“You have come all the way here to give me a puppy? To replace my dog?”
He seemed unhappy with her question. “Not to replace. I don’t suppose that’s possible.”
It wasn’t. Just as it would not be possible to replace him.
“Will you accept it?” He extended his arm.
She moved forward and took care to lift the pup from his hand without touching him. But through the rain she smelled him, familiar cologne and horse and leather and him, and longing clogged her throat. She backed away.
“Thank you.” She could say nothing else. He was giving her a puppy because he cared about her and did not wish her to be alone. They truly were friends. “Are you en route somewhere . . . else?” Kent wasn’t so far from everywhere. He must have stopped at Shelton Grange as he passed through the country. “Airedale?”
He removed his hat, ran his hand over his jaw, and looked away across the field. “Yes. I—” He frowned and returned his attention to her, raindrops settling upon his hair and cheeks. “My brother’s wedding will be in several weeks and our mother is already in a state of high agitation over preparations.”
“I see.” If he did not leave now she would burst into tears. It would startle the pup. Awful way to become acquainted, that. “I suppose you should be on your way, then,” she said through the prickles in her throat that signaled the hated tears.
He looked grim. “I should.”
“Thank you. Again. For him.” She drew the pup against her neck.
“Well, then. Good day.” He bowed and it was so beautiful and lordly that she didn’t even care that it was positively silly for him to be bowing to her in the middle of a patch of bluebells in the rain. He took several steps away and she felt like someone was squeezing her heart with a fist.
“No. I cannot,” she heard him utter quite firmly. He pivoted to her. “Ravenna, I love you. These past weeks have been hell. I did my damnedest to believe that I could walk away from you, that we could be friends, or rather some idiotic fond memory of a passing acquaintance. But we cannot, not on my part, and I don’t wish to be without you. I want you and I need you with me. If you go to America now and abandon me you will be doing to me just what Beast and Pettigrew and that damned bird did to you. I don’t know if you want this, but I cannot let you go. I will follow you across the Atlantic if I must.”
For a long moment she could say nothing; the tide of joy overwhelmed. “I did not think you could love me. I thought your world was so distant from mine that you could not possibly find in me what I found in you.”
He walked right to her, very close. “Tell me that means you love me.”
“When I thought you were— That night at the castle, when you did not return, and the next morning, it was as though my life had ended. I could not bear it. I thought that if I pretended that my heart was not bound to you already, I could— I could . . . escape.”
“Escape?”
“Escape the pain of losing you.”
He stood perfectly still, tension in his arms at his sides, the emotion in his eyes beautiful. “If you will allow me to hold you, I will never let you go.”
Delirious happiness filled her and tumbled across her tongue. “I will allow it. I—”
He caught her mouth with his, sank his hands into her hair, and united her to him in abandonment to their love. She flattened her palm over his heart. The strong, steady beat of his life thrummed through her.
He kissed her cheek, her brow. “Why did you run away from me?”
“I knew you would leave me.”
“You knew a falsehood.”
“I did not wish to be taken by surprise.”
His smile was both tender and amused. “You are a controlling female.” He brushed his lips to hers. “Ravenna Caulfield?”
“Yes, Vitor Courtenay?” She smiled fully now, because the holes inside of her were sealing up, all of them, as though this love was swallowing the grief of loss and making her whole again. “Lord Vitor Courtenay, that is. I am using the title, you see, in hopes of inspiring your ardor.”
“You inspire my ardor by simply existing, so really the title isn’t necessary after all. Now, could you put the dog on the ground?”
“Yes.” She suited action to word, nestling the pup in the grass. “Why?”
Vitor drew her into his arms, fitting her snugly against him. “Because I am going to make an offer of marriage to you now, and I would like to receive your enthusiastic assent without any impediments to my enjoyment of it.” Rain ran down his nose and over his sculpted lips. She pressed onto her toes and kissed those lips that were hers now to kiss forever.
“Vitor?”
He nuzzled the corner of her mouth. “Mm?”
“After we are married, will you allow me to continue working with animals?”
He drew back and his smile was gorgeous, the crease in his cheek pronounced. “Have you just consented to becoming my bride?”
“That depends on your answer.”
“I love you, Ravenna.” His voice was beautifully rough. “I love who you are and what you do and how you do it. You must continue to go on in that manner, and I will rejoice that you are mine. Given that I am a man prone to sin, I will also boast about you to everybody I encounter. Pride, you know. One of the Seven Deadlies.”
There was another kiss then, this one quite lengthy, in which she expressed her appreciation of his position on the matter.
“However,” he said over her lips, “if you put another wild creature in my bed, I will annul you instantly. The paper will be signed in Parliament by the end of that very day.”
She laughed. “What if the wild creature is me?”
He pulled her tightly to him. “She will always be welcome in my bed, as she is always in my heart. Now, say you will marry me.”
“I will marry you. Is it my turn now?”
“Your turn?”
“To order you about like you have just ordered me about?”
“I suppose.” He nodded. “Having just been accepted by the woman who commands my heart, I am currently of a magnanimous mind.”
“Make love to me now.”
“With pleasure.” He looked about them curiously. “Here?”
She twined her fingers into his hair and kissed his jaw. “It has been a dream of mine for some weeks now to make love to a handsome lord in a field of wildflowers. You are a handsome lord. This is a field of wildflowers. Also, we are both very wet and that reminds me of when you pulled me from a river and held me in your arms and I thought that despite the cold and damp I could remain there forever.”
His smile lit her heart. “As long as there are no pitchforks about, I am at your service, madam. But when did you leave off referring to it as mating?”
“When you made me say your name and I wanted to run away. The trouble of it was, I wanted you to come with me.” She pressed her brow to his chest and held him tight. “Vitor, I love you.”
He served her then, in the field of wildflowers as spring rain gave way to golden sunshine, proving himself both her lord and servant at once. And in return, as before, willingly, truly, she adored him.
Author’s Note
In 1807, threatened by Napoleon’s imperial ambitions, the Prince Regent of Portugal fled Lisbon, sailing across the Atlantic to establish his court in the lucrative colony of Brazil. Upon mainland Portugal’s political landscape bereft of its leaders, I placed my fictional lesser branch of the royal family in hiding in the mountains. An era of tumult, the early nineteenth century in Europe and Britain provides a rich and thrilling context within which to tell a tale, even if that tale technically takes place in a remote, snowbound castle. I had great fun stocking my murder mystery with an international cast of characters and flavoring it with little bits of information about the wider world from which each of the actors had come.