Bridal Favors (34 page)

“There’s a notion amongst the intelligence community—I know, I know, from what you’ve witnessed that must seem a strident oxymoron—anyway there’s this notion that the less any one man knows of a situation, the less likely he is to affect it. But you—canny, bright,” he searched around for a word that would please her, “
competent
Evie Whyte—have seen through the murk to the real issues, the real stakes.”

“You did, too.”

“And I’m jolly well congratulating myself on that matter, don’t you disbelieve it. Circles within circles, darkness within shadows, enough intrigue to last a fellow a lifetime.”

At this, she shot him an odd, unreadable look.

“But what I want to know, Evie, is why you aren’t pleased? You take pride in your intellectual accomplishments—and well you should—but this doesn’t seem to mean anything to you,” he mused. He’d finished cleaning her cheeks but somehow neglected to stop stroking her cheek. Not that she appeared to notice.

“I’m sure to feel most self-satisfied in a while, but right now . . .” She sighed heavily and turned her head away. “Have you ever seen such a mess?”

He looked about at the collapsed tables, ruined cake, shattered china and crystal, and mired fishpond. “No.”

She smiled at his honesty. At least she appreciated that. “No one will ever hire me to do their wedding now. Not anyone.”

“I should think not.”

At this her eyes grew brilliant under a renewed assault of unshed tears. She lifted her small chin and bit at her lower lip but remained silent.

“Why should it matter so much?” he asked. “It’s not as if you’ve cherished the idea of becoming a wedding planner from the cradle.”

“I know.” She sniffed. “It’s just that . . . I tried so hard, Justin!” She turned, and suddenly she was in his arms, her face smashed against his white shirt, as he pressed his lips fervently to the crown of her head, the one spot on her person still silky and clean and sweetly fragrant.

“But, Justin . . . it wasn’t my fault! I did everything right. It would have been a perfect wedding. Perfect and lovely and beautiful if it hadn’t been for that horrible, wretched Quail!” She spat the last syllable.

He took a deep breath, and sent out a fervent prayer that he was about to say the right thing. “It wouldn’t have been that perfect.”

He felt her go absolutely still.

“What?” her muffled voice asked after a moment.

“It was all very pretty and everything but, Evie, it wasn’t perfect.”

She pushed away from him, her hands resting on his chest. “Exactly where did my wedding celebration fail to meet your expectations?” she asked stiffly.

“Oh, just, well, all these papier-mâché boulders, they seem a mite contrived, eh?”

One brow arched in an elegant inquisition so like her mother’s it was startling.

“And the cake—so many flowers and so many different colors.”

“It was meant to look festive.”

“And in the right milieu doubtless it would have.”
If that milieu happened to be a circus.

“Did anything else fail to meet with your approval?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” he hastened to reassure her. “The candles above, the mirrored ceiling, the floating candles, the rest was lovely. Though perhaps that big rock dripping champagne might have been replaced—”

At that she burst into tears. He tried to hold her, but she would have none of it. She twisted away from him and threw herself down on the fake bank of the fishpond, sobbing as if her heart would break.

And
he
would have none of that. Forcefully—if gently—he gathered her into his arms, scooping her up and settling her on his lap. She came with little resistance, finally flinging her arms about his neck and soaking his shirt with her tears. He let her cry for a few minutes. He doubted his Evie spent much time in tears.

“Evie, you’re just not meant to be a wedding planner. For whatever reasons, circumstances seem to conspire against your every effort.
So what?
” He felt the hitch in her crying and pressed his point. “Why do you need to be a good wedding planner on top of everything else?”

“Because. Because Aunt Agatha is depending on me and I have
failed
her!”

“So?” he said reasonably.

She lifted her wet, tragic face and searched his eyes before burrowing her head back against his shirt. “Easy for you to say. You who look like you do.”

And how was he supposed to take that?

“But for people like me, it is important,” she went on in a muffled voice. “Because if you fail people they don’t want you around. What benefit is a useless spinster? None. They are entirely superfluous.”

Ah. There it was, then. He’d suspected. Now he knew. And he knew he had to be careful in the next few minutes, as careful as he’d ever been with any explosive, any sensitive document, or anyone’s life. Because this was
his
life. She was his life, and the next few minutes would determine his future.

“Evie, my sweet Evie. Your aunt Agatha never asked you to take over her business. You told me so yourself; she eloped without leaving one word as to how the business should be conducted,” he said. “My dear, she was not thinking about her business or her profits or her family or even you. She’ll not blame you for not making a success of her enterprise, because she doesn’t care. She’s not concerned with anything but being in love.”

“How can you know that?” she demanded, pushing back, her fists on his chest.

“Because I’m in love with you, Evie, and I have just had an object lesson in being in love and how it strips away all other considerations.”

Her amazing eyes went round at his statement. Her mouth formed an
O
of amazement but then snapped shut.

“You are just saying that because of last night, because you feel obligated.”

He could have shaken her, but that would mean removing her and he wanted her touching him. He’d waited a lifetime for such intimacy. He wouldn’t set it aside, not even to shake some sense into her.

“Well, yes. I do. I should. We slept together,” he reminded her gently. “Of course that makes me obligated. But it makes you obligated, too.”

“Aha!” she crowed in a voice whose triumph broke into a wretched sob.

“Aha, what?” he demanded, flummoxed.

“You want to marry me in order to satisfy your sense of honor.”

He still didn’t understand. She was looking at him as if he was some loathsome thing. What was so bloody wrong with honor?

“What’s so bloody wrong with honor? I should think you would like the man who wishes to marry you to be honorable.”

And now it was her turn to be frustrated. Of course she wanted him to be honorable. He was honorable. It was one of the things she loved about him. But she didn’t want honor to be at the heart of his proposal. She wanted love to be.

But he
had
said he loved her. And he hadn’t needed to say that, although he
would
say it if he thought it was the only way to persuade her to do the honorable thing, the right thing. Blast! Her thoughts were in a quandary!

“I just . . . I don’t feel honorable toward you,” she finally blurted out, suspecting she sounded like an ass, and certain she should be removing herself from his embrace. But the feeling of “rightness” she’d experienced in his arms had grown during this peculiar and infinitely wonderful interlude and she couldn’t bestir herself.

“Don’t you?” There was the flavor of laughter in his voice. “How do you feel, then?”

She wasn’t going to be the first to make a declaration of love. Oh, yes, he already had. But for what purpose? Because it was the truth? Or because it was the way to achieve his goal? “Not honorable,” she finally answered gruffly.

He tipped her head back. “Darling, wonderful, insecure, prideful Evie. I am not a green boy, and while my experience with the fairer sex is far more limited than you once thought, I am not, nor was I when I came to you, a virgin.”

She blushed fiercely, and was amazed to see a dark answering bronze rise up his throat. “I am not the sort of man who gets carried away by sexual drives. And while I was and am and forever will be carried away by
you,
I could have—granted with no small discomfort and much unhappiness—walked out of your room well before we got to the point of no return.”

She stared at him mutely, listening to his words and trying to hear the meaning behind them. He saw her confusion and once more rescued her.

“What I am trying to say, and doing a damn poor job of it, is that when I made love to you, the idea that I wanted to marry you was already fully formed and recognized and approved by every faculty I own: by body, mind, heart, and soul.

“But I erred, Evie. I admit it. I wanted you so much, so desperately, that I refused to tell you I loved you and then let you decide whether you could feel the same. So like a coward—and this hurts to admit because I detest cowards—I sought to bind you to me. That’s why I made love to you without declaring my intention, hoping you’d be incurably conventional and then be obligated to marry me. I should have known better.”

His mouth turned in a lopsided smile. “Can you forgive me?”

Her throat was tight and she felt tears rise in her eyes and she wanted so desperately to answer “yes!” and “yes!” and “yes!” But she had been a
golem
a long time and she had learned to mistrust men—and found that even though she wanted to believe Justin, even though her heart clamored in recognition of his veracity, her troubled mind would not allow it.

“
Why
do you love me?” she asked.

He looked at her. Her beautiful porcelain skin, her dark hooded eyes and tangle of silky coiling curls, the narrow feet, the slender arms and delicate collarbones, the thin wrists and blue-veined bosom. He looked around at the mess in which they sat and recalled her frantic confession, “What use is a functionless spinster?” and he had his answer.

“Because I am beautiful?” she threw the question out temptingly.

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe.”

“Then, yes,” he said simply. “You are beautiful. Your beauty undoes me and quickens me.” She started to turn her head away but he caught her jaw lightly but implacably and forced her to meet his gaze, ardent and passionate. “I see you in a doorway, the curve of your cheek, the chance gesture of your hand, and I want to kiss you. I touch your skin and I grow hard with desire, I kiss your lips and I am consumed by need.”

She felt the heat rise in her face, and her gaze lowered before the burning ardency in his. He lifted her chin again.

“But, Evie,” he said, his tone potent, “should your features grow coarse, your skin wrinkle, and your body bend with age, I will
still
want you. You are pleasing to me in my heart; you quicken not only my blood but my soul; I desire to feel your embrace as much as to embrace you. The aesthetics of the heart, my darling, surpass the senses and make its own perfection.”

She swallowed. His expression softened, his gaze candid and exposed. His touch was near reverent, and yet she trembled.

“Yes, I love you, Evie. You know I do.”

And she did. He hadn’t said a word about her wit, her intelligence, her abilities, or her competence, all the qualities she had spent her life honing and polishing so that she would have some boon to bring to a relationship—any relationship, whether with a friend, companion, or God-willing, lover.

No. He’d ignored all her wonderful attributes and spoken only about an ephemeral—and to her mind very suspect—beauty that he freely admitted he expected to fade. And yet, she’d never been so certain anyone spoke the truth as when he’d said, “I love you.”

“There is only one question, really, isn’t there, Evie?” he asked in a sure, quiet voice. “And that is, do you love me?”

She couldn’t deny it. She didn’t want to, and yet she was still afraid. She’d spent a lifetime protecting herself from potential pain, and now it stood shoulder to shoulder with a love she’d never dreamed possible. But that was probably always the way with true love, she thought with sudden clarity.

“Yes. Oh, yes. I love you. I think I’ve loved you since I was fifteen. Yes.”

He hadn’t been as confident as he’d sounded, because his eyes squeezed tightly together and his jaw pulsed in a hard little muscle. Then he was kissing her, raining kisses down upon her face, her cheeks, her eyes, and her mouth, and she was kissing him back as if there was nothing else in the world but him.

Only after a long, long time, after their kisses had finally grown less ardent and they more quietly confident, did she pull back and look long and lovingly into his face and say, “Do we really have to retire from spying?”

“Well, Mr. Beverly,” Merry whispered from where she stood by the French doors leading into the courtyard, “a job well done, to my mind.”

Beverly rolled his eyes and muttered a heavenly invocation against interfering women. Merry chuckled and turned to the little clutch of romantically inspired spectators who “happened” to be by the door just as Justin enfolded Evelyn in a passionate embrace.

“See, Lady Broughton? There was never any need to worry. I am most knowledgeable about the human heart, and I could see from the very first that this would be the end result. So alike. Both so . . .” She struggled to find the word.

“Peculiar?” Lady Broughton supplied.

“Yes,” Merry agreed happily. “And oblivious. The only question is what two such naive, sweet, and guileless souls should do to make their way in this wicked, wicked world. A thief at the wedding! I worry for them, I do indeed. Someone is bound to take advantage.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t fret too much about those two,” Lord Stow muttered enigmatically, and, with one last contemplative glance, he left.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Connie Brockway is the author of
The Bridal Season
, the debut novel in the Bridal Season series. She is also the author of the McClairen’s Isle trilogy, which includes the acclaimed novels
The Passionate One
,
The Reckless One
, and
The Ravishing One
, and four other historical romances:
My Dearest Enemy
, winner of the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA Award for Best Historical Romance,
All Through the Night
,
As You Desire
, and
A Dangerous Man
. She loves to hear from readers. Please write her at P.O. Box 828, Hopkins, MN 55343, or visit her website for excerpts and reviews of all her Dell books at
www.conniebrockway.com