Simply Unforgettable

made the promise as soon as you knew the Earl of Edgecombe was failing in health. Do you know why you made that promise? Because it was the dutiful thing to? Yes. I believe duty means much to you. Because you love him, and your mother and your sisters too? Yes. You bound yourself to marrying and settling down and having a family of your own, Lucius, because you love the family that nurtured you and felt that you owed them that stability in your life.”

“You are very ready to assign all sorts of sentimental motives to me today,” he said. His plate was empty. He set down his knife and fork and picked up his glass of wine. “But if there is some truth in what you say, Frances, there is truth in this too. I will marry for love. I have decided that, and that puts you in an awkward position. For I love you. And so I cannot settle for anyone else. And yet I have a certain promise to keep before the summer is out.”

The landlord arrived to clear away their plates. A maid behind him carried in two dishes of steaming pudding. Frances waved hers away and asked for tea.

“Your father acknowledged you from the moment of your birth, did he not?” Lucius asked as soon as they were alone again. “He was married to your mother? He gave you his name?”

“Yes,” she said, “of course.”

“Then you are legitimate,” he said. “In the eyes of the church and the law you are Frances Allard—or perhaps Francoise Halard.”

“But no high stickler, knowing the truth, would want to marry me,” she said.

“Good Lord, Frances,” he said, “why would you want to marry a high stickler? It sounds like a dreadfully dreary fate. Marry me instead.”

“We are arguing in circles,” she said.

He looked up from his pudding to smile at her.

“It has only now struck me,” he said, “that you never did make suet pudding and custard to follow the beef pie, Frances. But I will say this. That pie was so satisfying that the pudding would surely have gone to waste if you had made it.”

She loved him so very, very much, she thought, gazing across the table at him. She must have fallen in love with him—

“I believe,” he said, “I fell in love with you after tasting the first mouthful of that pie, Frances. Or perhaps it was when I walked into the kitchen and found you rolling out the pastry and you slapped at my hand when I stole a piece. Or perhaps it was when I lifted you out of your carriage and deposited you on the road and you gave it as your opinion that I ought to be boiled in oil. Yes, I think it must have been then. No woman had ever spoken such endearing words to me before.”

She continued to gaze at him.

“I must know something, Frances,” he said. “Please, I must know. Do you love me?”

“That has nothing to do with anything,” she said, shaking her head slowly.

“On the contrary,” he said, “it has everything to do with everything.”

“Of course I love you,” she said. “Of course I do. But I cannot marry you.”

He sat back in his chair, his pudding only half eaten, and beamed at her in that intense-eyed, tight-lipped, square-jawed way in which he had looked at her before. It could hardly be called a smile, and yet . . .

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you will continue on your way to Bath in the old boat, Frances. You have teaching duties there, and I know they are important to you. I will return to London in my curricle. I have duties awaiting me there, and they are important to me. Tonight we will make love.”

She licked dry lips and saw his eyes dip to follow the movement of her tongue.

He had given up the argument, then.

Her heart broke just a little more.

But there was tonight.

“Yes,” she said.

He could not believe what a difference loving her made—consciously loving her, not just bedding an attractive body for which he had conceived a strong sexual desire.

He had, he supposed, fallen in love with her early, as he had told her at dinner. Why else would he have pleaded with her to go to London with him when he had no real plan and when there was every reason not to take her? Why else would he have found it impossible to forget her in the three months after she had rejected him even though he had convinced himself that he had? Why else would he have made her such an impulsive marriage offer in Bath? And why else would he have pursued her so relentlessly ever since?

But somewhere along the way—and it was impossible to know exactly when or why it had happened—his feelings for her had shifted and deepened so that he was no longer just in love with her. He loved her. The beauty of her person and of her soul, the strong, sometimes misguided, almost always irritating sense of duty and honor by which she lived her life, the way she had of tipping her head slightly to one side and regarding him with a look of exasperation and unconscious tenderness, the way her face had of lighting up with joy when she forgot herself, her ability to give herself up to fun and frolicking and laughter— ah, there were a hundred and one things about her that had brought him to love her, and a hundred and one other intangibles that made her into the only woman he had ever loved—or would ever love.

When they came together, naked, in the middle of the wide bed in their inn room, he wrapped both arms about her slender, warm body and drew it against his and found that he was almost trembling. The thought that he might yet lose her threatened to overwhelm him, and he set his lips, parted, over hers and concentrated upon the moment.