“Marry.” A cold sweat broke out. His wound hurt like a hundred demons prodded him with pitchforks. His vision turned hazy. He struggled to focus on her face.
He was accounted a brave man but the truth was he just hadn’t cared. At this moment, he cared more than life. He needed every ounce of courage to speak.
“Love . . . you.” Pain crescendoed with cymbals and trumpets and drums. “Marry . . . me.”
Blackness swelled, strong and inexorable as the tide. He couldn’t resist its power. Before the dark swallowed him, he heard her speak. Over the stormy rush of blood in his ears, over the thundering agony in his side.
“Yes, Nicholas, I’ll marry you.”
Good.
He was almost sure he didn’t speak the word aloud. But her hand firmed on his in silent acknowledgment. His Antonia held him fast against death. If need be, she’d drag him screaming back to life.
She was his life.
Epilogue
Connemara
December 1827
The convent’s parlor was no more welcoming than its gray granite exterior. The only concession to comfort was a small fire in the mean little grate, although the warmth hardly penetrated the winter cold. No flowers or cushions softened the room. The sole decoration was a plain wooden crucifix above the door.
Shivering, Antonia sank onto one of the oak chairs ranged against the wall. She watched her husband pace the flagstone floor like a cantankerous tiger.
Nicholas bristled with hostile edginess. All day he’d been in an odd mood. Longer than that, since the moment she’d convinced him to undertake this journey. Last night when they’d made love, he’d been wild and desperate, almost as wild and desperate as during their first time in the summerhouse. Wicked creature that she was, his unrestrained hunger had thrilled her to the bone.
“They won’t let her see us,” he said grimly, pausing near one of the tiny barred windows on the far side of the room. It was an overcast day and the cold light shone stark on his moody expression.
“It’s not an enclosed order, Nicholas. The sisters are allowed visitors,” she said steadily, as she’d said a hundred times before. “Eloise wrote that she was delighted you were coming to the convent.”
His lips set in a discontented line and he folded his arms over his powerful chest. He stared out the window. “Well, why isn’t she here?”
Antonia smiled at his spiky agitation. It still astonished her to recall her first impressions of this man as someone impervious to emotion, self-absorbed, vain, careless. That shallow assessment was laughably far from the truth.
Six months of marriage had taught her that, if anything, he felt too strongly. He was intimate with few people, but once someone joined that inner circle, Nicholas pledged his complete loyalty. And with that loyalty came vulnerability. When he’d said he loved her, she’d been unaware what a powerful commitment he made to her.
She was strong enough to flourish in the blasting furnace of Nicholas’s love. How ironic to remember she’d rejected his original proposal because she’d doubted his fidelity. He loved her with a concentrated ferocity that made her feel the most cherished woman in the world.
“We’re earlier than we said we’d be.” A good three quarters of an hour.
The convent dominated an isolated glen on the Connemara coast. The nearest town offering suitable accommodation was an hour and a half away. The late marquess had clearly decided to place his daughter beyond reach of temptation.
On the way here today, Antonia had thought Nicholas would get out and seize the reins himself, he’d been so impatient with their driver. Even though the roads were rough and muddy and the way traversed steep hills that tested the horses.
He turned to face her and her brief amusement died. She caught the raw emotions on his face. Hope. Fear. Self-disgust. Yearning. Uncertainty in a man so rarely unsure of himself. “Should we have come?”
“Yes.” She spoke with conviction. Eloise’s ruin and banishment constituted the defining upheaval in Nicholas’s life. He needed to make peace with the past.
They’d been rapturously happy since marrying by special license a few days after he regained consciousness—partly to save the scandal of her presence in his house. But Eloise’s fate still weighed on his conscience.
Once she’d scoffed to imagine he possessed a conscience.
He began pacing again. She laced her fingers together in her lap and prayed with all her might that today’s meeting had a happy outcome.
As so often these days, her mind strayed to another happy outcome. One hand inched to brush her belly in silent greeting to the child resting there. The child Nicholas had no idea existed.
If he knew, he’d have delayed this difficult winter journey or left her behind. And she couldn’t let him endure this fraught reunion without her.