Page 42 of Betrothal Between Enemies

She laughed, teasing him. ‘You want me to answer before you ask the question? That seems backwards to me, Alistair.’

‘Well, we’re pretty good at doing things backwards.’ Alistair gripped her hands, his grin turning sombre. ‘Ismay Elizabeth Rose, will you do me the great honour of becoming my partner in business, in life, in love?’

His partner. Not his wife. It was perhaps not an ideal proposal by romantic standards, but it was perfect by hers. More importantly, he had known it would be. ‘You’ve thought about how you wanted to word that,’ she commented.

‘All the way up the mountain, Iz. Once I knew it was possible, all I wanted to do was reach you.’ He squeezed her hands, and she saw the depths of his devotion in his eyes. ‘Then you fell just before I got there. The ash moved, and I thought it was over, that happiness had been within my grasp and I had lost it. I have never been as frightened in my whole life, not even when I told you I loved you that night in the library.’

‘But you acted. You raced towards the danger anyway, and that made all the difference.’ She bracketed his face with her hands. She wanted to soothe him, wanted to ease the fright in those beautiful eyes.

He smiled at her words. ‘Like you did at the boar hunt. I figured I owed you one.’

‘Actually, you owe me two.’ She laughed softly. ‘I pulled you up that first night on the mountain.’

‘I saved you in the dining room that very first night,’ he replied with a chuckle, their words whispers for each other alone, their mouths close. ‘But who’s counting?’

‘We are. It’s what we do, Alistair. We save each other.’ She feathered a kiss over his lips.

‘Is that your way of answering my question?’ He responded with a kiss of his own.

‘It most certainly is,’ she murmured against his mouth, wrapping her arms about him as they straddled the worn wooden bench in the inn yard. ‘How soon do you think we might wed?’

‘I think the sooner the better.’ Alistair’s tone was playfully cryptic as if there was one more secret waiting in the wings.

‘I like the idea of that, but why sooner?’ she asked curiously.

‘Because we do things backwards, Iz.’ He chuckled. ‘Most people marry and then find a home and establish a career and a family. But we have a home, we have our careers.’ She liked how he said that, how he thought the journal and her science was her career along with helping at the warehouse. ‘And we just might possibly have our family, too, Iz,’ he said meaningfully. ‘I’d wager it’s not bad fish or noxious fumes that has your stomach turned inside out.’

She punched him playfully in the arm. ‘Of course you’d know I was pregnant before I did.’ She laughed, but the truth was she’d already begun to suspect it was a possibility. ‘So, sooner it is.’

‘Christmas Eve,’ Alistair whispered into her sooty hair. ‘No later.’

‘Four days?’ She drew back to give him a hard stare. ‘That’s not much time.’

‘It’s the season of miracles, Iz. Anything is possible. If dried blood can liquefy, if an avalanche of ash can stop feet from burying the woman I love, if two stubborn people can find love together, then planning a wedding in four days is possible. We don’t need much, just each other.’ He was right. She’d just been slow to realise it.

Epilogue

Alistair was looking forward to marrying in haste and repenting in leisure. Even four days seemed to be too long, although the time had been very necessary. While Ismay and her mother put together wedding decorations and hurried invitations, Alistair sought help from Lord Danton and Clifford Eddington in obtaining a certificate of nulla osta showing no impediment to their marriage from the British officials in Naples and then in arranging for the civil service. The speed of that arrangement required the exchange of gold ducats to accomplish, and Alistair felt it money well-spent. He recalled it had taken weeks for Hayes and Evelisse to navigate the marital requirements in Florence. They’d had time, but he didn’t. Fatherhood was in his future. Marriage was just moments away.

‘Are you ready?’ Sir Thomas entered the small room off the chapel where they would wed. This had been another piece to arrange as Naples’s churches were Roman Catholic. But Lord Danton had a friend who had a Church of England clergyman relative visiting for the holidays, and Clifford Eddington had known of a church willing to let them use a small chapel for the Anglican service. One did not need to be Neapolitan to appreciate the arte di arrangiarsi.

Sir Thomas straightened Alistair’s cravat. ‘Today, I gain a son. I could not be prouder or happier. You’ve made an old man’s wishes come true. I hope you don’t feel that you’re marrying without family present. We are your family, too.’

Alistair nodded. Hayes’s presence would have been comforting, as would his parents’, but it was not necessary. They were with him in spirit, and there’d been a letter from his father at last. The presence that mattered most would shortly be coming down the aisle towards him. Sir Thomas clapped him on the shoulder and smiled. ‘Well, I’m off. I’ve got to be ready to walk Ismay down the aisle.’

It was still early days since news of the ruse had come out, and there was much to repair—Alistair’s reputation with Ismay’s parents, and their relationship with Ismay, which needed to be strengthened. Alistair had made it clear to Sir Thomas the day he’d gone up the mountain that he intended to support Ismay’s pursuit of science, and he’d implied he expected that same from her parents. There would be no more discouraging Ismay’s talents. There was work to do there to repair the damage done by Edward Ashford, but they loved their daughter, and Alistair was confident that in time the relationship could be restored.

Alistair tugged his lapels one last time and stepped into the small chapel, taking in the decorations of white wax candles and bunches of red flowers, stelle di Natale—Christmas stars. He was about to be a husband. It was an overwhelming thought as he looked out over the small crowd. Attendance was exclusive and intimate as befitted the space. There would be a larger Christmas ball tonight to celebrate at Vista Sulla Baia. They would spend the holidays—and his thirty-third birthday on the twenty-seventh—at her parents’ home before taking up residence in the house off Piazza Vittoria. He smiled to himself. His father would be pleased at that.

There was a rustle, and Alistair’s eyes found Ismay as she approached on her father’s arm, dressed in a gown of cream velvet, with a fuller skirt that swayed when she walked—her mother’s wedding gown from an earlier time. Her hair hung in loose waves down her back, and she carried a bouquet of the stelle di Natale, the red a perfect punctuation to the cream velvet.

‘You look beautiful,’ Alistair whispered as he took her hand from her father.

‘You look like a man in love.’ She laughed, but he saw that the compliment pleased her.

‘I am indeed, and not looking to fall out of it any time soon.’ He smiled. Who would have guessed he’d feel this content standing before an altar, pledging himself in perpetuity to this woman? This was what he’d come to Naples to find: a sense of himself through the expression of deep abiding love for another. This journey had started from a place he’d not wanted to be, in his father’s study at the end of a long Devon winter, but it had ended right where he wanted to be—in the arms of the woman he would love forever and who would love him in return.

Epilogue II