‘Lucinda?’
‘She has slept beside you for the past three nights since the accident. We all thought it was time she looked after herself and took a break, though I should imagine she will be back before the clock strikes the next part of the hour. It seems she cannot stay away.’
Exhaustion hammered at Tay like a mallet and he let his eyes close.
The next time he awoke it was night and Lucinda was there, watching him.
‘Welcome back.’ Her smile was shy and her hair was loose, dancing in pale waves across her shoulders and down her back.
‘Beautiful.’ And she was, in every single way that he might imagine.
‘Thank you for saving me, Taylen.’ Her fingers traced the lines of a scratch across the back of his hand as though measuring the hurt. ‘If you had not come …’
He stopped her. ‘But I did.’
Tonight the world was sharper, less hazy. He could even lift his head from the pillow and it did not ache.
‘How many days?’
‘Four.’
He brought up his free hand to feel the bandage.
Memories. After Rouen. A small child without a hope in hell of protecting himself.
Lucinda knew everything hidden and still loved him?
A bunch of wildflowers sat in a vase opposite the bed, and for the first time ever the bile did not rise up in Tay’s throat as he thought of his uncle. It was over, finished, and there was all of the future to look forward to. The peace of it made him smile as he spoke. ‘You look happy.’
‘I am. With you here next to me and a whole night of just us. Ashe also sat with you each time that I did not. Taris came, too, and Cristo. They all hope you can forgive them.’
This time he laughed. ‘Forgive them for forcing you upon me? Forgive them for making my life … whole?’
Catching her hand, he brought it to his lips and noticed an injury on the top of her knuckles from the fall. Further up on her wrist an older scar from the carriage accident lingered. He wanted to wrap her in his arms and keep her close.
When she lay down beside him to sleep he knew that he would never be lonely again.
They were all in the Alderworth dining room at the end of dinner, celebrating the first time that Taylen had been able to come downstairs unaided.
A week since he had fallen down the well. Lucinda thought it seemed like a lifetime ago.
Everyone was present, her brothers and their wives and Posy.
Cristo made certain that a comfortable chair was angled in the best way for Tay to sit in and Asher got him a drink. It was strange to see her brothers fussing over a man they had hated not so very long ago.
When Taris raised his glass he gave a toast. ‘Here is to you, Taylen, and a warm welcome to our family. The beginning may not have been exactly comfortable, but we have many years now to make up for it.’
Tay smiled and took Lucinda’s hand. ‘Without your … help—’ he gave the word the inflection of a question and everybody laughed ‘—I may not have found my wife.’ He raised his own glass now and looked directly at her. ‘To you, Lucinda, and to family.’
His green eyes brimmed with a happiness that softened the lines in his face. To Lucinda he looked the most beautiful man in the world, her man, and a husband who made her feel strong and real.
Intrinsically flawed? No, she felt far, far from that.
‘To life and to laughter,’ she toasted in return and looked around the table at the smiling faces as she held up her glass.
Happiness was a feeling that was almost physical. Emerald’s jade talisman was warm in her palm and she knew for certain that she would ask Emerald if she could give it to Posy, who sat next to her with a look on her face that she thought might have been her own a few months back.
An observer of life, but wanting so much more.
‘Has your memory returned fully yet, Lucy?’ Beatrice asked the question.
‘It hasn’t. But there are new memories now which have replaced those old ones.’
‘Then let us drink to that.’ Cristo stood and poured fresh brandy into all the glasses. ‘But be warned, Duke, once a Wellingham, always a Wellingham. Eight of us now and that is not counting any of the children.’
Lucinda’s eyes met her husband’s. Children. How she hoped that the time would come when she held the heir of Ellesmere safely in her arms.
Chapter Sixteen
London—three months later.
Tay had always hated these big society events for all of the falseness and the inherent censure within them. As the Duke of Alderworth he had been invited because of his title, but the ton had tiptoed around him, feared him, he supposed, and worried about what he might do or say next, every new and over-exaggerated myth that had built up around him adding to their trepidation.
An outsider. A Duke asked because it was harder to leave him out, such a slight a reminder of how far the Alderworth star had indeed fallen. Oh, granted, there were those amongst the ton who would gravitate to him, but they were often men he felt no true communion with or else young bucks satisfying their first urges to kick the traces and to irritate their more-than-disapproving families.
But tonight with the lights of the chandeliers full upon him and a dozen of the Wellinghams around him it was different. Every eye in the place might be turned towards their party, but the usual alarm that prickled inside him on entering such a salon was missing.
Safety. Belonging. The feel of his wife’s hand tucked through the crook of his arm and her oldest brother beside him.
‘A smile might persuade those who are here to criticise you to do otherwise, Tay.’
‘You think it that easy?’ Months of getting to know Asher Wellingham had brought them together as friends.
‘The ton revolves around a large measure of deceit. Surely you have learned at least that?’
Such an answer did make it easy to smile, to simply laugh at all the implied deceit and make use of it. Taylen saw Taris smile, too, his wife, Beatrice-Maude, beside him in the company of Cristo, Emerald and Eleanor. Asher’s friend, Jack Henshaw, also lingered amongst them, Posy Tompkins on his arm and dressed in the most absurdly expensive gown, the diamonds on the cloth glittering in the light. The plain jade pendant she had around her throat seemed very out of place in the ensemble and Tay remembered seeing the piece around Lucinda’s neck and wondered.
Altogether they made up a high-ranking and prominent group and although the power of money and title was behind them, it was something much more than that again that made Tay’s heart swell with pride.
Respect was something he was not used to, but it came tonight in waves from those who watched them, the consequence, he supposed, of the years of good works and care of others the Wellinghams had been involved in. And he belonged, not in the game room amongst the card sharps and the drunken care-for-nothings, but here in the bosom of the protective custody of the Carisbrooks. One of them. For ever.
His hand tightened on his wife’s. ‘Can I reserve every single dance, sweetheart?’
‘I have already pencilled you in, Tay.’
In a light gold dress Lucinda looked unmatchable, her hair wound into curls and the décolletage on her dress showing off the creamy skin of her breasts.
‘Should your bodice be quite so revealing?’
She simply laughed. ‘This from a man who insists I come naked to bed every night?’
‘There it is only us, but here …’ He looked around. A good percentage of the men in the room had their eyes fastened upon his wife and he knew exactly why. It was the joy that seemed to well up in Lucinda like a fountain, spilling around her as laughter and honesty and delight. And there was something else that only he was privy to, a wild and wonderful secret that had not yet been told to anyone, save him.
They would have a child in less than six months, and there had been no payment except for love involved in its conception.
His whole being filled with a feeling that almost frightened him with its intensity and yet when he looked at Taris and Ashe and Cristo he saw the same desperation in their eyes, too. Men made whole by their women and astonished by the fact over and over again.
‘How many hours until we can be back in our bedchamber?’ he whispered and saw the flush of pleasure stain her cheeks. God, he loved her puritanical bent because it was so much fun dismantling it every single night.
‘Five waltzes at least, Duke,’ she replied, knowing how he enjoyed holding her close to feel the slight swell of her stomach between them. Three months along. The newest Ellesmere. Another Wellingham. A cousin for all the numerous children who ran and laughed in the great estates of Falder and Beaconsfield and Graveson. Another belonging. More protection. A tight circle of safe-keeping.
Like an onion, he thought, and Lucinda was his very centre.
A soulmate. He had never expected one, never believed that after all he had been through he might find such paradise.
Tripping as he walked, he clutched at the stick he needed to use now, a reminder not of his infirmity, but of their survival.
Asher’s arm came out and steadied him. ‘If you get tired, we can go home.’
Tay knew Asher hated these large gatherings and smiled at the hope in his voice. ‘I have promised your sister that I will dance with her.’
‘You feel up to it?’
‘My balance is getting better with each passing week. Doctor Cameron said that soon there will be only a little of the vertigo left.’