All the Pleasures of the Season by Lecia Cornwall

Author:Lecia Cornwall [Cornwall, Lecia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-11-30T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“He’ll say no,” Gilbert murmured as they left the room.

“He could have said that at once,” Miranda replied. He watched as she gave instructions to the hovering servants. She introduced him by name, bade them make him welcome, and dismissed them.

“Come with me,” she whispered. Her hand in his was warm, and he let her lead him along a corridor filled with portraits and paintings and sculptures. At the end of the hall, a pair of footmen snapped to attention and opened a set of oak doors to let them through.

Miranda breezed through and doors closed again behind them. He found himself in another huge room, lined on three walls with bookshelves that soared two stories toward a ceiling painted with cherubs and summer clouds. Beyond the windows just as tall as the bookcases, snow was falling.

Miranda threw herself into his arms, her mouth finding his, kissing him passionately for a long moment, the warmth of her lips lending heat to his own. He pulled her close, held her as she laughed softly. She cupped his face, kissed his cheeks, his mouth, his chin, his eyes. “You came!” she said over and over. “You came.”

He wrapped his arms around her. “How could I do otherwise? I should have done it months ago. I love you, Miranda.” He hesitated, looked down into her blue eyes. “Should I have asked you first, before seeing Carrington? Will you marry me?”

She laughed. “I asked you first, if you’ll recall. I think I’ve wanted to marry you from the moment I met you,” she said. “I was riding with Phineas in Hyde Park and you came down the track toward us. I couldn’t stop looking at you. You were different than anyone else I’d met.”

“No title, no money?”

“No insincerity. You spoke to me like a person, didn’t look at me as if the value of my dowry was written on my forehead.”

He smiled. “You were the most remarkable woman I’d ever met. You didn’t simper like the other ladies of the ton. You weren’t haughty or silly. You were beautiful, and witty, and perfect. I couldn’t stop thinking of you, or dreaming about what it might be like if I could—”

He groaned and stepped away. “Your grandfather might still say no.”

She crossed and poured wine into a pair of pewter mugs, and went to sit on the rug in front of the fire, sinking in a billow of soft woolen skirts. She was at ease here, a lady born to the gracious surroundings of a castle, raised to run a gentleman’s estates, to become the consort of a duke or an earl, yet she pushed the poker deep into the glowing coals like a country lass and turned to beckon him to her side.

The firelight turned her golden curls to molten copper. “Tell me again what you liked best about me,” she teased, a saucy debutante again.

He stood and stared at her, but she held out a hand to him, inviting him again to join her on the hearth rug.

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