‘Oh, Mum.’ Kay grinned at her mother. ‘I do love you.’
‘And I love you.’
Then the car stopped at the little wicker gate in front of the long, winding path leading to the church door, and it was all flurry and movement for a minute as Kay helped her mother out, adjusting her hat and handing her the posy once she was on the pavement.
‘Grandma! Grandma!’ The twins had been waiting just inside the gate, holding Mitchell’s hands, and now they came dancing out, small faces aglow as they caught sight of Leonora and their mother.
Kay smiled at her husband.
They had married within six months of his proposal, a quiet summer wedding with just family present and the girls as bridesmaids, dressed in fairy-tale dresses of white muslin and pink rosebuds. It had been wonderful, magical.
Now the twins were being bridesmaids again, but this time they were in blue satin with fake fur muffs and little warm cloaks. Her mother—the most conventional of women normally—had cut with pro
tocol and insisted she wanted Kay to give her away, and with Mitchell being Henry’s best man it was a real family affair.
Kay looked at her husband now as he hurried up the church path to take his place beside Henry, ready for when they came in. She touched the round mound of her stomach briefly wherein their first child, a little boy with strong, healthy limbs, from what the scan had revealed, lay.
Mitchell had cried with joy when he had seen his son on the monitor; in fact he’d had them all crying—the doctor and herself as much with the look on his face as the wonder of the new little life growing inside her.
And it had happened at just the right time. With Henry now leaving their house to live with her mother in Ivy Cottage, and Kay just having finished work completely after making the delivery business over to Peter, lock, stock and barrel, she felt ready to become a housewife again.
It had taken a little time for her to be comfortable with the idea after she had fought so hard for a measure of independence with Perry, but life was so different with Mitchell, so absolutely wonderful and perfect and glorious, that all her faint doubts had disappeared. He loved her in a way she had never dreamt of being loved, only desiring the best for her, and she felt more treasured and cherished than any woman on earth.
“‘Perfect love casteth out fear.’” She murmured the words the minister had spoken on her wedding day, and which had stayed with her ever since.
‘What was that, dear?’
Her mother had turned to her, and now Kay said as she pushed open the gate, ‘Nothing, Mum. Come on, he’s waiting.’
They walked up the long path hand in hand, and when the wedding march sounded and Kay had ushered Georgia and Emily in front of them they still walked hand in hand to Henry and Mitchell, waiting at the end of the aisle.
The sunlight had turned the stained-glass window overlooking the altar into a spectacular backdrop, and as Kay delivered her mother into Henry’s care and took her place in the front pew her heart was full.
She loved the most wonderful man in all the world and he loved her. Their days were filled with warmth and closeness, Mitchell hungry for all that real family life meant, but it was the nights, when it was just the two of them in their huge, soft bed, that she felt she really became the woman she’d always been destined to be.
In the warm afterglow of their lovemaking, lovemaking that was so wonderful and incredible that sometimes she thought she would die from the pleasure he induced, he would tell her how much he loved her. She was his woman, his treasure, his reason for breathing, the only woman in the world for him—beautiful, perfect and incomparably precious.
And in the soft darkness she would hold him close, her body moulded into his as she laid her heart and her soul bare before him. She kept nothing back; she didn’t have to. He was Mitchell, her husband, and she could trust him completely, and she wanted to give him the reassurance she knew he would always need. The world saw a strong, powerful, ruthless man, but that was only a part of him. The real part, her part, was so much more than that.
As he joined her in the pew Mitchell smiled at her. ‘Happy, love?’ he asked softly, his fingers brushing over his child briefly as his eyes devoured her in a most un-churchlike way.
‘More than I can say,’ she answered mistily as joy and gratitude for all that life held flooded her heart. Life was rich and filled with love. She had Mitchell, she had her family and there was new, strong life growing inside her.
She was blessed.