Page 90 of The Ladies Least Likely
“We owe you our thanks, Miss Carew. You saved our lives.”
“It was Penrydd—Rhydian, my lady.”
“And how uncharacteristic of him, too.” Lydia looked as if she were struggling to smile but was unsure how to move her mouth that way. “The old Rhydian didn’t care a sot for others. You’ve—changed him.”
“I can’t take credit, mum. ’Tis more that he’s become himself, I think.”
“The man he was meant to be,” Lydia murmured. “I believe I can live with that man. And—with you.”
It was very nearly a blessing. Gwen’s eyes smarted with tears as she hurried back to Pen’s room.
She found him struggling out of his shirt. The candle in its holder on the high shelf showed the jagged cut in his back. Another scar for his fine, splendid form. Her heart burrowed into her throat, sealing off words. He had survived so much. He had come to her, her fair unknown, her gift from the sea, and he had seen beneath her own scars to the woman hidden there, had called forth a love she hadn’t known she could feel. Hadn’t known she was healed enough to ever be capable of feeling.
She was his, body and soul. Like that silly myth of Plato’s he mentioned. She would be his mistress. She would be anything he wanted, just to be near him, in his life. She’d been putting too much stake in all the things that wanted to separate them—their stations and birth, their countries, their pasts. When the truth was simply this: his heart calling to hers, and hers responding.
“What happens next?” Gwen whispered.
“To the Hound? Let him wash up where he may, and let the mercy shown to him be the kind of mercy he’s shown to the other poor souls he’s left in torment.” Pen stretched out on his bed, turning his injured back her way.
“To us, my heart.” Gwen wrung out her cloth in the basin. The water turned filthy in an instant.
Pen caught her hand. “I thought we settled that.”
She moved to swabbing his neck and felt his fast pulse. He had over-exerted himself, or he was desperate for her answer.
“I thought you might want to reconsider,” she whispered. “If you’ve been blown to your senses, or some such.”
He bent his head and laid his forearm against her arm. The gesture of surrender flattened her as nothing else could.
“I came to my senses the minute you walked into my rooms at the Green Man,” he said. “Everything’s pig’s poo without you, Gwen. You make everything hurt less.”
She loosed a trembling laugh at his Welsh curse. Could that be enough, that they could simply try to shield each other from the hurts of the world?
She stroked his back. Everything she wanted was bound up in the shape of this man. Just him. As he was. And he needed her.
“Let me be clear, Pen. Rhydian.” She tried his name in her mouth, finding she liked the full, properly Cymric shape of it. “I don’t want to marry the viscount.”
He tensed, as if awaiting the killing blow. She dabbed her cloth against his wounded cheek. She didn’t know what their future held, any more than he did. But she trusted him completely.
“However,” she said, her breathing shaky, “I very much want to marryyou.”
His eyes kindled with wonder, and his face transformed into the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen. He lifted his hand to cradle hers against his cheek. “Thank God.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“We’ll travel north for our honeymoon to inspect her mines and ensure all is in order.” Pen’s voice floated down from the bell tower of St. Sefin’s where he was repairing the wooden platform where he had made love to Gwen under the stars. “My viscountess and I won’t let our workers be abused the way Mother Morris’s sons were in the coal mines.”
“Viscountess,” Dovey murmured. She buffed the stained glass window that held the portrait of St. Sefin, one of the many daughters of the legendary Brychan, Welsh king and saint. “Will I have to call you milady?”
Gwen gave a last loving pat to St. Gwladys, whose window gleamed beneath her cloth. “I’ll only ever be Gwen to you. Will you want me to call you Dovinia Emerald Van der Welle Evans?”
Dovey smiled. “You might call me Mrs. Evans once in a while. Until I get used to the name.”
Dovey’s wedding to Evans would take place in a week, after the last banns were posted. She wanted the ceremony done before Gwen left. There would be less gossip and suspicion, Dovey thought, if St. Sefin’s were run by a proper married couple.
Gwen would marry Lord Penrydd the week after, and so they were polishing St. Sefin’s church to its highest gleam, sprucing up every guest room. Penrydd had invited all his family and friends, everyone he’d pushed away in his mourning and self-isolation after Tenerife. He was ready to return to the world.
The children were supposed to be helping clean, but they had got up a game with their brooms and mops that involved batting a ball around the floor. Tomos was currently the man in the middle, chuckling each time the ball sailed past him. Ifor proved the most proficient player, as he tracked the ball by listening, while Cerys was more interested in shouting taunts and challenges.
