The Wagered Miss Winslow (18 page)

As it turned out, Rosalind could not have made a more apt choice. She and Mr. Fordham had not been in the drawing room above a quarter hour, the little man cluck-clucking over the fine Adam fireplace and painting verbal pictures of the furnishings he envisioned scattered atop large ornamental carpets, when Woodrow happened past the open door, looked in, and called out, “Jules! Can it be you?”

As Rosalind informed her husband later over a sumptuous dinner of
potage
à
la Monglas, filets de volatile
à la marechale
, and
petits poulets à l’Indienne
(needless to say, Woodrow had chosen the Remington cook), it seemed that Jules and Woodrow had known each other “this age,” although their paths hadn’t crossed in some years.

“Woodrow complimented me most courteously on my decision to employ Mr. Fordham,” she told Beau as he bit into a piece of succulent chicken, “and then the two of them listened to my ideas, nodding or frowning at each new suggestion until I decided to withdraw completely and let the two of them have at it.”

“And that pleases you?” Beau inquired, wondering if Rosalind felt usurped in her own house. She seemed happy enough, but one could never tell with Rosalind. She had seemed happy enough with his kisses, he recalled ruefully, and yet they had barely been alone since a few minutes after their wedding.

He should have stated his case more clearly, Beau had decided late last night, lying just one room away from his wife (the connecting door unlocked between them, a fact that did not help him toward a restful night). Yes, he had told her they might one day have a marriage in more than name. Yes, he had hinted at a desire for her. But it didn’t seem to be enough.

Perhaps he should be more direct? And perhaps not. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been so confused by anything, or anyone. This business of falling in love was more tricky than standing back and watching while Mr. Hampshire’s daughter, Cassandra, had tumbled into love with her earl.
Everything
, he had decided, was easier when your heart was not involved.

“Do I mind?” Rosalind asked after chewing and swallowing a bite of glazed sweet potato. “No, I honestly can’t say that I mind. Mr. Fordham has a clear understanding of what I want, and he seems to agree with my ideas. Tomorrow he will begin hiring other tradesmen to take care of draperies, and the carpets, and any painting that might have to be done. The walls in the dining room are rather dingy, you know.”

“Leaving you free to concentrate on gathering your new wardrobe, as I have asked you to do?” Beau questioned, reaching for his wineglass.

Rosalind averted her eyes, which was easy enough to do as they had been served on trays in the study, each of them sitting in one of the burgundy chairs, Rosalind with her legs tucked up beneath her.

“I have made a few purchases, Beau,” she said after a moment, knowing that she had been deliberately going slow, feeling too much like a money-grubbing fortune hunter to spend his money freely on clothing her own back, even if she would only be doing it to impress Niall. “Mollie and Bridget and I will be going to Bond Street again tomorrow.”

Beau nodded. “All right. But that brings up another matter. Jewelry.”

Rosalind’s head snapped up, her green eyes wide. “Jewelry?” Really, she was going to have to find a way to stop this annoying new habit of parroting other people’s words. What about jewelry? I have my pearls, and my garnets—and a rather lovely emerald bracelet that was my mother’s.”

“All of which Niall has seen,” Beau pointed out. “Fine feathers might not make fine birds, m’darlin’, but a bit of sparkle around your neck and in your ears will have Niall flocking to us like we were golden peacocks.”

“You’d be a peacock,” Rosalind forced herself to say. “I’d be a peahen—brown feathers, and blessed little to draw the eye.”

“Now don’t go interrupting me when I’m being poetic, Rosie,” Beau admonished with a smile, pushing away the small table the tray had been placed on and getting to his feet. “It’s the devil of a time I’m having with this anyway, without you pointing out the gaps in my education the way Woodrow is prone to do.”

Rosalind lowered her head, her cheeks flushed a delicate pink. “I’m truly sorry, Beau,” she apologized as he took the fork from her nerveless fingers, replaced it on the tray which he moved away from her knees, and helped her to her feet.

“Never apologize unless there’s no other way out, m’darlin’, Beau advised, reaching into the pocket of his jacket.

Rosalind smiled up into his face. “Another one of Woodrow’s strictures?”

Beau shook his head, lifting her left hand to his lips for a quick kiss. “No—Bridget’s. The same dear lady who pointed out to me that, having no ancestral ring to offer you, I had better get myself out and find something suitable to slip on this dainty finger.”

Rosalind looked behind her, as if gauging the distance from where she stood to the doorway, suddenly nervous and very much aware that the two of them were quite alone in the study. “There—there was no need—”

“There was every need,” Beau corrected her, holding a small box in front of her, then flipped the lid back with one hand long-practiced in executing a similar move with his snuffbox.

“The stone is not as bright or as deep as your eyes, but it was the best I could find,” he said, embarrassed at the slight tremor in his voice as he held out the opened box to let her see the emerald ring nestled inside. “There are only twelve diamonds around the stone, and they’re none too large, but this is just a beginning, you understand. I—I had planned on a necklace, believing Bridget to be wrong, but when I saw this I thought—well, never mind what I thought. Do you like it, Rosie?”

He hadn’t realized how much he wanted her to like the ring until this moment, or how much he wished he could go back to the first day they’d met and redo things right, rather than in this slapdash way. He had married her out of hand, promising revenge on her rotter of a brother, then ripped her away from the estate he swore to love and brought her to his unfurnished house.

It hadn’t, heaven knew, been exactly an august beginning. But what he couldn’t change, he could mend, and he would begin the wooing of his wife this very evening, and hope she would forget his promise that they would deal with her brother before taking any more “permanent” steps in their marriage.

Rosalind was quiet for so long that Beau began to sense that perhaps he had erred on the side of impatience yet again. At long last, when she still made no move to take the ring from its velvet bed, he looked at her, only to see that she was crying—enormous crystal tears that coursed one after the other from her swimming emerald eyes, down her alabaster cheeks. He hadn’t known teardrops could be so large, or that the sight of them could rip so at his heart.

“Rosie?” he said questioningly, tipping up her small chin with one of his large fingers. “Is it a fool I’ve made of m’self yet again?”

Rosalind squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a moment, spilling yet another waterfall from her eyes, and shook her head. “No, Beau, you haven’t made a fool of yourself,” she told him, looking up into his dear, handsome face. “It’s me who’s being foolish. You see, I—well, I have this house now, and the lovely chore of furnishing it, and taking on staff, and clothing myself at your expense. You’ve been nothing but good to me, and I—but I don’t
deserve
—I mean, I haven’t
done
anything to—and you certainly made it plain that—but even so, I’ve
hoped
—”

Beaumont Remington had lived on his wits for many a long year. He had learned when his luck was in and he could sense when it was out. Only since meeting Miss Rosalind Winslow had this knack deserted him, causing him to blunder into one rash judgment after another, each seemingly worse than the last.

But now that time of uncertainty was suddenly behind him, and he knew—he just
knew
.

“Rosie,” he said, his voice a low, affectionate growl. “Rosie, m’darlin’, are you telling me that I’m not wrong to hope?”

She didn’t answer, but only stood there silently, once more staring at the ring.

“Damn me for a blithering idiot Boglander!” Beau exclaimed, startling the both of them with his sudden anger. “I’m doing this all wrong, but I’ll be stripped naked and tossed in the deepest ocean for whale bait before I ask Woodrow how I’m supposed to go about asking m’own wife to love me! Woo you? I wouldn’t know where to begin! Here,” he said, pushing the ring box into Rosalind’s hand. “Do what you want with it!”

He moved to storm out of the study, stopping only when he realized that the brandy decanter (the contents of which he wanted to down in one long, soul-easing swallow) resided on the drinks table in the corner of the room. “Damn and blast!” he swore, turning back just in time to see Rosalind sliding the ring onto her finger, to have it fit perfectly against the plain gold band he had put there only a few days earlier. “Rosie?” he asked softly, once more daring to hope.

“Beau?” Rosalind questioned back at him teasingly, her tears over and a wide smile lighting her features. At five and twenty, nearer to six and twenty, and previously without a hope of ever finding it, she knew herself to be looking squarely into the eyes of love. “If I promise not to serve cabbage for three days in a row, or let the fire go out of a winter morning, do you think we could make this a marriage in more than name?”

“Ah, Rosie, m’darlin’!” Beau exclaimed, opening his arms wide so that Rosalind could run into them, pressing her head against his strong chest. “I don’t deserve you, sweetings, I swear that I don’t.” His arms closed around her and he buried his face in her hair. “But I won’t be letting you go now, Rosie, and I swear that as well.”

She lifted her eyes to his, in charity with the world—and even with Niall, who had served to bring them together. “Beaumont Remington,” she warned playfully, touching a hand to his smoothly shaved cheek, “you’d better be sure of this, because I’m not about to let you go either.”

Laughing, Beau swept her up into his arms and headed for the stairs, brushing by two clearly astonished footmen as he carried his bride upstairs to bed.

Rosalind snuggled down under the covers in the large bed, her body still tingling with the memory of Beau’s talented ministrations. They had awakened late after falling asleep in each other’s arms, and he had opened her eyes with kisses, proceeding to make sweet love to her for half the morning.

Now they were lying quietly, thinking their own thoughts, one of which Rosalind decided to put into words. Twisting her face up to his, she stroked his beard-roughened cheek with her fingertips. “Beau—this mansion. It’s lovely, truly it is, but how did you acquire it?”

Beau chuckled low in his throat. “Darlin’, you ask the worst questions possible if you wish to continue believing yourself to be the wife of an honorable man. I won it, of course.”

Rosalind rolled her eyes, finding it difficult to believe her husband could be so unremittingly lucky at cards. “You won it, Beau? Who did you win it from, that you have the house, but not the furnishings?”

Beau lifted one fragrant lock of Rosalind’s blonde hair and pressed it to his lips. “He had a lovely name, my pet, although I disremember it at the moment,” he said. “He had been renting it, so that when he found himself short of blunt for one last wager he offered me the lease in lieu of scribbling his vowels. When I won, which I knew I would, Lord Somebody-or-other moved himself and his furnishings out, and I moved in.”

Rosalind’s full bottom lip came out in a pout. “The mansion is leased? How disappointing. I had thought you owned it.”

“Ah, darlin’, but I do. And a pretty penny it cost me, too, but Bridget said I should begin putting down roots, just in case I couldn’t get Remington Manor back the way I’d planned. I knew I could not fail, but there are times when it is best to humor Bridget. Now I am grateful to her, for our daughters will be well-launched from this house.”

“Our daughters?” Rosalind rubbed her cheek against his bare chest. “No one will ever be able to accuse Beaumont Remington of underestimating his powers. What if we have nothing but sons? Or no children at all? I’m no young girl of twenty, you know.”

“Impossible,” he stated flatly. “We’ll have a half dozen—maybe more. I have decided we should found a dynasty, you understand.” He looked down at her, his chin pressed against his throat so that she laughed out loud as a small, second chin appeared below his chiseled jaw line. “Or do you object? Are you happy digging in the dirt and have no great desire for babies?”