He had his eyes closed. But he opened them when he felt Jenny’s light and practiced hand moving over him again.
“No, Jen,” he said, removing her hand from his body and kissing her lightly on the nose. “I have to go.”
She pouted and looked for all the world as if she were sorry.
But he wanted to be out in the fresh air. He wanted to be home. He wanted to be in a bathtub full of hot suds, scrubbing her perfume from his skin.
He wanted to be well-rested for his wedding day—and for his wedding night.
4
OH.” FOR ONCE ABIGAIL APPEARED TO have been rendered speechless. She stared at Laura Seymour, who was standing at the opposite side of her room beside the window. “Yes. Thank you, Edna.”
Mrs. Gill’s maid stared at her wide-eyed from the doorway, from which she had just announced the arrival of the bridegroom. “Ooh,” she said, “you do look fine, Miss Gardiner.”
Abigail looked speakingly at the girl and turned back to Laura. “I don’t believe my feet will move,” she said.
“Then we will have to persuade them to do so,” her friend said, coming across the room toward her. “We can keep his lordship waiting for five minutes, Abby, because it is your wedding day and brides are allowed to be a little late. But not indefinitely, until your feet decide to unroot themselves from the floor.”
“What if he has changed his mind?” Abigail said. “What if he is having regrets? What if he does not like me, even when I am dressed in all my finery?”
Laura looked at her friend’s pale blue muslin dress with its high waistline and short puffed sleeves and flounced hem. And she looked at Abigail’s hair, which Mrs. Gill’s personal maid—lent for the grandeur of the occasion—had dressed smoothly down over her ears and coiled intricately at the back of her head.#p#分页标题#e#
“You look extremely pretty, Abby,” she said. “No man could possibly look at you and dislike you.”
“He thinks I am quiet and sensible and good-natured,” Abigail said, her voice almost a wail.
“Well, on such short acquaintance,” Laura said, “he is fortunate to be accurate about one of the three. He will get used to the fact that you are almost never quiet and not always sensible.”
Abigail giggled nervously.
“But we agreed last night and again this morning that you would not think of such things,” Laura said. “Abby, we have kept him waiting for almost ten minutes already.”
“I don’t think I will be able to speak one word all day,” Abigail said. “How does one get one’s stomach to turn the right way up when it insists on standing on its head?”
Her friend clucked her tongue and took Abigail firmly by the hand. “It is time to go,” she said.
Abigail took a deep and ragged breath and allowed herself to be led from the room. Her new blue slippers must have been manufactured with lead weights in the soles, she was convinced.
The Earl of Severn was standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, talking with Mr. and Mrs. Gill. He had a stranger with him, a fair-haired young man of medium height and pleasing, amiable expression.
Abigail focused her attention on the stranger, though she was aware only of the earl, dressed quite gorgeously in pale blue knee breeches, a dark blue waistcoat embroidered with silver thread, and a lighter blue coat. His stockings, his elaborately tied neckcloth, and the lace that half-covered his hands were snowy white.
Prince Charming would have looked like a bulldog beside him, she thought as he took her hand and raised it to his lips and she was forced to meet his blue eyes.
The stranger was Sir Gerald Stapleton. Abigail smiled at him and curtsied and found herself wishing that he were the Earl of Severn. He looked very much less threatening than the man who was to be her husband. She presented Laura to both gentlemen, accepted Mrs. Gill’s kiss on the cheek and Mr. Gill’s bow, and before she had quite digested the fact that the moment of her doom had finally come, she was being led down the steps to the pavement with the earl’s hand at her elbow and helped into his carriage.
Laura sat beside her, the two gentlemen opposite them, their backs to the horses. And Abigail, trying to decide whether to stay quiet or to burst into animated conversation, found herself having to concentrate on not giving in to a quite inappropriate urge to giggle.
Except, she thought, thoroughly alarmed by the possibility that she might give in to that urge, that there was nothing even remotely funny about the situation. She was a bride on her way to church to be married. Her bridegroom—a total stranger—was sitting across from her, his silk-clad knees almost touching her own.