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“Yes.”
He slipped the ring back on her finger and stood, leaning down to kiss her over the sleeping baby. The kiss was full of longing and promise. When he broke it, he glanced at the sofa.
Emily blushed to understand him. “We can’t,” she said.
“That doesn’t stop me from wanting to,” he said. “When does the baby go back to his mother?”
“When he needs her,” Emily said firmly.
“I’ll wait.” He dropped a light kiss on her cheek, and flashed a grin at her before he disappeared once more behind the high arching back of the sofa.
Emily kissed the baby’s head. “Would you like a cousin?” she whispered. “I think it can be arranged.”
After a time of perfect contentment in which the diamonds on Emily’s ring winked up at her and the sleeping baby breathed against the lace at her collarbone, the drawing room door opened. A businesslike rustle of skirts sounded, and Emily’s mother came to a halt, looking down her.
“Hello, Mama,” Emily said. “Roz is having a rest.”
“Emily dear, I’m quite confused. Are you engaged or not?”
“Very much engaged, Mama.” Emily smiled over her nephew’s little head.
Her mother looked harassed and skeptical. “Your father seemed to think that your betrothal was a jest, and he had no idea what to make of your continuing it after your fiancé did not attend your engagement party.”
“Oh, Mama, I have a great deal to tell you, and I do have to thank you for the little blue book. Will you sit down? Should I ring for tea?”
Her mother sat opposite her. “But what is he like? How can there have been all these rumors?”
“You shall meet him presently, Mama, and see that other than his height, which is a little out of the ordinary, and his habit, acquired I believe in Spain, of napping where no one may detect him in the middle of the day, he is a most respectable young man.”
From the green sofa came Lynley’s laugh, warm and happy. “Enough,” he said, coming to his full height and bowing, as Emily’s mother gaped at him.
“She’s roasting you, ma’am, as you’ll see when we become better acquainted.”
“Oh my,” said her mother. “You are tall.”
Lynley dropped a kiss on Emily’s head. “I will let your daughter tell you all about us, ma’am. And”—he turned back to Emily—“will you come for a drive with me tomorrow, Em? There’s something I wish to show you.”
Emily nodded and hid a smile as her mother gaped after Lynley’s retreating form.
“Mama, Roz will be down in a moment. Do you want to hold the baby?”
“I’m dying to,” said her mother.
Epilogue
My dear husband hunter, if you are reading this page, I must thank you for your attention to my small volume. It is my hope that its lessons will serve you well. Perhaps you have come to see that happiness in marriage is not entirely a matter of chance, but rather that young women and men of sense and character may so conduct themselves in this great million-peopled city of ours as to find the sort of lasting love that makes a great joy of the marriage union.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
They married on the morning of Emily’s twenty-ninth birthday. Lynley and Emily left the small family breakfast that followed their nuptials, in a chaise and four bound for a brief wedding trip.
“There’s a place I’d like you to see,” he said simply as he handed her into the chaise.
As they traveled, he held her hand and gave her further details of Walhouse’s capture and the restoration of the missing papers. It seemed a lazy journey. Emily felt no impatience. She understood him better now. The tangled feelings that had driven him to help Lady Ravenhurst did not arise from the lady’s beauty but only from her resemblance to the woman who had betrayed his boyish faith in love.
Emily watched him to see how he held himself and how he adjusted to the movement of the chaise. If she felt any impatience, it was only to know about the state of his wounds. He had joked that they might make use of the green sofa, but she did not know what their wedding night held.
Before midday they left the main Aylesbury Road and shortly reached a lodge at the gated entrance to an avenue lined with tall beeches. The lodgekeeper admitted them, and at length a view opened up, and she could see an expanse of lawn before a sprawling gray stone house. He now watched her with some trepidation.
