, “in France he insisted that not everything had been his fault. I didn’t believe him at the time. But some of the sabotage was you, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, no…” He saw their expressions and gave up, smiling tentatively. “I didn’t do anything dangerous, I swear. Or anything to favor one competitor over another. None of the really bad stuff. That
was
all the major. I just…spiced things up a little bit. For the readers.”

“Our boat?” Kate asked softly.

“Well, yeah.” His careful smile turned into a leer, nasty and knowing. “But maybe you should thank me for that one, eh, Lord Bennett? I—”

She hit him. Square and sure on his nose. He howled, bringing his hands to his face, eyes screwed shut against the pain. Kate leaned forward to ensure he’d hear her. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she straightened, turning to Jim. “You got a horse?”

“Yup,” Jim said carefully, battling a smile. Lord only knew what Kate might do if he smiled at her now. He pointed at the beautiful, long-legged roan.

“Where’d you—oh, never mind.” She grabbed his arm, dragging him toward the horses. “Let’s go find a clock.”

T
hey ran into trouble ten miles from London. The roads were still sloppy, slick with icy mud, but that apparently hadn’t kept anyone home. Traffic clogged the roads—horses, people on foot, coaches with revelers hanging out the windows. Grand carriages pulled by matched teams, their drivers in glorious livery shouting for space ahead, had no more luck in parting the crowds than the gangs of laughing young men who’d obviously already tipped deeply into their flasks, starting the New Year’s celebration a day early.

Kate and Jim picked their way along the edges of the crowds, swinging wide, until finally forced to a dead stop. Up ahead they could see a large carriage, side-tipped, people swarming around to see what had happened.

They’d been moving too slowly as it was, tense and impatient with every delay but unable to go any faster. It promised only to get worse the nearer they got to London.

“We have to go cross country,” Jim said.

Twin hedgerows marched along the road, so thick nothing wider than a rabbit could push its way through, nearly as high as Kate’s head. She eyed the leggy gelding Jim had managed to procure and his practiced management of it.

“Go ahead,” she said. “We’ll never make it over the first jump.”

“I can’t leave you here alone.”

“Of course you can,” she said, and waved her fist, showing the knuckles that had scraped against Hobson’s face, her badge of victory. “Just let anyone try to accost me. I’m getting rather good at it, don’t you think?”

“The best,” he said, a note in his voice that had her looking at him closely, trying to read the expression in his eyes. He studied the mob in front of them, the limited paths around it. “Come up with me,” he said. “I think the horse can manage.”

“You’ll be faster without me. Safer, too, and you know it.”

She would never forget the way he looked right then. Bareheaded, hair tossed by the breeze, jacket and collar open. Sitting tall and correct on the horse, controlling it skillfully, his strong hands every bit as expert at other things. She had so many memories of him now, ones that made a youthful kiss under the moonlight pale. Stronger ones,
real
ones. Ones without a gauzy veil of innocence, ones with heat and grit and
hurt,
ones that lived in your heart and bones instead of your imagination.

“It doesn’t seem right,” he said, “to finish it without you.”

“You’re not finishing without me. You’re
winning
it, for both of us.”

He nodded, accepting. And leaned down to press his mouth against hers, the horses shifting so that their lips didn’t fit quite right but he just kept kissing her anyway, making it work, hard and long, unbearably sweet. She felt the burn of it—her lips, her eyes, her heart, so that when he finally pulled back she had to bite her lip to keep the tears from gathering.

“Jim, I…”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Me too.” He backed his gelding up a couple of steps and wheeled him around, aiming for a slight gap between the sweets vendor who’d set up at the side of the road and the ostensibly blind beggar who’d plopped down right there, tin cup at his side.

“The Queen’s Arms Hotel, near Regent Street,” he said. He tapped his heels against the horse’s side, they sailed over the hedge, and were gone.

They’d won. Kate had read about it in the newspaper she’d bought from a vendor very early that morning, when she, unable to sleep, had stumbled out of her modest inn looking for tea.

There was no triumph in it and even less surprise. She’d known he would win.

Now, five minutes before midnight, Kate huddled on a narrow bench beside the Thames. Revelers crowded the walkways beside her, shifting crowds of happy people, chattering, laughing. Clusters of boats drifted on the Thames, oarsmen shouting cheerfully at each other as they jostled for a better view. Somewhere an orchestra played, the sound swelling and sliding, underlaid by a sprightly, military rhythm. Across the river someone had fashioned electric lights in the shape of an hourglass. Every few seconds another one blinked off from the upper cluster, lighting up on the bottom a second later. Lights, wavering, indistinct, reflected on the water.

She was cold. Far colder than the weather dictated.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she would get on a ship and go…not home, where was that? But back to America, where she could begin the process of making one.

It had taken every ounce of self-control she could dredge up, and then some, not to sprint to the Queen’s Arms. Once that afternoon, a light drizzle falling, the sky as dark and gray as her mood, she’d faltered, going to stand across from the inn and gaze hungrily at its façade. There, that window, where the light glowed cheerily…was that his room? Perhaps that one, dark, the curtains drawn, where he lay in bed and rested from the race, waiting for her.

It seemed such a small thing. What was one more night? She’d slept with him countless times; what harm could one more do? Except it would not be only one more, for she knew in her bones that she simply could not say good-bye to him again.

She’d no idea how long she’d stood there. It was only when a butcher, sturdy belly wrapped in a dark-stained apron, wandered from his shop to ask if she was all right that she moved on, shaking her head at the absurdity of it. She, Kathryn Bright Goodale, standing love-sick in the street drinking in the sight of where he might,
might,
be. Was it something that everyone must do at some point in their lives, be stupid in the name of love, and since she’d skipped it in her youth she was visited with it now, twice over? She’d hailed a cab and gone straight to the office to buy her ticket to America.

Across the river a spark shot skyward, whistling as it climbed, fizzling to almost nothing. And then it burst, a cluster of bright blue-green, cascading almost into the river. Proper appreciation from the crowd:
oooh, aaah.
The imprint of the fireworks remained in her retinas for a moment; she saw them streaking, sparkling, when she blinked.

The crowd fell silent, waiting, but the sky remained dark. Perhaps someone had made a mistake, firing one off prematurely. It was as if the world held its breath, waiting for the new century.

It was terribly unfair, Kate thought, that Fate had asked this of her. For in the same stroke that might have given Jim to her, the inheritance that finally tied him to one place, one home, had stripped him from her at the same time. It had laid out his future and responsibilities in front of him, undeniably clear: a wife who would supply a dowry that could restore the earldom and give him the sons that would carry it on, wisely and responsibly this time. She could do neither.

She closed her eyes. The vestiges of the single explosion still speared across the inside of her lids.

Something dropped into her lap. A package, medium-sized—smaller than a hatbox—but heavier, wrapped in plain paper, wound round and around with twine, tied with at least a dozen clumsy knots.

“You forgot something.”

Don’t look at him, she told herself. If she looked at him, she’d be lost. Lightly, she fingered the string. He’d tied it not long ago, probably struggled with it and swore as he did so. “I didn’t forget. Your tenants, all those repairs…they need the money more than I do. I don’t want it.”

“Try again.”

“I don’t want it much.” One of the knots gave way, unraveling in her fingers. “I knew we’d work it out. That you’d insist on sending me something. But I couldn’t take much. I
won’t.
Consider it an investment in your business, if you must. You can pay me back.”

“In about fifty or sixty years.”

Oh, go away. Please, don’t make me do this. I can’t.
“Then there’ll be plenty of interest, won’t there?”

He sat down beside her. Too close, shoulders brushing, left hip pressed against her right one, so vibrantly aware of the contact she thought it must glow between them, white hot, visible to those who wandered by.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” he said. “What you forgot.”

A whistle, a crimson spark arcing through the sky. This one was a dud, fizzling out before it bloomed.

“You forgot me.”

Oh, God. “I didn’t forget.”
I’ll never forget
.

“Kate.” And again, a full minute later, when the crowds murmured restlessly and she hadn’t moved: “Kate.”

He was going to make her. Make her with his patient voice and the warmth of his body next to hers on the cold bench and his unignorable, beloved presence. She turned her head, a slow swivel she couldn’t have halted any more than she could have willed her heart to stop beating.

He wore solid black, severe, ruthless. Bareheaded—one would think a man who’d been to the Arctic would have learned the value of covering his head—hair mussed, as if he hadn’t taken the time to comb it, eyes shadowed, nearly as dark as the sky.

More fireworks must have gone off. She didn’t hear them, only saw the flicker of the lights across his face: red, blue, gold.

“I wasn’t going to ask you,” he said. “Told myself it was for the best.
Your
best.”

The crowd roared. The sound came to her dimly, as if from very far away. Shut up, she wanted to shout at them. Shut up, because she had to hear, breathe in, every single word he spoke, each whisper, each nuance.

“And then I thought, who am I to decide that for you?” He smiled gently. “You’d break
my
nose if I presumed to do that.”

A shower of sparks, dazzle-bright, violet as midnight, reflected in his eyes. “And so I’m asking you, Kate, what I should have asked a long time ago. On the boat, in Maine, the minute you walked in my door. I love you, Kate. Marry me.”

“Jim—” Applause erupted, drowned out her answer.

“No, not yet. Don’t answer me yet. You have to understand. The money we won is barely a start. There’s so much to be done and the house has to come last. It
has
to, they’ve waited so long. It could be years before we even begin on the manor. Hell, it could be never. I’m going to be working, more like a farmer than a lord. You deserve better.”

She almost turned it back on him. Spoke of titles and dowries, duty and babies. But he knew all that, knew it even better than she did. If he could trust her to know her own mind and heart, how could she do less for him?

“Do I?” she murmured. The world erupted in celebration around them, church bells clanging all over London, ringing in the New Year. People cheered, shouted, laughed, kissed. The last electric sand dropped through the lighted hourglass. Fireworks spangled the sky, a dozen explosions at once, two dozen, every color spearing into the next until they blazed and fell together, a million colored stars tumbling to earth. And all that wild celebration, a city, a
world
of welcome and joy, was nothing compared to the way she’d felt when Jim said “I love you.”

“I want the best,” she said. “I want you.”