Wicked Becomes You(96)
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I do love you, Gwen.” How had she never realized that? Even Richard had known it.
He was watching her posture as she turned to face him. She stood so painfully erect. He was waiting for her shoulders to relax.
They never did relax, even as she lifted her face to him and smiled, a smile so unearthly radiant that he had a brief, uncanny fear: he was in a dream; none of this was real; he was dreaming, and she was not really saying, “Then yes, Alex. I will marry you.”
Chapter Fifteen
For the rest of Gwen’s life, memories of the masked ball would be vague and indistinct, washed out by the immense, blazing light in which they were made. At the moment, however, the illumination lent an overpowering precision to the scene. One thousand French lamps had been lit within the Cornelyses’ house in Grosvenor Square. The flames reflected crazily off the scarlet and gilt molding of the Chinese décor, the best jewels of some six hundred guests, the sequins affixed to their shiny, expressionless masks. Combined with the tumult of hundreds of conversations, three over-competitive orchestras scattered across two floors, and the ring of crystal and steel-toed shoes, the effect rippled through one’s senses like champagne. Gwen had gone in search of the water closet and had lost her way back to the ballroom twice.
Or perhaps, Gwen thought, her brain was malfunctioning. All of these last twelve days seemed to her to have passed in a sort of intoxicated haze. From Milan, she had wired Elma to come quickly—an edict obeyed even more quickly than Gwen had hoped; she’d spent only one more breathless night with Alex before Elma had appeared, anxious to know the cause of this early recall, and a bit put out, besides (although Gwen did not dare ask how Elma had been occupying herself that made her early return so much to be regretted).
Once revealed, their cause for recalling her had achieved the impossible: Elma had been rendered temporarily mute. And then, as astonishment had ebbed, she’d thrown herself into crisis mode. “Shall we bother with bribing an Italian priest? Oh, bosh, simply another mouth to tape shut. No, let us go to where we know our friends, and figure it all out there,” she’d decided. “We book tickets for London directly. Mr. Ramsey, go, go, go!”
It had occurred to Gwen that there was no point in bothering to make the marriage match Lady Milton’s dates. “What do we care?” she’d asked Alex, when Elma had finally turned her back long enough to give them an opportunity for private conference. “Will it matter, in Buenos Aires and New York, if people in London say we were traveling alone together before we wed?”
“It will matter in London,” he’d said. “And one day, it might matter to you.”
He would not listen to her arguments to the contrary. Indeed, he’d proved surprisingly amenable to all of Elma’s moralizing and marshaling, and his sisters’ besides. They had been waiting at St. Pancras, four days later—alerted by Elma’s wire that a “terrible tangle” caused by “two idiotic lovebirds” required their best efforts at reconciliation.
Gwen had predicted to Alex that at least one of his sisters would fall down from shock upon learning of the marriage plans. In reply, he’d merely smiled and said they might surprise her.
And indeed, upon hearing the news shortly after retrieving them from the station, Belinda had done no more than lift her brow and nod, while Caroline, with a cry, had thrown herself across the carriage to embrace Gwen and Alex in turn. “Well done,” she’d said to Alex, winking as she pulled away.
The trick was this: stirred by Lady Milton’s industrious hand, the news of the marriage had spread far and wide. A flurry of cards was appearing at the Beechams, all from acquaintances dying to learn the story. They needed a very influential person, then, to facilitate the procuring of the special license, perhaps even to twist an arm in fudging the date of issue; otherwise, news of its belated usage would become the season’s next scandal. “And Gwen has already provided two,” Elma said, “for everybody is saying now that she must have bribed Pennington into crying off so she could have Mr. Ramsey instead.”
While Alex’s connections spanned the government, he’d never had cause to befriend anybody connected to the church. And so the matter of the special license came down to Gerard.
The twins, together with Alex, broke the news to their brother as Gwen waited outside with Elma. In the hallway, all that could be heard of the moment of revelation was a clatter and a great thump.
“Oh dear,” Gwen murmured.
Elma patted her hand. “He will be your brother-in-law,” she said.