Page 36 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

She had never quite known what to do with that.

But now, standing in his small room with his life already packed into trunks and the future waiting with all the patience of something entirely indifferent to her feelings, she thought she might at last be beginning to understand something about herself.

“The idea frightens me,” she said, because she had decided on the carriage ride over that if she was going to say it at all, she would say it properly, without the careful varnish she usually applied to anything that threatened to reveal her as a creature capable of feeling too much at once.

“Leaving England. Leaving my family. Leaving every street and face I have ever known and crossing an ocean to arrive in a place where I shall be entirely unknown and where, I am told, they have some very alarming opinions about how tea ought to be prepared.”

She paused, drew a breath, and then added, “All of it frightens me rather dreadfully.”

The corner of his mouth shifted as though he might smile, though he did not quite permit it to become one. She pressed on before he could interrupt her, because if she allowed him the chance, she suspected she would lose her nerve entirely.

“But,” she said, and there was something in her voice that surprised even her, something soft and unguarded that she had not intended to let out into the open. Something that had been sitting very quietly beneath her ribs for weeks now, waiting with an infuriating sort of patience.

“The thought of losing you frightens me more.”

He crossed the room to her.

He did not hurry, because Edward Reinhart had never been a man given to haste, and she had come to understand that his unhurried nature was not indifference but a rather infuriating form of masculine pride. When he reached her, he lifted both hands to her face with a gentleness that felt entirely unfair in its effect upon her composure, and he looked at her in the firelight as though she were the only thing in existence worth looking at.

“You are certain,” he said, though it was not quite a question.

“I am terrified,” she replied at once. “Which, I am told, is not the same thing as uncertainty.”

A small laugh escaped him, soft and brief, as though it had surprised even him in its existence.

“No,” he said. “It is not.”

And then he kissed her.

It was not at all what she had imagined, though she had taken considerable pains to assure herself she had not been imagining it in the first place. It was not grand or dramatic, not in the least the sort of kiss one might later describe with flourishing language to a sympathetic confidante. It was simply him. Warm, unhurried, entirely certain of her in a way she was only just beginning to understand she longed to be certain of herself.

One of his hands remained at her jaw, steady as anything, while the other settled at her waist as though it had always known precisely where it belonged. She discovered, to her quiet astonishment, that her mind offered her absolutely nothing witty or sharp or even faintly clever in response, which struck her as rather alarming and, for reasons she did not care to examine too closely, rather perfect.

When they finally parted, she found she was still holding on to the lapel of his coat, a fact she regarded with mild surprise and no intention whatsoever of correcting. He was smiling down at her in a way that made the fire seem almost decorative rather than necessary.

“You are,” he said softly, “the most extraordinary woman I have ever met.”

“Yes,” Caroline replied, with impeccable dignity and what she hoped passed for composure. “So I am told.”

He laughed again, with his whole body, and the sound did something most wonderful to the tingling sensation down her spine. Then he drew her back in, as if there had never been any question of doing otherwise.

Caroline smiled into the second kiss.

Chapter 16

September 1st

The chapel had smelled of beeswax and very old wood, and the ceremony had lasted approximately twenty minutes, which Caroline felt was a perfectly sensible length of time for an event of such permanent consequence.

"I will give you a proper wedding," Edward had said with great fervor afterward, taking both of her hands in his and kissing them. "In New York, with flowers and a cake and however many guests you like and music that does not sound as though it is being produced by a man who learned the instrument this morning."

"I thought the organist was quite good," Caroline had replied, with a smile in her voice.

"He played one hymn three times."

"He played it with conviction," she had said in a teasing tone. The responding look on his face had made her laugh, and the laugh had made him kiss her, and by the time they had separated again, she had decided the entire affair was, on balance, rather lovely.

She did not tell him this. She thought she would save it for later, when they were somewhere on the Atlantic and she could say it without anyone overhearing.