Page 103 of Unforeseen Affairs
“How can it be as simple as that?”
She looked up from under her wet lashes—so solemn, but eager for his reassuring kindness.
“I’m not sure. I daresay no one is.” He smiled sadly at her. “But I know that… having fallen so utterly and devastatingly in love with you, I do not think you could ever leavemysoul, Charlotte Sedley, in either this world or the next.”
He placed a gentle kiss upon her forehead before sliding his arm around her shoulders and pulling her into a soft embrace. She buried her face in his shoulder, awkwardly holding her champagne away from the both of them.
After a minute she lifted her coupe, her face still pressed against him.
“A toast, then,” she said, slightly muffled.
“Oh?” Colin chuckled. He smoothed the back of her hair with one hand. “To what, then? Cunt and gunpowder?”
“No.” She pulled back and sat up straighter, her eyes fervent. “To Sir Colin Gearing.” She hoisted the coupe higher.
Colin loosened his hold on her, and raised his glass as well.
“Whom I love,” she said, watching him as her lips slowly formed every sound, “more than I ever thought it possible to loveanother person. More than I ever expected to love… but I do. Love you.”
Setting his glass down, Colin took her in his arms and brought her as close as he dared, not wishing to jostle her wrist.
He kissed her, long and slow, wishing they’d need never come up for air.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Ifyoucouldmanage,”Dr. Collier said, “keep still for a moment.”
Charlotte did not bother to respond. She had mastered the art of stillness many years ago.
“It says here,” said her father as he looked up from the copy ofThe Daily Albionhe clenched in his hands, “that Sir Colin Gearing wasmorethan gracious, allowing reporters the benefit of a full evening’s worth of questions.”
Ajax Sedley then rolled up the paper and slapped it against his thigh.
“Afull evening? While my daughter sat writhing in pain?”
Charlotte wanted to respond with a blithe retort, but she held her tongue and remained still, as Dr. Collier had instructed her. Instead she merely raised an eyebrow and stared her father down, keeping her arm loose and extended so the doctor could continue his examination.
“Very well done, thank you,” the gentle doctor murmured as he turned her wrist over in his hands.
Colin had initially taken Charlotte to a physician in Manchester to have her wrist set, but her father had beseeched Dr. Collier to give his opinion on the job the first doctor had done. Dr. Collier had arrived in Lancashire earlier that day, and upon Ajax’s insistence had undone Charlotte’s dressing to examine her arm.
It had been nearly a week since their misadventure, and far too many things had happened since for Charlotte’s liking. However, given that she’d gone and fallen in love—something she’d never counted as a possibility—she knew well enough that disruption after disruption was bound to follow. The first of which being that she’d been holed up at her cousin Marcus’s house in Knockton with a flummoxed Cousin Bess as soon as the family had figured out her whereabouts. Once she had been delivered there, it wasn’t long before every remaining Sedley in existence arrived. Including her father.
The second disruption to her calm and quiet existence had been the sequestering of Colin.
Despite the Sedley predilection for scandal and poorly planned affairs, wise Cousin Marcus took charge of the situation and did his best to minimize the drama, though his process unfortunately involved sending Colin to stay with the local lord for the time being. Though Baron Methering was not only the local lord, but also Marcus’s father-in-law, and his house, Methering Manor, was only a short ride away. The baron turned out to be quite happy with the arrangement, having done his best to keep abreast of all Royal Navy goings-on for most of his life, and he was thrilled to have in his house a bona fide hero.
Charlotte, for her part, did not care for the arrangement at all. The day before she had seen Colin only briefly, at luncheon, and they’d not been left alone for even a minute. He had whispered to her that the baron was mad, and that aside from his incessant questions about the Navy, he spoke only of hoplite races. WhenCharlotte had asked what a hoplite race was, a deflated look came over Colin’s face. “Were I only like you, and completely ignorant once again,” he’d muttered sadly.
“Well?” her father blustered, now shaking the newspaper in one hand for emphasis as he demanded an explanation.
“It wasnota full evening,” Charlotte said, once Dr. Collier had released her arm. “You, Papa, of all people ought to know how writers are. Hyperbolic, to say the least.”
“Me, of all people? I… I don’t know what you’re after.” Her father’s gaze dropped for a moment as he scrambled to find another foothold for his anger.
Charlotte, of course, knew all about her father’s hobby of pseudonymously penning yellowbacks and trashy popular fiction. He’d taken pains to conceal it from her—as well as most others—but she’d figured it out soon after first setting foot in his household.
He forced a cough, then straightened himself up to his full height.
